Nineteenth-century freedmen themselves requested land as reparative compensation

Evidence

Frazier replied: “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

• XREF: The land-and-labor demand prefigures the whole forty acres promise and the book’s thesis that reparations were requested at the moment of emancipation, before being refused.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘grafting’ article’s metaphor of root claims — freedmen asked to own the land they tilled, which reparations-as-accounting must honor as a labor debt.