40 Acres And A Lie
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show has gotten a lot of attention. Not just because he made history as the first solo rapper in Super Bowl history, but because he caused a huge spike in Google searches. Lamar started his song “Not Like Us” by stating “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music” and people across the country ran to the internet in search of what exactly this meant.
When slavery was abolished in 1865, Special Field Order No.15 ordered 400,000 acres of land to freed people that was previously owned by white plantation owners. General William Tecumseh Sherman issued this order to provide up to 40 acres of land for around 18,000 freed families. No mules were mentioned in the policy, but some freed people were allowed army mules. This is where the term “40 acres and a mule” came from. It was the first time Black Americans had been asked “what they want for themselves”. Rev. Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister and local leader of the community, responded with, “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”
1,000 freed people began immediately settling on Georgia’s Skidaway Island. A short time after, nearly 40,000 other freed people had joined them also. Families had so much hope of a fresh start. They had hopes of creating life within their land, growing families, and dreams of finally being free. Unfortunately, the promises that were made to them, were just as quickly snatched away.
When President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, Andrew Johnson, a known white supremacist, took over the presidency. Lincoln selected Johnson as his Vice President as a sign of “unity”. He knew he needed the support of Southern Democrats in order to win the presidency and Johnson was also loyal to the Union. Once Johnson came into office, he immediately rescinded the offer to the freed people and he returned all of the land to confederate soldiers. Andrew Johnson gave a speech in 1866 stating, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men”. After the war, there were other proposals for reparations that congress also declined. It was not just Johnson.
Since there was no land of their own, formerly enslaved people were forced to work as sharecroppers, or tenant farmers, on what was often their former master’s land. While being a sharecropper was slightly better than a slave, Black Americans were still enduring hours of grueling labor for very little money. The term sharecropper was given because they were supposed to get a portion of the crop they were harvesting. Unfortunately, it was rare that they actually got what they worked so hard for.
This policy would have given slaves the opportunity to build their lives from scratch. This land they worked on, died on, suffered on, and was rightfully owed to them, was stripped away and it wasn’t until the 14th amendment was passed in 1866, that black people were allowed to own land. This doesn’t mean racism and the persecution of black people ended. It has been 159 years since the civil rights act was passed. When Kendrick Lamar said, “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music”, he was acknowledging that we are still fighting racism and prejudice to this day.