Freed Black agricultural communities thrived when left alone with land

Evidence

By June 1865, 40,000 people had been settled on the plots and had been given old army mules. Sherman’s field order was not the first of its kind. Black squatters on the Mississippi land of Jefferson Davis’s family had formed their own government and swung a cotton profit of $160,000. “Davis Bend” became a testament of what Savannah Blacks were saying in those days: all Black people needed was to be left alone, secure on their own lands and guaranteed their own rights. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 618

Categorization

• XREF: Davis Bend echoes the reader’s own fiction on early-1900s Black landholding — a model for what could have been — and the mule reference anchors the ‘forty acres and a mule’ promise.