COOLING OFF THE COMMOTION (10)

By: Chenjerai Kumanyika
November 22, 2017

One in a series of posts featuring writing, music, and podcasting by HILOBROW friend Chenjerai Kumanyika.

UNCIVIL is a history podcast, hosted by Chenjerai and journalist Jack Hitt, which goes back to the time our divisions turned into a war, and brings us stories left out of the official history. The episode featured here, “The Deed” is about: “A 19th century promise, and a 21st century betrayal. The past and present of 40 acres and a mule.”

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE.

Katie Brown, former slave on Sapelo Island, Georgia 1939

Transcript excerpt:

JACK: In April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. And the new president, Andrew Johnson, tore up Sherman’s Special Order 15 and pardoned all the Confederate slave owners. Kate Masur again:

KATE: Once they had a pardon, they could go back and say, ‘Well I’m back, this is my land. And anybody who asserts they have a right to the land is nuts. Anything that happened here during the course of the war, distributing land land to freed people, all that stuff – none of that is valid anymore.’

JACK: And the military showed up, to make sure the the land was returned to its former owners, the same military that just months before had fought to free these black farmers.

CHENJERAI: This was the beginning of a hundred years of newly freed black people getting land and having it taken from them with violence. If it wasn’t the military, it was a mob. A professor named Ray Winbush put it “If you’re looking for stolen black land, just follow the lynching trail.”

At the turn of the century, black people owned 15 million acres of land. Today, it’s about a million.

CHENJERAI: Sapelo (Georgia) is one of the places where black people resisted. They forced the white former owners to sell them back some of their original 40 acre plots. And not long after that, a portion of one of those plots would pass to Netty’s grandmother. And that’s the land Nettye grew up on.

NETTYE: See now it was not that wide over there, that’s because of the marsh coming forth, land that’s washed away.

JACK: Families like Netty’s eventually built 28 little villages on the island — places called Hanging Bull, Moses Hammock, Chocolate, Bourbon, and Raccoon Bluff. Sapelo was an isolated self-sufficient Gullah island. That’s how things were when Nettye was born in 1935.

NETTYE: Shrimp boats would come into Sapelo. And they would blow their horns before they got to the edge, here, and the women would come with their pans, and they would give them all the shrimp they wanted.

CHENJERAI: For the moment it felt like the black farmers there had won. They’d fought for their freedom, and the right to own land, and held onto their 40 acres against President Johnson’s betrayal, the US military, and former slave owners.

But the farmers on Sapelo were about to face a new threat.

***

COOLING OFF THE COMMOTION (10)

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