The Short-Lived Promise of ’40 Acres and a Mule’

...Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.” Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.” Without land of their own to work, the 3.9 million members of...