“40 Acres & A Lie” is podcast from NPR on Sherman’s order giving land to freedmen on the Sea Islands in 1865. This is a four part series on the distribution of land to more that 1,000 former slaves that would eventually be undone. Here is the description of this Reconstruction podcast from the producers:
The promise of Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 — the so-called “40 acres and a mule” — is often thought of as a broken one. But what if part of that promise had actually been fulfilled?
It turns out, some freed people actually received land as reparations after the Civil War. And what happened to that land and the families who it was given to is the subject of a new series, 40 Acres and a Lie, by our colleagues at Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity.
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