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.
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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. | |
| Karen Dove Barr: | Yeah. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Yeah, where it’s like- |
| Karen Dove Barr: | I hate to say it, but it is a paradise. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | It is. |
| Karen Dove Barr: | It is beautiful. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Why do you hate to say it? |
| Karen Dove Barr: | Just for the purpose of your project, but it’s beautiful, natural. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Karen understands the purpose of our project. She knows we’re trying to get a sense of what the 40 Acres land has become, what it is today, and what it used to be. And we are. The team at Public Integrity examined dozens of old plantation maps, and we determined that much of the 40 Acres land is now expensive coastal real estate. But we chose Skidaway for a reason. Because in 1865, this island, it was a thriving Black community. |
| It was started by some of Savannah’s most prominent Black leaders at the time, Ulysses Houston and Garrison Frazier. Frazier was a 67-year-old Baptist Minister, and a leading member of the Black community. At that now infamous 40 Acres meeting in January 1865, it was Frazier who said, “We want land, and we want to be left alone.” And within just five months of that meeting, Frazier and Houston had created a Black settlement on Skidaway Island. | |
| Actor: | We confess it was not without fear and trepidation that we accepted our invitation to visit the island. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is a colleague reading what a reporter from the Savannah Daily Republican wrote after visiting the settlement. |
| Actor: | Judge of our great surprise to find on Landing a large concourse of men, women, and children, all very neatly attired. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Many white southerners were convinced that freed people would never be able to make it on their own. But that wasn’t what the reporter found. The article says they were living on several hundred acres of farmland, growing things like snap beans, cucumbers, and potatoes. They had elected a Governor, a Sheriff, and we’re in the process of building a church. |
| Actor: | An inspection of the island revealed a degree of prosperity that was highly satisfactory, surpassing the expectations of the most sanguine friends of the Freedmen. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Upwards of 1,000 Black people started settling on Skidaway Island, and we identified nearly 100 that received possessory land titles. An island that was once made up of cotton plantations became a 40 Acres success story. It was the start of a self-governing Black belt along the Southeast Coast. But before Frazier, Houston, and their settlers could fully develop the island, the land was returned to the former slave holders. Today, 40 Acres on The Landings is now worth at least $20 million. The Landings marketed the development to affluent Northerners, looking for a warm and luxurious lifestyle, and to affluent Southerners like Karen Dove Barr. Karen knows more than most about the history of slavery here. She’s written a book of historical fiction, set on Skidaway, so she’s done her research. Karen even remembers finding a piece of that history in her backyard in 1984 when she was getting ready to build her home. |
| Karen Dove Barr: | I could see that a cabin had been taken off of the property. So in my mind, I just thought, “There’s been a cabin here.” I knew people had lived on Skidaway.” |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | And when you say cabin, do you mean a slave cabin? |
| Karen Dove Barr: | Prior to developing this, it had been abandoned for many years. There were a few larger houses, but primarily slave cabins were all that was ever erected here. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | But driving your golf cart through The Landings today, you’d never know that history. |
| Linda Brown: | The pulse here is upbeat, everyone is happy. You are when you have money, you know. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is Linda Brown. She also lives at The Landings. She actually introduced us to Karen. They’re friends. |
| Linda Brown: | My neighbor’s 74, he just sold a Corvette. Having not lived here, I never would’ve been even thinking that I would see anyone crawling in and out of a Corvette at 75 and 80 years old. You know how low it is to the ground? So to see this, it gives you a new lease on life. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Linda is one of the few Black people who live here. She’s a 74-year-old Army veteran. And while Linda loves her home, she doesn’t buy into everything The Landings has to offer. |
| Linda Brown: | I have not joined the Country Club. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | When we ask her why, she says- |
| Linda Brown: | It’s just me. Usually I’m the only Black. So why would I buy into it? Seriously? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | The Landings is a departure for Linda because for a long time she lived in Atlanta, which is mostly Black. She still lives there part of the year. |
| Linda Brown: | If I had more people that looked like me, I probably would do more things on the Island, okay? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Yeah. Do you ever feel like an other at times here? |
| Linda Brown: | I have never been made to feel uncomfortable. As a matter of fact, I get just the opposite because usually it’s just me when I’m there, and they do more to make me feel welcome. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Linda grew up in Savannah during segregation, so she doesn’t just know the history of racism in the South, she’s lived it. Like many people, Linda had heard of 40 Acres and a Mule. Like many people, she referred to it as a promise, one that wasn’t kept. But then we showed her the land titles. |
| So here I’m showing you two different land titles of two Freedmen who got 40 acres on the plantation that is where your house is located. So here is one is Henry Screven. | |
| We read the names: Lewis Hardway, 40 acres, Martha Wright, 30 acres. We found the names of dozens more who got land titles on what’s now The Landings. | |
| Linda Brown: | So we didn’t know that there were paperwork involved in that, it was paperwork involved in it. It was just sort of spoken from the field. That was how we perceived it. So never did we think that anything beyond that happened. And my brother, who was a Captain in the Army, he understood field orders, and then he was an attorney. He didn’t even know it. You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak. This is breaking news, really, for some and to me. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is breaking news for Karen, too. She had never seen one of those land titles. And while she believes the Freedman who had them taken away may have had a claim for compensation in the past, she’s skeptical anything can be done about it now. |
| Karen Dove Barr: | I feel like it was not taken away from the people who are alive now. That any people who were involved in the hardships have long since gone. And of course, my family was not here then. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | But Linda, she had a very different reaction after learning this history. |
| Linda Brown: | My question is, where do we go from here? The people who actually had people, the descendants, thinking about their ancestors who actually had property and it was stolen. Do they want it back? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | We’ve thought about this too. Could descendants of the formerly enslaved who got a land title from the US Government still have any claim to that land today? We consulted different historians and legal experts, even legal historians. They all said probably not. Mostly because it was never clear whether the Government could legally seize the land in the first place. Kate Masur from Northwestern University explains it this way. |
| Kate Masur: | There were different ideas even among Northern Republicans about what it meant to confiscate land, how legal it was, whether it would be legal for the Government to continue to hold the confiscated land after the War was over. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | In other words- |
| Kate Masur: | Did the government really take ownership of the land in a way that they were able to give it out? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | There was just too much ambiguity. And while there were Republicans in Congress who tried to make sure freed people could own the land outright, their efforts failed, and the land was restored to former slave owners. The end, right? Not necessarily, because this isn’t just about whether land seizures were legal or not, this is about our values as a country. Who we were then, and who we are now. Do we just chalk this up to a past wrong, or do we try to reckon with it in some way? Because now we have documents, a paper trail, proof of what was lost. |
| Kate Masur: | It wasn’t just words, that is for sure. It was a program. It was rolled out. There are documents to show it. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Remember, we’ve unearthed the names of more than 1,200 people who received land titles as part of the program. The ancestors of people alive today and several experts we spoke to say that while the moment may have passed for these descendants to make a legal claim, they could have a moral claim. |
| Kate Masur: | I actually think that these moral questions are way more to the point. The possessory land titles and other stories about land loss among African-Americans can be the basis for certain kinds of claims to reparations that are very concrete, I think. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Linda Brown agrees. She believes that these land titles could certainly add legitimacy to the idea that descendants of the enslaved are owed something. Because learning this history now, it puts a lot in perspective, including the way she looks at her home. |
| Linda Brown: | It was a joke for me to even think that I wasn’t going to live on a plantation in Georgia. What was I thinking? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Thinking about what this land used to be, what this land could have been, it’s uncomfortable, even painful. But Linda says turning away from it would be a mistake. |
| Linda Brown: | I think truth has a great role in the healing process. And with the way things are now, we’re all in the same boat now. One race is not going to arrive without the other. There’s no way that it can happen. So, to bridge gaps, we’re going to have to face it, talk about it, which would neutralize it, and then we move on from here because we are talking history now, we really are. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Linda doesn’t want to dwell on the past, she just wants it acknowledged. |
| Al Letson: | To fully acknowledge the past, we have to better understand our history. But for over a century, much of that history has been hard to access and hard to read. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | I like to joke that the distribution of good versus bad handwriting has been the same over centuries. |
| Al Letson: | Bringing the past into the present, that’s ahead on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Everything we’ve talked about in this series, and there’s been a lot, it all started when Public Integrity reporter Alexia Fernández Campbell found herself clicking through a folder of documents that she found on a Smithsonian website. It was labeled miscellaneous. And the folder was full of old hard-to-read records. Among them was something that looked like a certificate. She took a closer look and could see it was from 1865. A man named Fergus Wilson was being given permission to hold and occupy attractive land, 40 acres on Sapelo Island, Georgia. |
| And it, “Prohibited people from interfering with the man’s possession of this land.” The document bears the stamp of a major general in the military, and here we are two years later. Because those miscellaneous documents would turn out to be possessory land titles. Alexia would eventually learn that these land titles were part of a trove of nearly 2 million records from the Freedmen’s Bureau. A federal agency created just after the Civil War to help formerly enslaved people transition into freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau records are crucial to understanding this pivotal moment in our history. So are those land titles. And yet most of us have never seen them. | |
| Kate Masur: | I’ve never looked at the Possessory land titles. |
| Al Letson: | Including historian Kate Masur, an expert on the history of reconstruction. |
| Kate Masur: | There are certain documents associated with this history that have in hidden away in the National Archives. They’re hard to find. It’s hard to know how to ask for them. Literally, if you were to go to the National Archives, what would be the form that you would fill out? |
| Al Letson: | For years, the only way you could see the Freedmen’s Bureau records was to travel to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Then you’d have to know the exact needle you were looking for just to be directed to the right haystack. The only reason Alexia was able to find that document at all is because hundreds of thousands of these records have been making their way online for the first time. And the story of how they got there involves the Mormon Church, a worldwide pandemic and artificial intelligence, all colliding to bring this history out of the cold, dusty shelves of the national Archives and into the 21st century. Here’s Alexia and Nadia. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | There are few people who are as familiar with the Freedmen’s Bureau records as Damani Davis. He’s an Archivist with the National Archives. |
| Damani Davis: | These are the first records to formally document this mass population that prior to the Civil War was not officially documented outside of property records. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | In other words, this was the first time the formerly enslaved were seen and documented as people, not property. |
| Damani Davis: | The particular records that stood out to me or grasped my feelings or emotions or whatever you want to call it the most would be the transportation records. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Transportation records are exactly what they sound like. They show Freedmen’s Bureau agents trying to find transportation to reunite husbands and wives, children and parents after slavery tore families apart. |
| Damani Davis: | One case I remember it was the father was based in Augusta, Georgia, and he had two daughters who were in, I think Corpus Christi, Texas or somewhere in Texas. And he was seeking help to have them sent back to them. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This man’s children had ended up roughly a thousand miles away. Damani says finding stories like this was a sobering reminder of just how cruelly enslaved people were treated. |
| Damani Davis: | Their status as a father or a mother or children was not legally recognized within slavery. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | On top of reuniting families, the Freedmen’s Bureau distributed rations, opened hospitals, helped establish schools. It legalized informal marriages entered into during slavery. The agency not only tracked incidents of racist violence, it pushed for prosecutions. The Freedmen’s Bureau touched so many aspects of Black life at the time, and its records are the best window we have into what was and wasn’t done for Black people at this turning point in American history. But Damani admits that for a long time… |
| Damani Davis: | They were extremely difficult for the everyday American citizen to research. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | One big reason, the agency’s records were in really bad shape. |
| Damani Davis: | These are very old bound volumes in various states of deterioration. Sometimes you can see that some of them are actually falling apart. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | It took an act of Congress to protect them. |
| Earl Hilliard: | I’m Earl Hilliard, former member, United States Congress. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Earl served in Congress from 1993 to 2003. At the time, he was the first Black congressman from Alabama since Reconstruction, part of an influx of Black legislators that were elected in the ’90s. |
| Earl Hilliard: | They realized that records had not been preserved. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | And he says the reason they all learned that the records were not being preserved was in large part because of legislation called H.R.40. It was a reparations bill named after Forty acres and a mule. Many Black lawmakers at the time were supporters of the bill and they knew if they ever wanted to make a case… |
| Earl Hilliard: | You have to have records. You need to know what has taken place or who was involved, what need to be done or what was done or what action was taken to either give or to deter. All of this is so important when you get ready to move forward with any action. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | So Earl was part of a group of legislators who introduced the Freedmen’s Bureau Preservation Act of 2000. The bill required that a majority of the records be indexed and scanned, so instead of touching them, they could be viewed on rolls of microfilm. And because microfilming a bunch of old historical documents isn’t necessarily the flashiest of bills, no one really connected it to the political hot potato that was H.R.40. So it passed with bipartisan support. |
| Earl Hilliard: | We slipped it in, so to speak. Congressman, they knew about it. It was not really contentious. We didn’t go out and beat our drums on it before, nor afterwards. Nobody really thought about the application of it. They didn’t think about what the consequences would be in the future. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | It was a monumental preservation effort. The project costs just $3 million, but took half a decade to finish. And it was just one step in a very long game towards reparations. |
| Earl Hilliard: | But it was something we really wanted and we really needed. I mean, you wouldn’t be interviewing me now if the bill had not passed. The research you doing, it was made easier by that bill. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Earl is right. It did make researching the records so much easier, but it didn’t make them all that more accessible. Because they still weren’t on the internet where the rest of the world was. And it would’ve been a daunting task to get them there, if not for two unlikely developments. The first involved the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yes, the Mormon Church. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They had thousands of reels of microfilm already in their collections. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | That’s Hollis Gentry Brown. She’s with the Libraries and Archives branch of the Smithsonian. Hollis had been working to get more than 1 million Freedmen’s Bureau records online when she heard that the Mormon church was already way ahead of her. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They had hundreds of thousands of published genealogies and anything that had been published related to local history, family history, that’s what they were collecting in Utah. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | And when Hollis says in Utah, she’s referring to a pretty one-of-a-kind place. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | They have a mountain in which they preserve these records. I’ve been to the facility. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | In literal mountain? |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | In the mountain. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | [inaudible 00:08:22] the mountain. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | It’s amazing. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Billions of records are kept there. It’s the largest genealogical collection in the world. And among all the reels of microfilm were copies purchased from the National Archives, including the Freedmen’s Bureau records. We tried to speak to the Mormon Church about all this. And while officials didn’t want to talk, they confirmed what Hollis told us. The church digitized more than a million Freedmen’s Bureau records. And in 2015 they went online. But we’re not done yet because there was still one huge problem. Have you ever tried to read 19th century cursive in faded ink? It’s hard. Like really hard. So the documents needed to be transcribed. Something Hollis and the Smithsonian were prepared for. They began organizing transcribathons with the hope that everyday people would sit down at their computers and decipher each word. Hollis and her team had it all set up. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | What we didn’t have was the large numbers of volunteers. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Maybe because it’s pretty tedious work. Squinting at hundreds of old documents for hours on end trying to make out is that a J or is that an F? It isn’t exactly going to entice a ton of people. That is until another very unlikely development. |
| Speaker 9: | More than 84 million Americans are now under state directives to stay home. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | A worldwide pandemic. |
| Hollis Gentry B…: | We had a lot of people who had an interest in doing something while they were sequestered, and so they turned to the Smithsonian. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Pre-pandemic, only about 3,000 volunteers signed up to transcribe records. After the pandemic, that number ballooned to more than 50,000. An act of Congress, a mountain in Utah and a COVID lockdown, all that paved the way for me to stumble upon that miscellaneous folder of Possessory Land titles. And the story of the documents could have ended here, but we at public integrity are adding our own chapter. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | I like to joke that the distribution of good versus bad handwriting has been the same over centuries. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is my colleague Pratheek Rebala. He’s a data reporter. Pratheek and I have spent the last two years trying to figure out how to search through all of the Freedmen’s Bureau records, including more than a million documents that still haven’t been transcribed. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | This collection is so massive that I just don’t know where to start. And for context, I’m new to this, right? I mean, this is the first time that I’ve ever worked with documents that are this old. The language is different, keywords are different. So I had a big problem because I didn’t know what to search. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Let’s stop and zoom out for a minute to remember the world before computers. It was a world that revolved around paper. Those loose pieces of biodegradable fibers, the government, the military, the banks, everything ran on paper. It seems so precarious now. And Pratheek and I are hunting for some very specific papers, Forty acre land titles. But to find them, we need to bring these records into the future, and that’s exactly what Pratheek does using artificial intelligence. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | I feel a little weird about saying AI. I’ve been getting [inaudible 00:11:50] for calling this AI. Is machine learning okay to use? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Okay, let’s call it machine learning. You’ll hear Pratheek refer to it as the model. Basically, he teaches the model to search through all the documents that haven’t been transcribed yet. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | What you can do is have the model look at a land title and find other documents that look like it. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Without text transcriptions, Pratheek’s model can’t search words, so it functions more like an image search. So isn’t it kind of like facial recognition? |
| Pratheek Rebala: | Yes. It’s almost exactly like facial recognition. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | So you can think of that first Possessory land title as the face we want the model to recognize. Lucky for us, it has some pretty unique characteristics. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | The land titles are much smaller. They’re almost like the size of a three by five photo, and they have a signature in the bottom, and then they have big, bold text title at the top. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | By using this model, we were able to identify the names of hundreds more people who received land titles. And we expect to find more because the model is still learning. Before Pratheek’s tool, I was searching the old fashion way, opening up each century’s old document, click by click. It was slow, but still effective. Together, Pratheek and I collected more than 1,200 names. It’s the largest collection of 40 acre land title holders ever put together. They were always there. They just needed to be found. And these documents are not just Black history, they’re American history. Lost narratives of individual men and women as they tried to build lives from nothing. The land titles, they’re just one piece. |
| Pratheek Rebala: | We are just six, eight people that were looking to these documents and our lens was always 40 acres. So everything we were looking for is so closely tied to property and land and were interesting other things, but that was our focus. We are hoping that by making these tool available, more people of course can learn about their ancestors, but also just understand what life was like in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The significance of this collection can’t be overstated. |
| Al Letson: | And that’s why public integrity is making their tool available online. When the Smithsonian’s Hollis Gentry Brown saw it, she emailed us to say, this is a, “God-sent for genealogists historians and other researchers.” But it’s not just for them, it’s for anyone, especially descendants of the formerly enslaved who are trying to rebuild lost narratives. |
| Speaker 10: | I said, wow, she has some more information. This is great. You helped me in my quest. |
| Al Letson: | We meet one of those descendants, coming up next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We’ve been talking about the importance of firsthand history, original records and how they can reveal hidden truths, but records can also be a window into where we come from, our ancestors, and provide tiny details that can feel personal and mean so much. Alexia and her team had this in mind, and as they combed through thousands of historical records, they started to make a list. Any time they found a land title or proof that someone received land through 40 acres, their name went on that list because they wanted to connect those names to living descendants. |
| But any genealogist will tell you, trying to rebuild the narratives of the enslaved is painstaking work. These people didn’t have birth certificates, marriage certificates, bank records, nothing identifying them as anything other than property, and even those are sparse and full of errors. This is one of the most insidious parts of slavery, that complete erasure of people’s histories. It took the public integrity team hundreds of hours and many dead ends, but eventually, they were able to identify more than 40 descendants and they reached out to dozens of them. Most didn’t respond, but some did. | |
| Mila Rios: | Come on in. Welcome to my humble abode. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Thanks for having us. |
| Al Letson: | A woman named Mila Rios was their first win. |
| Mila Rios: | I’m going to put some fruit out. Fruit is always good. |
| Al Letson: | Finding her felt almost serendipitous because Mila’s dedicated the last 30 years of her life trying to find out everything she can about her ancestors. Because she already knew so much, we weren’t sure if we’d have anything to add, but Alexia and Nadia still managed to surprise her. They pick up the story in Florida. |
| Mila Rios: | All right, enough Chiquita. |
| Al Letson: | We’re sitting at Mila’s kitchen table at her home near Fort Lauderdale where she lives with her two Chihuahuas, Bella and Chiquita. |
| Mila Rios: | We will just ignore them. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Mila is showing Nadia and I photos as she lays out her family tree. |
| Mila Rios: | All right, so that’s my great-grandmother. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | That’s Florence? |
| Mila Rios: | My great-grandmother. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This is the only photo Mila has of her great-grandmother, Florence Chisholm. She’s posing with her family members during a gathering in the backyard of their home near Philadelphia. It’s the early 1960s, a sunny day, and Florence looks serene. Mila was just a kid when this picture was taken. |
| Mila Rios: | I was probably running around, but I was really little, tiny. I was a real tiny thing. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Mila is a semi-retired clinical psychologist, the widow of an aerospace engineer. She grew up old school, four generations all together under the same roof. She says her great-grandmother, Florence, was a headstrong woman who got the most out of the world around her. |
| Mila Rios: | I remember her going out in the yard picking dandelions out of the ground, making dandelion wine, and she would make the most beautiful gardens that you would ever see. We had all sorts of vegetables, and she would tell me, “This is what my father and mother taught me,” and they called me Shell. “Shell, I want you to see, this is how you make it. This is how you plant it. This is what you do to it.” That’s what she did, and those are the things that she left me with. Now, I’ve never planted a seed in my life, but it doesn’t mean that I wasn’t taught. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | That’s not all Florence taught Mila. She was also a storyteller, a repository of family history. |
| Mila Rios: | My bedroom was right across from hers, so I spent an inordinate amount of time with her, and she loved to talk about family. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Florence was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1889. She’d come up during Jim Crow and went to school for as long as she was allowed. She finished the eighth grade, which was pretty advanced in those days. Despite this, she was confined to washing laundry for white families, the residuals of slavery. |
| Mila Rios: | Well, that’s another thing. My great-great-grandmother never said slave. Never, ever, ever did she say the word slave. It was when they were in bondage. If you said slaves, she’d get quite upset. They were not slaves. They were in bondage. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Florence’s parents, Pompy and Patience Jackson, they were in bondage. |
| Mila Rios: | She didn’t speak about their childhood because they had no childhood. They were working. They were working. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Florence talked a lot about the lives of Pompy and Patience and that first generation of freed people. |
| Mila Rios: | I would say to her, “You’ve told me that a million times.” She said, “I don’t care because I don’t want you to forget,” and you know, I didn’t forget. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Not only did Mila not forget, she spent the last 30 years trying to verify the oral history Florence passed down to her. |
| Mila Rios: | That’s the paper in which I was referring to. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | She shows us the copy of a document, a 156-year-old marriage record. |
| Mila Rios: | It shows Pompy Jackson, Patience Simmons and the date in which they were married, December the 17th, 1867, exactly what my great-grandmother had said. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | This was her very first attempt at research, and Mila struck gold. It happened during a family reunion in Savannah in 1992. |
| Mila Rios: | So I went over to the Savannah Courthouse, and I encountered this really elderly curmudgeon-looking justice. He looked like the meanest man in the world. He looked like… he really did. I said to him, “Excuse me, sir, can you please tell me where I could find the marriage records?” He looked at me and he smiled, and I said, “Okay.” He took me in into a room where I saw all the books, and I was astounded because me still being a Northern girl, you know the colored books? |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Yes. In the annals of Savannah marital history, there are the white marriage books and, quote, “colored marriage books.” |
| Mila Rios: | He asked me, “Do you have any idea when that got married?” I said, “Yes, I do, because my great-grandmother told me her mother and father got married in 1867.” He looked at me, he said, “Wow, you’re good.” That was my first document and that’s where it started. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Then Mila began to find other priceless documents, forms with Pompy’s signature, like a Freedmen’s Bureau bank record from 1874. |
| Mila Rios: | I was so proud. I said, “Oh, look, Papa signed his name. Papa signed his name.” |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | During Reconstruction, a Black man’s personal signature was a political statement all by itself. Pompy couldn’t write, but immediately after Emancipation, he made a point to learn how to sign his name. |
| Mila Rios: | That’s it, to sign his name. When he went to take his oath to be able to vote, even though Jim Crow relinquished that right, he signed his name. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | According to Florence, Pompy was a tall, quiet man who made the most of being a full citizen right after being emancipated. He got married, got a job as a carpenter, registered to vote, opened a bank account. Eventually, he bought property, 1/5 of an acre. He built a house on it and raised seven children there, including Florence. He did all the things white Americans took for granted but had been denied to people in bondage. For Mila, all these pieces of information bring her ancestors to life, but there’s more to uncover here. I know this because Mila’s great-great-grandfather, he actually got land through the 40 acres program. The first time I contacted Mila, she knew none of this. |
| Mila Rios: | I had no idea. That aspect I didn’t know that or that we didn’t know anything about that. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | What was it like to learn that? |
| Mila Rios: | I said, “Wow, she has some more information. This is great.” I thought it was wonderful. You helped me in my quest. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | When I was researching this story, I found Pompy Jackson’s name scrawled on a document that had been buried for more than a century deep inside those Freedmen Bureau files. The document was a handwritten land register from April 1865, and it said that Pompy Jackson, who was a teenager at the time, received a possessory title to four acres of land on the Ogeechee River low country. It was a small piece of a massive rice plantation near Savannah called Grove Hill. The plantation was previously owned by the Habersham family, one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful families in Georgia, and for a fleeting moment, a small slice of that wealth was Pompy. |
| Mila Rios: | We knew about 40 acres and a mule, but we never knew actually who. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Yes, who were all those freed people who received land, settled on it and planned their futures. At Grove Hill, they were people like Pompy, Peter McKnight and a woman named Jane Jones, people who history has largely forgotten. We’ve been able to prove that at least 50 Black families got land titles on this former rice plantation. After I told her about this, Mila started digging herself, looking for anything she could find about the Grove Hill plantation. |
| Mila Rios: | Grove Hill was abandoned. Oh, let me see. I’ll show you what I have here. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | She pulls out another document. What’s that. |
| Mila Rios: | This was given in the courts October 1865, and Grove Hill was abandoned and it said the name of W.R. Habersham. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | W.R. stands for William Robert Habersham. Mila had known Pompy was enslaved by the Habersham family, but she didn’t know exactly where or under what conditions. Grove Hill was a brutal place. People died every month, mostly young children. Those who reached adulthood often suffered spinal injuries, lung disease and foot rot from sloshing through flooded rice fields. Pompy survived smallpox. |
| By 1866, President Andrew Johnson had pardoned William Habersham and other former slaveholders, and they were all trying to regain control of the land in the Ogeechee low country. But Mila’s research found something even we didn’t know, that freed people in the area weren’t letting go of that land so easily. They believed that after generations of enslavement, the land was their birthright. They had formed a militia called the Ogeechee Home Guards, and this fight over the land became known as Ogeechee insurrection. Get this, Mila discovered that Pompy’s brother, her great-great-granduncle, Thomas Benedict was one of the leaders of that revolt. | |
| Mila Rios: | He didn’t just revolt one time, he revolted several times. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | What do you mean? |
| Mila Rios: | This is the court docket. There’s his name Thomas Benedict, and you see it says right here, insurrection. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | No. |
| Mila Rios: | Yes, and this is from April the 1st 1869. You could see that was four years later, and there’s still- |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Oh, yes- |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Four years later. |
| Mila Rios: | Four years later. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | After they refused to give up that land. |
| Mila Rios: | That’s right. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | They just refused to leave. |
| Mila Rios: | Yeah. Yeah. I told you I was searching, searching diligently. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | In the end, the Army was called in and the revolt was put down. Mila’s kitchen table is now scattered with documents. She’s been able to connect so many dots over the years, and this all started because she listened. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was collecting oral history. |
| Mila Rios: | There’s nothing, if we didn’t have oral history, there’s nothing. If the Freedmen’s Bureau didn’t know this, and if I hadn’t heard certain things that my great-grandmother said, there’s nothing, and I am so grateful for that because every single thing she told me was true. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Florence died in 1972. She was 83 years old. |
| Mila Rios: | I was the last one she spoke to when she passed away in bed. She looked at me, she said, “You’re going to be all right?” ‘Cause I was in her room again, and I said, “Yeah, I’m going to be fine.” I saw her take her last breath, and I knew she was gone. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Mila has spent her time documenting individuals, people who forged singular lives, who left legacies that led directly to her, and yet there is still that one thing she didn’t know, that Pompy received a 40 acres land title. It makes me wonder how many other families don’t know that their ancestors got land and had it taken away. All these documents can help set the record straight, not just for Mila, but for countless others. Now that Mila knows so much about what her ancestors went through, she wants to stand in the spaces where they once stood, in the places where they were once enslaved. |
| Mila Rios: | In African culture, they say that when you speak a name, they live, and I want to make these people live, and when you see what they saw, they see it again. |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | I went to part of Grove Hill. I wanted to see what was once 40 acres land. It still looks like a plantation only abandoned. There were overgrown fields, a no trespassing sign, and near the entrance was a for-sale notice. Later I learned that Grove Hill is being developed into a gated community. It’s called, wait for it, the Habersham Plantation. I told Mila this when we met. They’re selling them in four-acre lots, two to four-acre lots for people to build the homes that have to be part of this… Just like the landings development that we visited earlier in the show, this new gated community promises home buyers, the, quote, “perfect coastal lifestyle.” There’s already a homeowners association. |
| Mila Rios: | I should go and buy one. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Really, you shouldn’t have to buy it. |
| Mila Rios: | I should go and buy one. This belonged to us from the… Yeah, I should go and buy one |
| Alexia Fernánde…: | Mila’s joking, but an empty four-acre lot, the size of Pompy plot sold for $250,000 last year. There’s no way of knowing why Pompy only got four acres instead of 40, but it’s probably because he was a teenager with no family of his own, but some freed people did get 40 acres on Grove Hill, which could be worth more than $2.5 million today. That’s the kind of generational wealth that the 40 Acres program could have created. I wanted to know what Mila makes of all this. What if Pompy had been able to keep his land? |
| Mila Rios: | I don’t think that my life would’ve been any better. I really don’t ’cause my life has been wonderful. I thank God every day. I’ve had a hell of a ride. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Do you think that you are owed anything out of what happened with the 40 acres specifically? |
| Mila Rios: | Me personally, I’m not owed a dime. I don’t feel as if I am, me personally. Do I feel that my family should have been compensated in some way back in that time? Absolutely. But me? No, not me. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Do you think you’d feel differently, though, if you hadn’t been so successful in life? |
| Mila Rios: | I don’t know. Maybe I could utilize that as an excuse, but would it be a valid excuse? Would I be able to sit here and say, “If my great-great-grandfather had been given those four acres, boy my life would’ve been better?” I don’t know. I don’t know. |
| Al Letson: | While Mila doesn’t think she’s owed anything, she’s in the minority. |
| Speaker 11: | What do we want? |
| Speaker 12: | Reparations! |
| Speaker 11: | When? |
| Speaker 12: | Now! |
| Speaker 11: | What do we want? |
| Speaker 12: | Reparations! |
| Al Letson: | Because a majority of Black Americans want reparations, including those who lost land in more recent chapters of American history. |
| Speaker 13: | 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: | The answer, compensation, but not everyone agrees. |
| Speaker 14: | Nobody is coming to save us? Who are we asking to pay? |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on 40 Acres and a Lie, a new three-part investigation from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity. In the meantime, to see the historical records for yourself, we’ve got links at revealnews.org/40 acres. This story was reported by Alexia Fernández Campbell and Pratheek Rebala with help from Nadia Hamdan. Nadia was our lead producer. Roy Hurst also produced today’s episode. They had help from Steven Rascón. Cynthia Rodriguez is a series editor. Thanks to our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery. We also had help from genealogist Vicki McGill. For a full list of researchers and document transcribers, go to revealnews.org. This project was supported by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation. Victoria Baranetsky is Reveal’s general counsel. Missa Perron is our membership manager. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. |
| Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. They had help this week from Claire C-Note Mullen. Our production intern is Aisha Wallace-Palomares. Original vocals by Renn Woods and additional music by Dave Linard. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. 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 and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story. |