5. Forty Acres And A Mule?
As the end of the Civil War drew near in 1865, many freed slaves left their plantations to join the Union army as it pushed through Georgia. General William Sherman promised that the freed slaves would be given 40 acres and a mule so that they could provide for themselves and their families.
But in the economically devastated South, which was still full of racism, the promise could not be fulfilled. By 1870, five years after the war ended, only 30,000 former slaves in the South owned land, and these were usually rather small plots. Four million slaves did not own property; the vast majority of them became sharecroppers.
