This collection chronicles the tumultuous history of landowning African American farmers from the end of the Civil War to today. Each essay provides a case study of people in one place at a particular time and the factors that affected their ability to acquire, secure, and protect their land. The contributors walk readers through a century and a half of African American agricultural history, from the strivings of black farm owners in the immediate post-emancipation period to the efforts of contemporary black farm owners to receive justice through the courts for decades of discrimination by the U.S Department of Agriculture. They reveal that despite enormous obstacles, by 1920 a quarter of African American farm families owned their land, and demonstrate that farm ownership was not simply a departure point for black migrants seeking a better life but a core component of the African American experience.

"This ground-breaking collection proves that there is still a great deal to learn about the lives of black southerners. The essays offer a counterpoint to the standard story that all African Americans in the rural South found themselves mired in poverty and dependency."--Melissa Walker, author of Southern Farmers and Their Stories "A remarkable achievement. The authors in this collection have retrieved African American farm owners from the margins of history, making clear that life on the land for African Americans not only transcended sharecropping but also shaped the contours of the struggle for freedom and justice."--Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of Bloody Lowndes This collection chronicles the tumultuous history of landowning African American farmers from the end of the Civil War to today. Each essay provides a case study of people in one place at a particular time and the factors that affected their ability to acquire, secure, and protect their land. ?The contributors walk readers through a century and a half of African American agricultural history, from the strivings of black farm owners in the immediate post-emancipation period to the efforts of contemporary black farm owners to receive justice through the courts for decades of discrimination by the U.S Department of Agriculture. They reveal that despite enormous obstacles, by 1920 a quarter of African American farm families owned their land, and demonstrate that farm ownership was not simply a departure point for black migrants seeking a better life but a core component of the African American experience. Debra A. Reid, professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, is author of Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas. Evan P. Bennett is assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University.

First published in 1978, Claude F. Oubre's Forty Acres and a Mule has since become a definitive study in the history of American Reconstruction. Drawing on a vast collection of government records and newspapers, Oubre examines what he sees as the crucial question of Reconstruction: Why were the far majority of freed slaves denied the opportunity to own land during the Reconstruction era, leaving them vulnerable to a persecution that strongly resembled slavery? Oubre recounts the struggle of black families to acquire land and how the U.S. government agency Freedmen's Bureau both served and obstructed them. This groundbreaking book offers an indispensable resource for anyone eager to understand the evolution of slavery studies.

In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

In the wake of recent successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have recently found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed group - Native Americans, holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s - Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations. As Hurricane Katrina made apparent, the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. Long Overdue provides an up-to-date survey of the political and legislative efforts that are now breaking the surface to move reparations into the heart of our national discussion about race.

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.