Slavery, Land, Immigration and Wealth

The year my ancestors became free (1865), Abraham Lincoln agreed to give them land to live on and cultivate in order to start their journey into freedom. His sentiment was that “the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition." Due to the civil war, an enormous amount of land was left abandoned and declared property of the newly freed slaves by Sherman’s Field Order No. 15. That same year (in the fall) Lincoln’s successor President Andrew Johnson overturned the order and returned the land to the former confederate south.

The Homestead Act which signed into law during the Civil War granted 246 million acres of land to Americans at very little cost between 1868 and 1934. To receive 160 acres of government land, one had to file an application, improve the land for five years, and then file for the deed of ownership. I must note this act was also used to encourage immigration.

My people owned no cash (being they were former slaves), did not have experience with governmental affairs (again, being that they were former slaves), and were still looked at as property even though in letter they were free.

So while over 1.5 million white families – both American-born and immigrant – succeeded in becoming land owners through the Homestead Act, only 4,000 to 5,500 African-American claimants ever received final land grants through the year 1934. That’s less than half of 1% of what was awarded to white families. 

Let me repeat that last line: that’s less than half of 1% of what was awarded to white families. 

Additionally, many homesteaders sold their land to corporations, effectively establishing a basis of wealth and capital that would accumulate and become generational. By the end of the Act, more than 270 million acres of land had been transferred to almost exclusively white individuals.

Moreover; during this time over 7.5 million immigrants came to the United States, nearly all from northern and western Europe:

• close to 4.5 million Irish arrived in America,
• more than 1 million Germans immigrated to the United States,
• and Italian immigrants to the US from 1890 on became a part of what is known as “New Immigration,” - the third and largest wave of immigration from Europe and consisted of Slavs, Jews, and Italians. 

Blacks then, are the only race in the United States to ever to start out with just about zero capital.

They did not have anything upon which they would have been able to build or generate wealth. Immigrants who came to the U.S. were essentially given handouts from our government - while the people upon which the government was built received next to nothing.

The generational wealth of white families correlates directly to the generational poverty of blacks.

The effects of slavery and the laws both established and undermined have trickled down. This failure of land redistribution is one of the most significant reasons the net worth of a typical white family in 2016 was $171,000, nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150).

As Dr. King once said: "...it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."

There is also a proverb that states "better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice."

I hope America will wake up to the fact that their land of milk and honey was, and in a lot of ways still is, our land of deprivation and loss.