40 Acres and a Lie Part 1 - Reveal Podcast

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40 Acres and a Lie Part 1​


Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land—only to see it returned to their enslavers.

February 8, 2025

A collage illustration that pairs pictures of William T. Sherman with Trinity Church in Edisto, South Carolina. Overlaying Sherman is a snippet of a pardon for a plantation owner issued by President Andrew Johnson.

Credit: Illustration by Michael Foy


https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp...1c5-45f5-a2b9-bfa10d8f51a2/1106_Reveal_PC.mp3

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner.

“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it.”

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that.

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away.

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity and in honor of Black History Month, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.



Dig Deeper​


Learn more: 40 Acres and a Lie (Mother Jones, Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal)



Credits​




mother jones logo

Reporters: April Simpson and Nadia Hamdan | Producers: Nadia Hamdan, Roy Hurst, and Steven Rascón | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Genealogy research: Vicki McGill | Fact checker: Peter Newbatt Smith | Legal counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Zulema Cobb and Steven Rascón | Digital producers: Kate Howard and Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Vocals: Renn Woods | Additional music: Dave Linard | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith, and Wesley Lowery

This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.



Transcript​


Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.
The year is 1983. I was 11, and my parents were forcing me to move from New Jersey to North Florida, just outside of Jacksonville. The culture shock was significant. We were one of two Black families that lived in a middle-class White neighborhood. My elementary school was about a mile and a half away in a neighborhood that was pretty much all Black and mostly poor. Every day, I would ride my bike between those two worlds, from the better off White-community, big homes with pools, yards, and nice cars, to the Black community, many folks living in little houses in need of repair, people barely getting by. I hung out with Black and White kids, and everybody’s parents seemed to work hard, but the fruits of their labor were vastly different. It never made any sense to me. Then came high school.
It was the heyday of conscious hip-hop, and Public Enemy burned with righteous anger. They rapped about things that I was experiencing in the world around me and the history behind me.
MUSIC:Have you seen her.
Jack was nimble, Jack was quick.
(singing)
Got a question for Jack. Ask him.
40 acres and a mule, Jack.
Jack.
Where is it? Why’d you try to fool the Black.
Al Letson:It led to an awakening, including about 40 acres and a mule, a promise from the federal government that newly freed slaves would be given land, a foundation, something they could pass to their descendants. But that promise wasn’t kept. How different that bike ride I took as a child might’ve been if Black people had actually been given a fair shot, if they’d been given just a small piece of the wealth they spent centuries building for others. Now, I thought I understood the history of 40 acres and a mule, but what I didn’t know is that it was more than just a promise. It actually happened. Land titles, ink on paper.
Today, in recognition of Black History Month, we’re revisiting our three-part series, 40 Acres and a Lie. It’s an investigation that we first brought you last summer into an important moment in American history. It’s a massive story that all started when our partners at the Center for Public Integrity began digging through thousands of records that were once buried in the National Archives.
Nadia Hamdan:Lucy Crosby.
April Simpson:Phillip Young.
Nadia Hamdan:Amos Jackson.
April Simpson:John Major.
Nadia Hamdan:James Byrd.
Al Letson:Public Integrity reporters Alexia Fernández Campbell and April Simpson and their colleagues found proof that more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people were given land titles by the federal government.
April Simpson:Samuel Miller, 40 acres on Edisto.
Nadia Hamdan:Fergus Wilson, 40 acres on Sapelo Island.
April Simpson:Primus Morrison, 40 acres on Edisto.
Al Letson:And then had that land taken away. This betrayal of Black Americans has fueled a racial wealth gap that continues today more than 150 years later. There’s a line from W.E.B. Du Bois that goes like this. The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery. This is the story of that brief moment in the sun. We start with Public Integrity reporter April Simpson and Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan in Edisto Island, South Carolina.
April Simpson:The first thing you notice about Edisto are the trees, these giant live oaks draped in Spanish moss that form canopies over the old gravel roads. The second thing you notice is the water. This place is a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries speckled with salt marshes and nestled right on the Atlantic Ocean. People say sometimes, if you listen hard enough, you can hear a dolphin go by. This is the island where a man named Jim Hutchinson was enslaved and received his 40 acres.
Greg Estevez:This is one of the oldest roads on Edisto Island.
April Simpson:And this is Jim’s great-great-great-grandson, Greg Estevez. He’s showing us around.
Greg Estevez:Look how the trees go over the-
Nadia Hamdan:Like archways.
Greg Estevez:Yeah, like archways.
April Simpson:Greg is a big guy, over six feet tall, bald with a salt and pepper goatee. He retired from the Navy in 2004, and then he worked for some time as a correctional officer. Now, he lives in Florida. He spends part of his time driving for Uber and the rest of it, he spends writing history books, history books about Black life on Edisto. Greg can trace his roots through seven generations on Edisto all the way up to Jim Hutchinson’s mother, Maria. As Greg drives, he points out house after house.
Greg Estevez:Y’all see this house right here?
Nadia Hamdan:Mm-hmm.
Greg Estevez:That’s MP’s house.
April Simpson:An aunt here, a cousin down the road.
Nadia Hamdan:So now, would you say that on this street, this is majority Black families?
Greg Estevez:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look and see. You could probably tell if you’re paying attention.
April Simpson:Why would you say that?
Greg Estevez:These houses, you can tell that people are not as wealthy.
April Simpson:What Greg means is that on Edisto, every Black household earns less than $40,000 a year while close to half of White households earn three times as much.
Greg Estevez:So the Edisto Island Black residents have been economically disadvantaged for many, many, many, many, many, many years.
April Simpson:Today, just under 2,000 people live here, and the majority of them are White. But on the brink of the Civil War, Edisto’s population was more than double what it is today, and only a few hundred were White. Many were the plantation owners. The rest were enslaved. People like Jim.
Greg says Jim was a light-skinned Black man who spent much of his enslavement on the water, ferrying people through those many rivers and tributaries. He’s written a lot about Jim and feels a deep connection to his story. So do many others in the family.
Greg Estevez:Now, Aunt Patty looks younger than I do, but don’t be fooled.
April Simpson:Especially Greg’s Aunt Patty.
Patty Bailey:My name is really Patricia Susan Lee St. Clair Edwards, and then I married a Bailey.
April Simpson:Patty is 76 years old, but looks half her age. She’s got shoulder-length hair that she wears in locks and an infectious energy. Patty was born in New York, but remembers visiting Edisto as a kid.
Patty Bailey:I didn’t like the outhouse. I didn’t like things like that. But now, when I think about the well, we had fresh cold water. My grandfather had a beautiful horse he would ride sometimes. One time he put me on, my mother had a fit.
April Simpson:Patty spent much of her life working as a secretary in the neonatal unit of a hospital, living in Harlem and the Boogie-down Bronx, as she calls it. She was happy there. But then in 1997, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Over the next several years, the disease would attack her central nervous system and affect her ability to move. Her MS was so bad at one point, Patty had to start using a wheelchair.
 
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40 Acres and a Lie

40 Acres and a Lie Part 2​


We trace “40 acres” land titles to a staggeringly beautiful sea island off the coast of Georgia that’s now a wealthy gated community.

June 22, 2024

podcast_skidaway_2000px.jpg

Credit: Illustration by Chris Burnett

https://dovetail.prxu.org/_/149/779...2e10a01d/1025_Reveal_A_Block_rev_2_PC_-16.mp3

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools and other amenities.

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.



Dig Deeper​


Listen: 40 Acres and a Lie Part 1

Learn more: 40 Acres and a Lie (A collaboration between Mother Jones, Center for Public Integrity and Reveal)



Credits​


Reporters: Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala and Nadia Hamdan | Producers: Nadia Hamdan, Roy Hurst and Steven Rascón | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Additional reporting, editing or support: April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Lisa Yanick Litwiller, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery from the Center for Public Integrity | Digital producers: Kate Howard and Nikki Frick | Genealogy help: Vicki McGill and Sharon McKinnis | Research: Jenna Welch, Ileana Garnand, Sophie Austin, Aallyah Wright, Audrey Hill, Elijah Pittman and Doreen Larimer | Document transcription: Terry Burks, Deborah Maddox and Selma Stewart | Vocals: Renn Woods | Additional music: Dave Linard | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Membership manager: Missa Perron | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.



Transcript​


Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:Close your eyes. You’re on an island. It’s lush with giant oaks, salt marshes, and lagoons. It’s hot, but you feel a cool breeze coming in from the Atlantic. The birds compose a symphony around you. This is what it’s like on the Sea Islands along the Georgia and South Carolina Coast. Here, the word paradise would not be an exaggeration. And who gets to live in paradise? Well, usually it’s people who can afford it because we know that some of the most beautiful places are also some of the most expensive real estate, and that’s true across many of the Sea Islands.
Speaker 2:We looked at places in the Southeast. We had lived in California, we looked out there. Texas, Colorado, Carolinas.
Al Letson:This is an ad for The Landings.
Speaker 2:But once we crossed that bridge over here coming into The Landings, my wife and I said, “I think this is the spot.”
Al Letson:This spot is a massive gated community that now takes up half of Skidaway Island, Georgia.
Speaker 3:As soon as you hit that bridge and you go over the marsh, you just decompress all the way down.
Al Letson:The average sale price of a home in 2022 was more than $800,000.
Speaker 3:It’s a lifestyle that I don’t think you can’t beat it.
Al Letson:The Landings is just a short drive from Savannah, a diverse city where Black people are the majority. On Skidaway, they make up only 1% of the population. 93% of Skidaway is white. But what if I told you, this now wealthy white island was once the beginning of a Black utopia. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. This is part two of our three part series, 40 Acres and a Lie, about a history that many of us think we understand but probably don’t. And that’s the history of 40 Acres and a Mule. The common understanding has been that a promise was made in 1865 to newly freed people, the promise of land.
But our partners at the Center for Public Integrity have learned that Black people weren’t just promised land, they were given land. Public Integrity reporters reviewed hundreds of thousands of Reconstruction Era records, and in them they found the names of more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who got what are known as possessory land titles, each with a name, an acreage, and a location, including Sea Islands like Skidaway. And it’s with these new details that we can begin to understand what this land has become, its value, and who owns it today. We start at The Landings with Public Integrity’s Alexia Fernández Campbell and Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan to see what the dream of 40 Acres has become.
Alexia Fernánde…:If you mention Skidaway Island to anyone today, they think of The Landings. So we wanted to see it for ourselves. And Karen Dove Barr offered to show us around.
Karen Dove Barr:That is marsh grass. In high tide, it’s covered with water.
Alexia Fernánde…:Oh, wow. This is beautiful. Karen lives in The Landings, and she’s taking us around on her golf cart.
Oh my gosh. I think a heron caught a fish, or one of these birds has a fish in their mouth.
Karen Dove Barr:Oh, he has a big one, wow.
Alexia Fernánde…:Nature is all around you here, and not one blade of grass feels out of place. The lawns are manicured, the trees are pruned, the landscaping is immaculate. Wilderness seems to have been tamed at The Landings, to become amenities.
Karen Dove Barr:That’s a lagoon maintained just for children’s fishing. And, you can fish there if you’re an older person, but you have to bring a kid with you.
Alexia Fernánde…:Karen is 77 years old. She’s got shoulder-length white hair and a strand of pearls around her neck. She spent her career working as an attorney while raising five children. She bought a lot here with her late husband in 1984. They built a five bedroom, five bath house on it. It’s a beautiful home that’s surrounded by magnolias, palmettos, and live oak trees. Around 8,500 people now live at The Landings. And driving through, it’s easy to see the appeal, especially if you like golf courses. The Landings has six of them. It also has four clubhouses, 10 restaurants, two marinas. A spa, five swimming pools, and multiple tennis and pickleball courts. And none of that comes cheap. We stop at Romerly Marsh, one of Karen’s favorite places to watch the sunrise. It’s high tide, and the marsh water seems to go out as far as the horizon.
Like wow, this is quite the paradise.

full transcript on site.
 
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Posted in40 Acres and a Lie

40 Acres and a Lie Part 3​


Calls for reparations were ignored for decades. Now, local governments are taking up the cause – and outrage is growing.

June 29, 2024

podcast_reparations_2000px.jpg

Credit: Illustration by Chris Burnett

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp...0c5-4e14-a593-49ff9d19c5d8/1026_Reveal_PC.mp3


The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people – and it has continued over decades.

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation.

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land (to) take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain. …There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

It’s an examination of American history that is now happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials are now asking: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?

This week on Reveal, we explore the renewed fight for reparations.



Dig Deeper​


Listen: 40 Acres and a Lie Part 1 and Part 2

Read more: 40 Acres and a Lie (A collaboration between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal)



Credits​


Reporters: Nadia Hamdan and Roy Hurst | Producers: Nadia Hamdan, Roy Hurst and Steven Rascón | Series editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Fact checker: Kim Freda | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Membership manager: Missa Perron | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Claire Mullen | Production intern: Aisha Wallace-Palomares | Original vocals: Renn Woods | Additional music: Dave Linard | Interim Executive Producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery

This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.



Transcript​


Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. This is the final episode of our three-part series, “40 Acres and a Lie,” and we’re ending on a topic that has come up many times throughout the series, reparations, and the question of what’s owed, because that’s what 40 Acres and a Mule has come to symbolize, an unpaid debt. In the iconic film “Buck and the Preacher,” Ruby Dee tell Sidney Poitier this hope for a new start, it was all a lie.
Ruby Dee:They don’t give us nothing, not no 40 acres and no mule and not freedom, neither.
Al Letson:You’ll find these same kinds of scenes in the made-for-TV miniseries, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” “Roots,” and “Freedom’s Road,” starring the great Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad Ali:Sure, I speak for all the Negroes here. They just want a little farm, a few acres of land what they can put in and plant, and take out their own crops, and feed themselves and their families. That’s all they want.
Al Letson:This land represents the government’s failure to give Black people a fair shot in a country that enslaved them for more than 200 years.
Speaker 4:Who will pay reparations on my soul?
Al Letson:The phrase, 40 Acres and a Mule, has stuck around because that injustice has never been forgotten.
Speaker 5:Well, me, I’m being rowdy, hot and Black. I want my 40 acres and my mule.
Al Letson:When we hear it today in a film or a song, it’s meant to evoke a deep sense of betrayal and a desire to right a wrong.
Speaker 6:40 acres and a mule. 40 acres and a mule.
Speaker 7:You owe me $10.00, you ain’t giving me nine. You only give me 40 acres and a mule.
Speaker 8:… reparations. How you calculate the amount to be paid? To try to imagine America without the slaves.
Speaker 9:We all right. What you want you, a house? You, a car? 40 acres and a mule? A piano? A guitar? Anything.
Al Letson:The fire that was lit with slavery in 40 Acres has not stopped burning. Instead, it seems to be getting stronger because the injustices did not end there. They’ve just taken a different shape. Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan recently traveled back to Georgia, the state where 40 acres began to meet someone who encapsulates the many ways Black people have continued to lose land and wealth.
Elon Osby:People hear my story and you can almost see it in their face. “What can I do? What can I do to make up for this?”
Al Letson:Her answer is simple reparations. Nadia takes it from here.
Nadia Hamdan:Elon Osby thinks that newly freed people should have gotten more back then.
Elon Osby:I didn’t understand why just a mule. You know, why not a cow and some chickens?
Nadia Hamdan:We’re sitting in Elon’s dining room in Atlanta. Much like her home, Elon is a pop of color. She’s wearing bright florals and a bold lip. Her salt and pepper curls cut short. And even as she jokes, she’s quick to acknowledge just how valuable those 40 acres and the mule would’ve been, not just to families back then, but the generations afterward.
Elon Osby:Your children reached the age of being an adult, then you can give them some of that and they can start being self-sufficient and it goes on and on.
Nadia Hamdan:Generational wealth.
Elon Osby:Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the start.
Nadia Hamdan:Yeah.
Elon Osby:That’s the start.
Nadia Hamdan:Yeah.
Elon Osby:But I think they should have asked for a cow. I do.
Nadia Hamdan:Elon knows more than most what land can mean to a Black family. More specifically what losing land can mean because her family was displaced. Not once, but twice. We start in Forsyth County, a 45-minute drive from Atlanta.
Elon Osby:My grandfather owned 60 acres of land.
Nadia Hamdan:Elon’s grandfather was named William Bagley, and back in 1910, William and his family were one of only a few dozen Black families who actually owned property in the county.
Elon Osby:I think he was way ahead of his time. I really think he was.
Nadia Hamdan:But in 1912, hundreds of Black families, including Elon’s, would be violently driven from their homes and everything Elon is about to tell us has been confirmed by the Atlanta History Center. They actually did an entire research project about this moment in Forsyth County. It all began because of two incidents with White women. The first, an accusation of rape against a Black man, but historians say it’s commonly believed something else happened.
Elon Osby:She was actually having an affair with one of the Black men there and her husband or somebody caught her, and so her story changed and then she was raped.
Nadia Hamdan:This was a common phenomenon at the time. And according to the Atlanta History Center, the rape charges were ultimately dropped. Then a few weeks later, a different White woman is brutally murdered nearby, and a group of Black men are arrested immediately despite very little evidence. And before any sort of trial took place, White people stormed the jail and the main suspect in the case.
 
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