Reparations efforts won’t end under the Trump administration

On the heels of emancipation in January 1865, Union leaders called upon Black ministers to advocate for thousands of freed slaves. The Baptist and Methodist clergymen convened with Union Army General William T. Sherman and the Lincoln administration’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to answer the question: What do you want for your people?  Led by Baptist minister Garrison Frazier, 20 ministers clearly and precisely described what was necessary for self-determination. Frazier, who emancipated himself and his wife four years before the start of the Civil War, asserted, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” The men, many of whom were considered property less than a decade prior, knew the sites of their profound trauma were also the key to their economic and personal freedom. General Sherman signed Special Field Order No. 15 four days later, a land redistribution plan granting African American families 40 acres and a mule.  An estimated 40,000 freedmen eventually settled on plots of seized Confederate farmland from Charleston,...