The rescinded land grant was a missed opportunity whose costs are incalculable
Evidence
The unfulfilled potential of Field Order No. 15 has haunted this country and black Americans ever since Andrew Johnson reversed course in 1865. It was a missed opportunity that has cost us more than we will ever be able to calculate or recover. Had it been allowed to stand and extended throughout the South to provide for the 4 million newly freed black Americans, we could have become a different America. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 21
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SHARE: For a scholar making the reparations case: the counterfactual ‘had it been allowed to stand’ is the precise causal hinge one needs to defend — the untaken fork.
Related
- Freed people received no reparations and had Forty Acres land repossessed by President Johnson. (similarity 0.82)
- The federal government repossessed land promised to freedmen and returned it to enslavers (similarity 0.79)
- Farmland promised to freedpeople was revoked and returned to former enslavers. (similarity 0.79)
- Reneged land promises forced freed people into exploitative sharecropping contracts (similarity 0.79)
- Political will, not design, is the real obstacle to reparations (similarity 0.78)