Title: '40 Acres and a Lie' Series from 'Reveal' [MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

David Furst: It's All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart, who will be back here on Monday. You may be familiar with the phrase "40 acres and a Mule," that's a reference to an order to allot land to formerly enslaved people post-Civil War, and it's often shorthand for a promise never kept. In 1865, more than 1200 formerly enslaved people did receive land, and they worked on it, cultivated it, and began to create their own communities, only for that land to be taken away. 18 months after an order required the land to be given to them through a land title program, it was canceled, and the land was returned to the enslavers who previously owned it.

Over 150 years later, the descendants of this lost land have yet to receive any compensation. It is this complicated history that is explored in the new Reveal series, 40 Acres and a Lie, airing on WNYC and available as a podcast. The first two episodes of the three-part series are out now, and Episode 3 is coming out tomorrow. We're joined by two of the reporters who worked on the series, Alexia Fernández Campbell and April Simpson. They're both reporters for the center for Public Integrity. Welcome to All Of It.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Thanks for having us.

April Simpson: Thank you.

David Furst: Alexia, the title of the documentary series is 40 Acres and a Lie. Tell us about that. Why did you decide on this for the title?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. One of the things we wanted to make clear, and I do want to make clear that reconstruction era historians have long known about this history, but what we wanted to show was specific people we found land titles with names. We found more than 1250 people who got land up to 40 acres and the locations where they got the land. Then we told the stories of as many of them as we could. Yes, it was a lie. It's not just a broken promise. It was a program that was carried out and then canceled, as you said. It was important for us to show that this was much more than a promise. It was program that deprived people of generational wealth.

David Furst: In other words, more than just a promise, right?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes.

David Furst: A promise not kept is one thing, but people had this land and then it was taken away.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. They were told by federal agents, "This is your land." They literally said, "You own this, you deserve it. You work this land, it's yours." It was very clear to the freed people that this was their land.

David Furst: April, can you get into the specifics of what 40 Acres and Mule actually means? The specifics of what that order was.

April Simpson: Yes. Sherman made this wartime order after the Union Army captured Savannah and he meets with a group of ministers, and they tell him, "This is what we need. We want land and to be left alone." The order allowed for formerly enslaved people to receive anywhere from 4 to 40 acres of land to restart their lives. Folks were literally starting from nothing. The order set aside land 30 miles inland on the coast between Charleston and around the St. John's River in Jacksonville and a lot of this land were former plantations that were going to be cut up and given to these formerly enslaved people.

David Furst: Well, Reveal is a one-hour radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Why did you choose this project and why now?

April Simpson: There's-- Oh.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Go ahead, April.

April Simpson: Well, Alexia can speak to how we got here, but I think there's obviously a big conversation happening now around reparations and what is owed and very different ideas on how we should or whether we even should reckon with this past and so we thought it was very important to tell this history about 40 acres and a Mule, a line that is often thrown out, but I think many of us don't really understand the details.

David Furst: Well, Alexia, you were a big part of the research team, and this was a major undertaking. Was this two years worth of work? How did you get started?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. April and I were on a team, we were researching a different story. It was related to Black Land Loss, but I was trying to find records of historic Black settlements. Professor at Texas A&M told me to check the Freedmen's Bureau records at the National Archives, they had just recently been digitized. I was just looking in the digital archives of the Freedmen's Bureau and I found these really old-looking documents that look crumpled and smudged and torn on the edges. The first one that I saw said, "40 acres has been granted to Fergus Wilson on Sapelo Island, Georgia and no one can interfere with this until Congress." Those aren't the exact words, but it was along those lines.

It took me a while to realize that what Sherman's said under the authority of Sherman's Special Orders 15, and then it took me a while to figure out what that was. I was like, "Oh my God, this is 40 acres and a Mule program." I was like, "People actually got land." We realized immediately that this was a significant story.

David Furst: Well, Alexia, what did you learn? What was the biggest revelation for you when you were doing this research?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Well, just the little that I knew about what 40 acres and a Mule was just this idea, like you had mentioned, that it was a promise never kept, but not that it actually had been land distributed to people. The most shocking thing to me was going to places today. We were able to identify locations where these plantations were, where people got land, and some of them are really, really expensive, gated communities. Like one place we went, my colleague found out that 40 acres there is now worth more than $20 million just for the land. To me, that was shocking. When we're going through those communities, there is absolutely no sign at all of this history.

David Furst: Well, April, take us to Edisto Island. You did a lot of work there. Tell us about this location. This is in South Carolina, and how you landed on this particular place to tell the story.

April Simpson: Edisto Island it's one of the sea islands off of South Carolina. It's about 40 miles south of Charleston, and it's beautiful. There are a number of plantations that were a part of Sherman's order. We landed on Peters Point plantation, which is actually still owned by descendants of Isaac Jenkins Mikell, who was the owner of Peters Point before, during, and after the Civil War, and lost the land briefly while Sherman's order was in effect. We also talked to descendants of one of Isaac Jenkins Mikell's sons, his Black son, and they also live in Edisto on land that Jim Hutchinson, their ancestor, was able to acquire despite losing his 40 acres.

David Furst: Well, Jim Hutchinson is a fixture throughout the first two episodes. Tell us about him and how you found about him in the records. It's also fascinating when you're talking about the descendants in Edisto, you say at one point during the series that everybody seems to be related somehow here. There's a lot of history.

April Simpson: Absolutely. Edisto is a place where it feels like you're stepping back in history. There's so many important institutions from during the Civil War. Jim Hutchinson was the son of Isaac Jenkins Mikell, the wealthy planter, and it's believed that his mother was an enslaved woman named Maria, who was the Mikell family's house servant. Jim Hutchinson is just a really interesting historical figure. His name was at the top of a list of a log of freedmen who received 40 acres on Edisto and he lost his 40 acres. He was a leader who formed cooperatives with other Black people on the island. They purchased land, they divided it among them. He was a successful businessman and he ended up being killed on his family's land when he had a clash with a white store owner.

David Furst: Alexia, you feature a lot of different voices in this series, some who feel that the descendants should be compensated, some who don't, some who currently live on the land that was given to formerly enslaved people and then taken away. Why was it important for you to include this diverse group of voices?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. We were just asking people, and we didn't actually mean to make sure that we got someone with every single opinion out there. It would just happen to be that everyone we asked had a completely different reaction. I think it just goes to show what a difficult conversation it is once-- people acknowledging. It's one thing to acknowledge is history, which is important and not everyone wants to do, as we can see in some school districts that are kind of censoring certain Black history, but also just acknowledging the history being one thing, but then when you start talking about, well, what do we do with this history? Are reparations due any sort of compensation?

It's very uncomfortable, and I'll say not just for white people, but also for the descendants. Some of the descendants we spoke to was very uncomfortable. Some people don't want to be seen or accused of wanting freebies, and also maybe they were fine. Like their ancestors, despite the odds, were able to succeed and they don't feel like they need it. It wasn't that we were trying to get every single opinion out there. I think it just reflects the reality.

David Furst: Let's hear a clip from the series. This is from the first episode where Jenks, an 82-year-old white man, is asked if he feels that compensation is owed to the descendants of formerly enslaved peoplea And it gets a little tense.

Jenks: No.

April SimpsonApril Simpson: No?

Jenks: No.

April Simpson: Why is that?

Jenks: Anybody in this country who wants to do better has the opportunity to do it. There are many, many, many Black folks around this country that have been very, very successful. Now, you explain to me why.

April Simpson: I mean, I guess I'm trying to understand how-

Jenks: It's all up in--

April Simpson: -hundreds of--

Jenks: If we keep giving away stuff, that's all we going to be able to do is give away, because people don't want to work. Because they don't have to work because all we're doing is giving them freebies. Nobody ever gave me anything other than this, but then I had to sweat bullets to keep it.

David Furst: April, can you tell us more about this moment and about Jenks?

April Simpson: Sure. Jenks, he is, I think, the great-great-grandson of Isaac Jenkins Mikell. Him and his brother Pinkney live on Peters Point plantation. Jenks has basically lived his life in South Carolina. He sold life insurance for 50 years. We were able to visit him in his home and interview him and talk to him about Edisto and reparations. This was a critical moment in that conversation where he's very obviously opposed to reparations. He feels like he's worked very hard to keep his land. It was a heavy moment.

David Furst: A heavy moment, but something happens in his conversation that happens in several conversations in this episode, where at some point during those conversations, your interviewee asks for the mic to be turned off.

April Simpson: Yes. Jenks, his brother Pinkney and Greg Estevez, who's a descendant on the Black side of the family, they all asked for the mic to be turned off, but for very different reasons. It was all when we were in this reparations conversation. For Jenks, there were things that he wanted to share off the record, so we were able to do that. Then with his brother Pinkney, it was something very similar. Although Pinckney is kind of the political opposite of Jenks.

David Furst: These are brothers that are very different.

April Simpson: Very different, yes. He's about ten years younger than Jenks and he considers himself politically liberal. Then, as I said, Greg on the Black side of the family, also talking about reparations and also just exhausted of having to discuss it and defend it. He asked the mic to be turned off because it became emotional for him.

David Furst: This is a topic a lot of people are obviously not comfortable with or willing to talk about. How do you go about interviewing all of these different people and starting these conversations?

April Simpson: We were fortunate to have had the time and space to work on this project for a while. There were many conversations had by phone before we ever met someone in person. Then at that point, I think their guards were down a bit and they were comfortable speaking to us on the record and with recording devices in their face. They knew we were very clear about what this project was about and that we would be asking these kinds of questions.

David Furst: It's different when you're doing an audio documentary to when you're doing a video documentary, in terms of how invasive all that experience is, you can be there with just a microphone. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can just seem like you're having a conversation, but at some point, a lot of these conversations get real.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. Like April said, building that trust was crucial because not everyone wants to discuss that. We had many people who did not want to talk about this. What you all heard, what you hear in these episodes are the people that actually had the courage to discuss something that we know is very hard in this country. The ones that you didn't hear are all the people that said, "Absolutely not." Just to be clear, there are lots of people who did not want to talk about this.

David Furst: Talk about some of the moments where people have all kinds of different emotions flooding to the surface when you're having these discussions with them. There are some moments where people have to take a break because of tears.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Well, I think that was-- April, I think the most moving one was Greg. Right, April? He asked you guys to turn off the microphone.

April Simpson: Yes. Greg just became emotional. He's just so tired of having to share with people how difficult it is to reckon with this history and to talk about how difficult it is to be the descendants of an enslaved person and not have that be appreciated.

David Furst: It's difficult because it's not respected as to how difficult that is?

April Simpson: It's not respected and that it's not just understood that Jim Hutchinson struggled because of being a Black man and a formerly enslaved person having to start from scratch. He, too, was a son of Isaac Jenkins Mikell, but he did not inherit the land or the wealth that his white sons inherited. We can see the effects of that intergenerational wealth that was lost today and it gets to be too much. I think sometimes, too, when you're in those spaces where that history, especially in a place like Edisto, is so present. Then with us, he was with us all weekend having these conversations, it got to be a lot.

David Furst: Well, over the last few years there has been a push for reparations for Black Americans, with states such as New York and California establishing reparations commissions to investigate that possibility. How does your research and this documentary series add to the current conversation for reparations, not just in Edisto, but nationally?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. Well, one of the things, there's a lot of different, like you said, cities, counties, states that are examining this, what their role was in basically profiting off slavery and discriminating other policies over the last 150 years. What we wanted to show is that this is also a national issue. This was the federal government that is responsible for this specific betrayal against free people. We didn't want to necessarily take a stance, but we definitely we were cognizant of, like, we wanted this to move the conversation forward in some way, because it's not an abstract idea of, "Oh, vaguely. Oh, yes, people were enslaved."

We wanted to show that there was an impact, and it's not just an impact that that's frozen in history, it's impacting people alive today. That was important to us, was to speak to people alive today, compare their financial outcomes to people like the Pinkney's descendants and that's what we were hoping to do.

David Furst: Alexia, was there a moment working on this project where the weight of all of this history really hit home for you? On one hand, you're thinking about this perhaps as a historian and going through the nuts and bolts of working on a documentary series and doing all the things you need to do, but was there a moment that really stood out for you?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. There was one story of Pompey Jackson. He was one of the free people who got-- He only got four acres and we think it's because he was a teenager and he didn't have kids and a wife at the time. I interviewed one of his descendants, his great-great-great-granddaughter, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I would say that the moment-- seeing his signature and then on a freedmen's bank record and then having his great-great granddaughter telling me how she knew because she lived with her great grandmother, who was his daughter, how important it was for him to learn to read and write and how he was so frustrated his entire life that he couldn't read and write, but that it was such an accomplishment for him to learn how to sign his name.

I've looked at those Freedmen's Bureau records, and most people just have an X because they don't know how to read or write. You see his signature and it's all trembly and wobbly, but he did it. Then seeing Mila, his great-great-granddaughter's excitement explaining about how significant that was for him, to me, was just-- I don't know how to explain that feeling, but I was just like four, five generations later, him as a freedman learning to write and then his great-great-granddaughter, who's got a PhD, lived a pretty great life in her own words and just seeing that connection and despite all the odds, what his family was able to accomplish.

David Furst: April, how important do you think it is to keep having conversations like the ones that you're having in this series?

April Simpson: Oh, I think it's critically important. Like I said, that there's this complicated conversation around reparations happening right now. I think our hope is that people on both sides of that debate gain a little bit more understanding of each other by learning about stories like the Hutchinsons and the Mikells.

David Furst: Alexia, what do you hope people take away from this series?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. That there's so much of our history that is still needs to be uncovered. These records, for one, are almost impossible to read because of the handwriting, but they've also been really inaccessible for most of the last 150 years because they've been at the National Archives in DC and there's so many records that are now being digitized that we were hoping other people will look through these Freedmen's Bureau records with a tool we created and just help us tell these stories that have largely been ignored.

David Furst: Tell us about the tool that you created. These were difficult records to sort through.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. Our colleague, Pratheek Rebala, he did something amazing. These records that the Smithsonian has been getting volunteers to help transcribe and also putting them all together online. The thing is, like I said, you can't really read them and the computer, like the algorithms, they don't know how to read that handwriting. We found several hundred names and land titles, but to help us find more, Pratheek created an algorithm so that it would do an image search of all 1.8 million. There are a lot of records in the Freedmen's Bureau collection. Basically saying, "Try to find more records that look like this land title or look like this land register," and then it surfaced more.

A lot of these names we've never seen published anywhere. It just shows how much of our own history still needs to be uncovered. Also it impacts people today. To me, that's the big takeaway.

David Furst: As we're digging into this history from 150 years ago, AI is part of the story as well?

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Yes. That image recognition was-- people call it AI, it is, but it's not like ChatGPT or anything like that. It's basically like facial recognition technology that it's-- critique said, "Look at this land title, it has kind of these-- it's rectangular. It has a stamp here in this spot, and it has text here and then handwriting here. Help me find more in this," and it basically searched all the documents to find more. That was how we used AI to find more.

David Furst: Oh my goodness, the research must have been intense for you over the past couple of years.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Oh my God. There were times where like my vision was blurring at night because of trying to read this handwriting. It's so difficult. I learned how to read and write in cursive, but that's not the kind of cursive that people wrote back then.

David Furst: Well, we've been speaking with Alexia Fernández Campbell and April Simpson, reporters with the Center for Public Integrity Reveal's three part series is called 40 Acres and a Lie. You can listen to the first two episodes now. The final episode drops tomorrow @revealnews.org. Yes, you can also listen to Reveal right here on WNYC. It airs Sundays at 11:00 AM, Tuesdays at 09:00 PM on 93.9 FM. Alexia and April, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

April Simpson: Thank you so much for having me.

Alexia Fernández Campbell: Thanks for having us.

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