40 Acres and a Lie Part 2

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey I'm Alletton and I'm a little bit of a history buff so I thought I knew the story behind
0:06.8	40 acres in a mule the promise that was made by the federal government to the enslaved
0:12.0	people of this country when they were set free a dream
0:15.8	unfulfilled.
0:17.5	At least that's what I thought it was, but this is a reveal and there is always more to the story and the story we tell here gives context to the way we live our lives today
0:29.6	If that type of journalism is important to you, please donate before our series ends next week.
0:38.0	It's easy, just text the word donate to 88857 reveal that's 88857 reveal, that's 888 577 3832.
0:47.0	Again, just text the word donate to 888 577 3832 and thanks. Imagine a world without rainforest.
1:05.0	Imagine a world where the only place tigers can roam is behind metal bars and orangutan swing from trees made of concrete.
1:15.0	Rainforest Action Network works to preserve the world's last remaining rainforest
1:20.0	by challenging corporate power.
1:22.0	Right now, tropical rainforest teeming with life are burned and bulldozed
1:28.0	to make room for crops like palm oil, soy, beef, timber, and cocoa, ingredients that make the products lining the shelves at
1:36.8	your local grocery store. And with every acre lost, endangered species are pushed closer to extension.
1:44.0	But you can change the future of rainforest.
1:47.0	Learn how at R-A-N.org slash rainforest.
1:52.0	With fewer than 400 Sumatran Tigers in the wild, there's no time to waste.
1:58.0	Find out how some of the world's best known brands are driving deforestation and what you can do to stop them at
2:06.0	R.a.org slash rainforest. Close your eyes.
2:15.0	on an island. It's lush.
2:27.4	Close your eyes. You're on an island. It's lush with giant oaks, salt marshes, and lagoons.
2:36.0	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
	...

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