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What If America Had Kept Its 40 Acres Promise to former slavers?$7.6M Part 2
Description
What if the families who were promised forty acres and a mule had kept their land? Part 2 of this alternate history follows one imagined family on Edisto Island, South Carolina, from 1866 into the 1950s, and then it runs the numbers on what Sherman's land would be worth today.
The family is invented and the episode says so, while the island, the year and the land title are real. Along the way the story touches real anchors from Reconstruction, including the Black legislators of the era, Claflin University, which opened in 1869, and the 1921 attack on Greenwood in Tulsa, often called Black Wall Street.
At Agriculture Department land values and our own assumed return, one grant would be worth $1.6 million to $7.6 million today, and all of the Sherman land would come to $16 billion to $76 billion. That is less than one and a half percent of the lowest estimate Part 1 opened with.
Sources include the USDA, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Thomas Craemer in Social Science Quarterly, and the National Archives.