Freedmen in 1865 identified land ownership as the pathway to self-sufficiency

Evidence

“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor—that is, by the labor of the women, and children, and old men—and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare.” (Black women, by reference to our ability to work, made our only appearance here.) Black people, according to Frazier, wanted the opportunity to work and build wealth for themselves, instead of continuing to do so for their former enslavers, as they had been doing for well over two hundred years. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,” he concluded. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 12

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what a remedy looked like to the enslaved themselves — productive land, not cash charity — which seeds Brown’s accounting-vs-charity distinction.
• SEED: Angle: the 1865 Savannah meeting as the original ‘reparations demand’ whose terms (land, self-determination) reframe what a remedy should restore.