Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.
Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner.
“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it.”
Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 – better known as 40 acres and a mule – implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that.
It was real.
Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders – and then saw that land taken away.
None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.
This week on Reveal, with our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, we bring you the first in a three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t – and the wealth gap that remains.
Dig Deeper
Learn more: 40 Acres and a Lie (Mother Jones, Center for Public Integrity and Reveal)
Credits
Reporters: April Simpson and Nadia Hamdan | Producers: Nadia Hamdan, Roy Hurst and Steven Rascón | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Genealogy research: Vicki McGill | Fact checker: Peter Newbatt Smith | Legal counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Zulema Cobb and Steven Rascón | Digital producers: Kate Howard and Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Vocals: Renn Woods | Additional music: Dave Linard | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery
This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. The year is 1983. I was 11 and my parents were forcing me to move from New Jersey to North Florida, just outside of Jacksonville. The culture shock was significant. We were one of two Black families that lived in a middle-class white neighborhood. My elementary school was about a mile and a half away in a neighborhood that was pretty much all Black and mostly poor. Every day I would ride my bike between those two worlds, from the better-off white community, big homes with pools, yards, and nice cars, to the Black community, many folks living in little houses in need of repair. People barely getting by. I hung out with Black and white kids, and everybody’s parents seemed to work hard, but the fruits of their labor were vastly different. It never made any sense to me. Then came high school. | |
| It was the heyday of conscious hip-hop, and Public Enemy burned with a righteous anger. They rapped about things that I was experiencing in the world around me and the history behind me. It led to an awakening, including about 40 acres and a mule, a promise from the federal government that newly freed slaves would be given land, a foundation, something they could pass to their descendants, but that promise wasn’t kept. How different that bike ride I took as a child might’ve been if Black people had actually been given a fair shot, if they’d been given just a small piece of the wealth they’d spent centuries building for others. Now, I thought I understood the history of 40 acres and a mule, but what I didn’t know is that it was more than just a promise. It actually happened. Land titles. Ink on paper. This is episode one of our new three-part series 40 Acres and a Lie. For more than two years, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity have been digging through thousands of records that were once buried in the National Archives. | ||
| Nadia Hamdan: | Lucy Crosby. | |
| April Simpson: | Phillip Young. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Amos Jackson. | |
| April Simpson: | John Major. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | James Byrd. | |
| Al Letson: | Public Integrity reporters Alexia Fernández Campbell, April Simpson and their colleagues found proof that more than 1200 formerly enslaved people were given land titles by the federal government. | |
| April Simpson: | Samuel Miller, 40 Acres on Edisto. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Fergus Wilson, 40 Acres on Sapelo Island. | |
| April Simpson: | Primus Morrison, 40 Acres on Edisto. | |
| Al Letson: | And then had that land taken away. This betrayal of Black Americans has fueled a racial wealth gap that continues today more than 150 years later. There’s a line from W.E.B. Du Bois that goes like this. “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again towards slavery.” This is the story of that brief moment in the sun. We start with Public Integrity reporter April Simpson and Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan in Edisto Island, South Carolina. | |
| April Simpson: | The first thing you notice about Edisto are the trees. These giant live oaks draped in Spanish moss that form canopies over the old gravel roads. The second thing you notice is the water. This place is a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries speckled with salt marshes and nestled right on the Atlantic Ocean. People say sometimes if you listen hard enough, you can hear a dolphin go by. This is the island where a man named Jim Hutchinson was enslaved and received his 40 acres. | |
| Greg Estevez: | This is one of the oldest roads on Edisto Island. | |
| April Simpson: | And this is Jim’s great-great-great-grandson, Greg Estevez. He’s showing us around. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Look at how the trees go over the- | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Like archways. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Yeah, like archways. | |
| April Simpson: | Greg is a big guy over six feet tall, bald with a salt and pepper goatee. He retired from the Navy in 2004, and then he worked for some time as a correctional officer. Now he lives in Florida. He spends part of his time driving for Uber and the rest of it, he spends writing history books, history books about Black life on Edisto. Greg can trace his roots through seven generations on Edisto all the way up to Jim Hutchinson’s mother, Maria. As Greg drives, he points out house after house. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Y’all see this house right here? That’s MP’s house. | |
| April Simpson: | An aunt here, a cousin down the road. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | So now would you say that on this street, this is majority Black families? | |
| Greg Estevez: | Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could look and see. You could probably tell if you’re paying attention. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Why would you say that? | |
| Greg Estevez: | These houses, you can tell that people are not as wealthy. | |
| April Simpson: | What Greg means is that on Edisto, nearly every Black household earns less than $40,000 a year while close to half of white households earn three times as much. | |
| Greg Estevez: | So the Edisto Island Black residents have been economically disadvantaged for many, many, many, many, many years. | |
| April Simpson: | Today, just under 200,000 people live here and the majority of them are white. But on the brink of the Civil War, Edisto’s population was more than double what it is today, and only a few hundred were white. Many were the plantation owners. The rest were enslaved. People like Jim. Greg says Jim was a light-skinned Black man who spent much of his enslavement on the water, ferrying people through those many rivers and tributaries. He’s written a lot about Jim and feels a deep connection to his story. So do many others in the family. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Now, Aunt Patty looks younger than I do, but don’t be fooled. | |
| April Simpson: | Especially Greg’s Aunt Patty. | |
| Patty Bailey: | My name is really Patricia Susan Lee St. Clair Edwards, and then I married a Bailey. | |
| April Simpson: | Patty is 76 years old, but looks half her age. She’s got shoulder-length hair that she wears in locks and an infectious energy. Patty was born in New York, but remembers visiting Edisto as a kid. | |
| Patty Bailey: | I didn’t like the outhouse. I didn’t like things like that. But now when I think about the well, we had fresh cold water. My grandfather had a beautiful horse he would ride sometimes. One time he put me on, my mother had a fit. | |
| April Simpson: | Patty spent much of her life working as a secretary in the neonatal unit of a hospital, living in Harlem and the Boogie-down Bronx as she calls it. She was happy there. But then in 1997, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Over the next several years, the disease would attack her central nervous system and affect her ability to move. Her MS was so bad at one point, Patty had to start using a wheelchair. | |
| Patty Bailey: | I don’t have any money. I didn’t. I just lived check to check because I was on disability. | |
| April Simpson: | When something like this happens, it can make you reflect on all the things you still want in life. So Patty made a vision board. She filled it with pictures, words, symbols of all those things. She still has it. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Oh, this is the vision board. | |
| Patty Bailey: | I wanted a dog. I wanted to get married. Got married. What’s this here? Can you all read it? | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Contact lens? | |
| April Simpson: | Contact lens? | |
| Patty Bailey: | Yeah, and I did experience contact lenses. | |
| April Simpson: | Wow. | |
| Patty Bailey: | And money. I wanted money. Now here I said something about Edisto property. | |
| April Simpson: | The Edisto property. It’s where we’re all standing right now. | |
| Patty Bailey: | God came to me. That’s how I really got down here. I was sleeping and I woke up about 4:30 in the morning because it was a voice in my ear and it was so crispy clear, and it said, if you want to get better, you would have to move. And I jumped up and it was like, oh my God, I got to move. | |
| April Simpson: | And so she did because she could. The Edisto property is land that Jim Hutchinson once owned, land that has passed down from generation to generation. Land that now belongs to Patty, his great-great-granddaughter. Patty built a home here in 2021. It has four bedrooms and sits high among the trees. A home where her body could heal and has healed. The land has become a place of peace, and it’s also her generational wealth. | |
| Patty Bailey: | [inaudible 00:09:37] my inheritance. | |
| April Simpson: | This is why we wanted to start Jim’s story here, not at the beginning, but at the end, to show you what land can mean to someone like Patty. You can even hear it in the way she says “inheritance.” Owning property has been the American dream far longer than that phrase has existed. It’s part of this country’s inception. Land was a means for realizing true independence, and this was the promise of 40 acres. But here’s the thing, none of the land Patty lives on today is part of Jim’s 40 acres because the federal government took all that land back from him and tens of thousands of others. The land where Patty sits today, Jim spent a decade fighting for it, and he wasn’t just fighting for himself, but for other freed people on the island. It wasn’t until Patty moved to Edisto that she really started to understand that legacy. | |
| Patty Bailey: | The other day, they were cleaning the road, and my neighbor had some friends with her picking up cans and whatnot, and she said to her friend, she said, this is Patty. She’s the Hutchison’s, and the woman dropped everything. She came over to me and she said, oh, you’re the Hutchison. I said, Jim Hutchison? She said, I’ve read everything. She said, it’s an honor to meet you. It was like, wow. | |
| April Simpson: | How’d that make you feel? | |
| Patty Bailey: | It made me feel real good. I felt good. I felt like part of the earth, like this goes back so long ago. | |
| April Simpson: | This story goes back to January 1865. Military leaders were trying to figure out what should happen to freed people after the Civil War, and so they decided to do something that felt new. Ask Black people what they want. | |
| Dr. Allison Dor…: | And the question is put to them. | |
| April Simpson: | This is historian Dr. Allison Dorsey of Swarthmore College. | |
| Dr. Allison Dor…: | What do you understand freedom to mean and what is it that you will need to be free? | |
| April Simpson: | Their answer was simple. We want land and to be left alone. And so the US government issued Special Field Orders No. 15, otherwise known as 40 Acres and a Mule. The order set aside land from South Carolina to upper Florida, including all of the Sea Islands along the South Carolina and Georgia Coast. This is an area made of hundreds of plantations, plantations that would now be cut up and given to freed people. Some people even got land on the very plantation they spent their life enslaved, and it’s something many white people at the time couldn’t believe. | |
| Dr. Allison Dor…: | Planters have this fantasy that enslaved people are dependent on them and would forever be dependent in the new life without slavery, but that’s not the vision that Black people had, right? Black people had a vision that if I can get my toe hold in this land, I can take care of myself. | |
| April Simpson: | It was a chance at true independence, one that was fully sanctioned by the federal government because despite popular belief, this wasn’t just some good faith handshake freed people were actually issued what are known as possessory land titles. | |
| Dr. Allison Dor…: | In my literature, I refer to it as promissory titles because to me that literally is how the Freedmen understood it. | |
| April Simpson: | The land titles came from the Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency set up to help 4 million enslaved transition into freedom. But to be clear, this land wasn’t just given. Black people would essentially rent the land from the government for three years. After that, they were expected to have built up enough wealth to buy the land outright, and they were just starting to build wealth. Black people began settling on acres and acres of land, planting crops, erecting homes, building a life of their own for the first time, with a government land title in hand. | |
| Dr. Allison Dor…: | I don’t think we can underestimate what it meant for freed people to think about this as the promise of the future. | |
| April Simpson: | These land titles are why we’re talking about this history again now. My colleagues and I at the Center for Public Integrity have spent two years reviewing more than a million Freedmen’s Bureau records, and so far we’ve been able to independently confirm that more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people received one of these possessory land titles. It’s the most detailed accounting to date of how many Black Americans received land, and when you can actually look at a title, read a person’s name and see what they got, you begin to understand just how real 40 Acres was. | |
| Greg Estevez: | You can see the water and stuff going all the way. | |
| April Simpson: | So this, would this have been the property? | |
| Greg Estevez: | Yeah. | |
| April Simpson: | This right here. | |
| Back in Edisto, Greg is parked along a waterfront known today as Edingsville Beach Road, but back in 1865, this was known as Bayview Plantation, and it’s here that Jim Hutchinson got his 40 acres, him and seven other Freedmen. There’s a bend in the road. Houses sit along a winding waterway surrounded by marshland. Reeds poke out of the water. It’s a peaceful spot. | ||
| Who lives on this road now? It was a lot of Black folks. Who lives here now? | ||
| Greg Estevez: | A lot of white folks. | |
| April Simpson: | The road is dotted with large homes, each nearing a million dollars in value. That’s because this is considered one of the most desirable spots on Edisto Island, and for a brief moment at least part of it, was Jim’s. | |
| Al Letson: | But it wouldn’t last 40 acres of land and the wealth that came with it would be returned to former slave owners. | |
| Speaker 7: | Yeah. I’m scared to talk about this stuff. | |
| Al Letson: | Coming up we talk to descendants who’ve inherited some of that land. That’s next on Reveal. | |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Jim Hutchinson was born enslaved on Peter’s Point Plantation, one of the richest plantations in South Carolina. It was owned by the Mikell family. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | I, very pretentiously, call this a fine plantation. | |
| Al Letson: | This is Pinkney Mikell, he’s showing April and Nadia around Peter’s Point. They’re on a golf cart because the property is just too big to see by foot. Pinkney’s dog, Hazel, runs alongside them. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | This is quite the workout for a dog. This is the best. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | Yeah. I do this twice a day with her and if she doesn’t get it, she gets crazy at night. It’s like, “Hey, I need to go out now.” | |
| Al Letson: | Pinkney is 73 years old with a mop of gray hair and a scruffy white beard. His sleeves are rolled up and collar is unbuttoned. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | I was an actor once upon a time and I went to New York to pursue that. | |
| Al Letson: | That didn’t work out. He became a contractor instead. And now he’s retired here on Peter’s Point because he’s always had this land to come back to. Pinkney inherited the property from his great-great-grandfather, Isaac Jenkins Mikell. He’s the last man who owned Peter’s Point back when it was a 2,200-acre cotton plantation. The property sits on a small peninsula with stunning views of slow-flowing rivers and marshes. Peter’s Point has shrunk over the years. Today, Pinkney’s slice is about 180 acres, overgrown with hundreds of trees and thick brush. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | So what is it like to keep up with the land right now? | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | It never ends, and I had no idea it was going to cost so much and be so difficult to do. I have two actual farm tractors and then just a lawn tractor and I can’t keep up. | |
| Al Letson: | When Pinkney says this, I can’t help but think about the enslaved people who work this land, who were forced to do the back-breaking labor required to keep this place running. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | See, this is one of the original drainage ditches from the plantation fields. And again, that must have been a horrible job. They didn’t have tractors and stuff. They had carts and shovels and bags and wheelbarrows, and they laid down wooden pathways. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | It’s an obscene amount of work. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | Oh, it was. | |
| Al Letson: | In 1860, Isaac Jenkins Mikell owned around 300 enslaved people here. This free labor fueled Edisto’s multimillion-dollar cotton industry making plantation owners as one newspaper put it, “unbelievably wealthy” and Isaac Jenkins Mikell was near the top of that list. So we wanted to meet the new generation of Mikells and have a hard conversation. April and Nadia pick it up from here. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | Yeah, I’m scared to talk about this stuff. | |
| April Simpson: | Pinkney knows how this looks. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | I’m clearly a white guy who’s benefited tremendously by privilege and the Civil War and everything else. At the same time, I’m doing the best I can, but still it’s a scary conversation to have. | |
| April Simpson: | And still he agreed to have it. Pinkney calls himself a cranky liberal. And as much as he loved his life in New York, Edisto has always been a part of him. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | Try and think of a more southern name than Pinkney. | |
| April Simpson: | And not just Pinkney, but Pinkney Mikell. It’s a well-known name in Edisto. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | My brother is actually Isaac Jenkins Mikell. | |
| April Simpson: | Yes, his brother is named after the original Isaac Jenkins Mikell. So is his father and so is his great-grandfather. To make it a little less confusing, people call him Jenks. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. | |
| April Simpson: | Yes, thank you. | |
| And he also agreed to talk to us. | ||
| Jenks: | Glad to do it, I think. | |
| April Simpson: | Jenks is 82 years old. He sold life insurance for 50 years, and he’s kind of the opposite of his cranky liberal brother. He’s conservative, clean-shaven with a trimmed mustache, his button-down shirt looks freshly pressed. Jenks also lives on Peter’s Point on his own 70 acres, in a house that was originally built in the 1800s, so it’s quite the fixer-upper. | |
| Jenks: | It is what it is. You can only put so much perfume on the pig and we keep on trying. But, anyhow. | |
| April Simpson: | Jenks is really into keeping things as-is. He’s a founder and board member of the Edisto Island Open Land Trust, which works to preserve the island from overdevelopment. And that’s because Jenks really does love this place. | |
| Jenks: | Only word I can say is heaven must be close. | |
| April Simpson: | Today, Pinkney and Jenks’ is land is worth over $5 million, and the roots of that wealth started long before the Civil War. Peter’s Point was one of the world’s largest producers of Sea Island cotton, making Isaac Jenkins Mikell a very wealthy man. He was able to leave an entire plantation to several of his sons and a significant amount of money to several of his daughters. | |
| Jenks: | He was a horny old man who had four wives and 14 white children, not to mention the others. | |
| April Simpson: | The others, like Jim Hutchinson. | |
| Jenks: | The Hutchinson was one of his whatever. | |
| April Simpson: | Jim was Isaac Jenkins Mikell’s son. Jim’s mother was an enslaved named Maria. And while both Pinkney and Jenks struggle to say it, their cousin Carol Belser doesn’t mince words. | |
| Carol Belser: | My great-grandfather was not a nice person. He obviously was a rapist. And it’s taken me a long time to come to that realization itself because you don’t like to think of your ancestors as having dirty laundry, and he did. | |
| April Simpson: | Carol is a biologist who lives down the road. | |
| Carol Belser: | It was just a real nasty time in our lives, not a pretty part of life. | |
| April Simpson: | She lives on one of the plantations Isaac Jenkins Mikell left to one of his sons. It’s known as Sunnyside and it’s beautiful. You feel like you’re stepping back in time. Part of the movie, The Notebook, was actually filmed there. Carol said she spent most of her life having no idea that she was related to the Hutchinsons. It wasn’t until around 2004 that it all started to become more clearer, and that was partly thanks to a phone call from Greg Estevez. And she says once she knew, she invited Greg and some of his family over for a visit. | |
| Carol Belser: | We were over at the big house and we just were sitting over there chit-chatting and it was just wonderful. We had a great time. And from then on it was like the doors opened up and I realized I’m related to everybody on Edisto, everybody. | |
| April Simpson: | It’s true that Edisto is full of families whose histories are intertwined by slavery. And while Carol and Greg’s families get along fine now, it was very different in 1865. Jim actually helped union soldiers capture Carol’s great-grandfather during the war. | |
| Kate Masur: | It was really a world turned upside down. | |
| April Simpson: | This is Kate Masur, professor of history at Northwestern University. And she says as slaveholders fled during the war, Edisto essentially became a Black island, and the formerly enslaved really believed… | |
| Kate Masur: | It is their turn to have land. It’s their turn to have an opportunity to be there. They were loyal to the United States government, unlike the enslavers. | |
| April Simpson: | And the US government was giving them a right to that land. Jim was one of more than 350 formerly enslaved people on Edisto to get a land title from the Freedmen’s Bureau. And that number was only expected to grow. | |
| Kate Masur: | I mean, it was offensive and an affront to many of the former slave owners. So, obviously, most of the planters wanted their land back, and so they protested vehemently. | |
| April Simpson: | Their petition started rolling in. In one letter to the president, 98 Sea Island planters, including Isaac Jenkins Mikell, described 40 Acres as cruelly unjust, and demanded that the government remove this delusion and restore the land to its rightful owners. | |
| Kate Masur: | It’s really amazing example of white elite victimization that here they are, poor them, they are so inconvenienced by this. And, of course, they are not acknowledging the former slaves worked for generations on the land without pay, that anything might be due to them, or why they might be entitled to live on their own and have a share of the wealth here. | |
| April Simpson: | Isaac Jenkins Mikell was not only against 40 acres. In Edisto, he started the trend of burning his cotton so that the enemy couldn’t benefit from it. And like many southern planters, he argued to the Freedmen’s Bureau that the land was still legally his because he was told to evacuate. Or as Pinkney says it… | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | We left but we didn’t abandon it, and we’ve been paying taxes to the Confederacy. Now, we’ll pay taxes to you, but we didn’t abandon this. | |
| April Simpson: | Pinkney is speaking to an argument many made at the time, that the government could only seize abandoned land. But Dr. Allison Dorsey of Swarthmore College says this distinction is irrelevant. | |
| Dr. Allison Dorsey: | Because the reason that you’re being encouraged to evacuate as the Confederacy is losing is that the Union Army is on the march, but you sided with traitors against your nation. So you can spin that any way you want to. I’m sorry, as a 19th century historian and as an African-American, and as someone who’s three generations deep in military service, everybody in the Confederacy is a traitor to the United States. So, I don’t know what else I can say. | |
| April Simpson: | In 1865, agents with the Freedmen’s Bureau basically said the same thing, arguing that Isaac has been “aiding and encouraging the rebellion”. And General Rufus Saxton, one of the leaders of the 40 acres program even wrote to his fellow generals saying, “I cannot break faith now by recommending the restoration of any of these lands. In my view, this order of General Sherman is as binding as a statute.” But President Lincoln was assassinated just a month after 40 acres went into effect. And while the military was prepared to push back on the former slaveholders, the nation’s new president, Andrew Johnson was not. | |
| Dr. Allison Dorsey: | All you had to do is sign an oath of allegiance, acknowledging that you were now going to be loyal to the United States and present to him personally, and you got your status back. | |
| April Simpson: | Johnson rescinded Sherman’s order just six months after it went into effect. Military generals leading the Freedmen’s Bureau didn’t want to see it go, but ultimately Johnson forced their hand. By the time it was all over, the 40 acres program would last about 18 months. In that time, around 40,000 freed people had settled on hundreds of thousands of acres across Georgia and South Carolina. Not all of them had land titles, but many believed it was only a matter of time. Instead, the land would be returned to former slaveholders. And Allison says, it’s hard to overstate just how devastating this was for freed people. | |
| Dr. Allison Dorsey: | My sense is that they understood this as a broken promise. And I would go out on a limb and say, for some of those Black men in uniform who had just fought as part of the Union Army, that this was a betrayal. | |
| April Simpson: | Records show that at least nine formerly enslaved people were actually given 40 acre land titles on Peter’s Point, but Isaac Jenkins Mikell got that land back before they had a chance to do anything with it. Pinkney and Jenks know their history. Well, they’ve shown us genealogies that go back to the early 18th century. They live on the same land where their ancestors lived, land where Jim Hutchinson and many others were once enslaved. We’ve seen the ditches these Black people dug with our own eyes, still here more than a century later. Not only that, but the brothers have broken bread with Jim’s descendants. And because of this deeper connection to not just their own history but Jim’s, but we couldn’t help but wonder if the Mikells ever wrestled with the question of what’s owed. Nadia starts with Jenks. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Do you feel like descendants of the formerly enslaved who have worked land on these plantations on Edisto Island are warranted some kind of payment or reparations for the time they spent enslaved? | |
| Jenks: | No. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | No? | |
| Jenks: | No. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | 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. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | I mean, I guess I’m trying to understand how- | |
| Jenks: | It’s all [inaudible 00:14:36] | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | … hundreds of- | |
| Jenks: | If we keep giving away stuff, that’s all we’re 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 I now had to sweat bullets to keep it. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | I respect that. There’s no denying that hard work has gone into your life, Pinkney’s life, Carol’s life, everyone’s life. But I think even you just said, “I haven’t been given anything, but I was given this.” And so is it not fair to at least acknowledge that there has been some privilege in having hold of this land? | |
| Jenks: | Did they not have land? | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | They, meaning Black people? | |
| Jenks: | Yeah, they had it. I don’t know what- | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And then it was taken away. | |
| Jenks: | I don’t know whether it was taken away or not. Some of it was given back, but not all of it. | |
| April Simpson: | But we do know the land was taken away. And while some fought to hold onto it, almost none of this land was given back. We tell this story to Jenks, the same way we’ve told it to you. And after we do, Nadia tries to ask the question another way. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | How do we try to give some kind of reparations for a really painful history in which a lot of wealth that many of us have benefited from was, in large part, due to the free labor of Black people? Slavery. And so it’s a difficult conversation. There’s no doubt. I still don’t know if I have a full grasp on reparations as a whole, but that’s why we’re asking questions and that’s why we’re trying to understand what do we think we should do to try to reckon with that past? | |
| Jenks: | I don’t know. I wish I had an answer to that. I am not happy with where this country is right now. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Do you have an idea of what you would like to see happen? At least maybe even in your own community since you’ve lived here a long time, and… | |
| Jenks: | Turn that thing off for a second. | |
| April Simpson: | We turn the mic off. It’s clear we’ve reached a dead end with Jenks. And while the interview ultimately ends amicably, it reminds us again how hard it is to talk about this stuff. But this question about reparations isn’t just for Jenks. We ask Pinkney the same thing. | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | It’s a societal problem or it will never be fixed. And many people think it’s not a societal problem because I didn’t benefit, “I didn’t do it. I hadn’t anything to do with this.” No, you didn’t, but you benefited. We’re still benefiting. It’ll eventually happen. I’m sure it will, but it’s just not happening very quickly. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And why do you think that is that something that I’ve always tried to grapple with is this understanding that everyone agrees when you talk to people, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, “Slavery was abhorrent. We should have never done it,” but then when it comes time to talk about how to fix the problem, we’re so resistant to that conversation? | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | Would you stop that for a minute? | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Yeah. You want me to? | |
| April Simpson: | We shut the mic again. This time we get an answer, but Pinkney doesn’t want it on the record. It’s a little surprising because he’s been so candid. | |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Is the hesitation just wanting to keep peace since this is your home? | |
| Pinkney Mikell: | No. No, because I’ve stirred up enough arguments. I don’t keep the peace very well, but I don’t know what would be gained by it. It wouldn’t change anybody and it would make things uncomfortable. And God knows I make plenty of people uncomfortable already. As you know, I’m a Democrat in South Carolina, and a liberal one at that, that makes people plenty uncomfortable. But it’s sort of like poking a beehive. I’ll do it in a lot of ways, but this is something I can’t make it better. I can’t hardly get heard. I just get tuned out, so I don’t go there. | |
| Al Letson: | But for Jim Hutchinson’s descendants, not going there isn’t an option. | |
| Speaker 9: | These are our ancestors, these are our people. So this is deeply personal. | |
| Al Letson: | Next up, how the story ends for Jim and what it means to his family. That’s ahead on Reveal. | |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. | |
| Greg Estevez is showing April and Nadia a small wooden chapel. | ||
| Greg Estevez: | Yes, this is the church. | |
| Al Letson: | It’s known as Trinity Church. Greg brought them here because this was the site of a crucial turning point for Jim Hutchinson and so many others on Edisto and across the south. | |
| Greg Estevez: | There was a general that came here to give the bad news. | |
| Al Letson: | It was here that newly freed people would learn that the 40 Acres Program had been revoked. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Church was packed. As a matter of fact, there was many people that was looking through the windows because they couldn’t even get in. And he came and that’s when he told them that the land grants that they had gotten was no good. They had to go back to work for the slave masses that they had already been enslaved to. | |
| Al Letson: | We found a diary of that day written by a white woman from the North, a teacher at one of the Freedman’s Bureau schools. She remembers the general telling freed people, “Their old masters had been pardoned and their plantations were to be given back to them, that they wanted to come back to cultivate the land and would hire the Blacks to work for them.” It would become a system that wasn’t quite slavery, but close. | |
| Greg Estevez: | So not only do they have to give the land grants back, but they had to go back to the system that they just came out of. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? I can’t. | |
| Al Letson: | The woman’s diary says, “Freed people truly didn’t understand at first,” but as they started to understand the room filled with, “murmurs of dissatisfaction.” She remembers the general standing with two of the island’s largest plantation owners asking freed people to lay aside their bitter feelings and become reconciled with their old masters. She heard people in the crowd say, “No.” “Never.” “Can’t do it.” | |
| MUSIC: | Nobody knows. | |
| The trouble I’ve seen. | ||
| Al Letson: | And then, the Black people started to sing. It was a spiritual that is very familiar to us today. | |
| I’m going to ask you to listen to this song within the context of history. This is 1865, the people in that church were enslaved just a few years earlier. And this is a song they and their ancestors before them would sing to help their spirit survive the brutality of slavery. And now, they were turning to it again. | ||
| Greg Estevez: | These are our ancestors. These are our people. So this is deeply personal. It’s very deeply personal. | |
| MUSIC: | The trouble I’ve seen. | |
| Glory, hallelujah. | ||
| Al Letson: | Many freed people had already put their crops in the ground. They built homes. They were establishing their own self-governing communities. They had felt true independence only to have it taken back. | |
| Jim Hutchinson was one of them. He had felt freedom, however brief, and he wasn’t going back. He would lose those 40 acres and get himself some more. | ||
| Here’s April and Nadia. | ||
| April Simpson: | We found a letter Jim wrote to the governor of South Carolina that says a lot about his tenacity. It was written on behalf of the Black community on Edisto, and it describes the, “embarrassed condition they find themselves in without land.” But he knows there is a 900 acre plantation for sale. And he’s asking that it be purchased for him and his people who will then refund the money in due time. He urges the governor to make it happen so his community may, “know the right side of justice.” | |
| The governor rejects him, but Jim doesn’t give up. He keeps trying for 10 years until it finally works. By 1876, Jim and 20 other freed men were able to get nearly 700 acres of land. They bought it together and divided it all up. Jim’s piece was about 230 acres. And if you’re trying to do the math, that’s four times more than 40 and then some. | ||
| This was the start of the Hutchinson’s generational wealth. Some lots were sold off over the years. Others were never willed to anyone and are sitting in a sort of legal limbo known as heirs property, but it’s not all gone. Six acres of Jim’s land are still in the family. | ||
| Aunt Patty: | All up in here is Hutchison. | |
| April Simpson: | Which brings us back to Aunt Patty, Jim’s great, great-granddaughter. | |
| Aunt Patty: | I know this is sacred land here ’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it. I feel safe here. I feel like I can do so much. I’m going to try to do as much as I can with this property before I’m not here anymore. | |
| April Simpson: | Patty now lives with her 87-year-old brother, Henry, who’s been sitting quietly listening to us talk about Jim. | |
| Henry: | I don’t know too much about him. | |
| April Simpson: | What is it like to learn about him now? | |
| Henry: | Some sad parts, how he got shot right there in his own house, in his home. | |
| April Simpson: | Jim was shot and killed in 1885 during a 4th of July picnic on his family’s land. A big group of friends and relatives were gathered there when a white man named Fred Barth showed up. According to news reports, Jim and Barth had clashed in the past, so this wasn’t a friendly visit. Jim told him to leave and the conversation devolved into a fist fight. | |
| At his trial, Barth testified that he only drew his revolver to intimidate Jim and it went off by mistake. But witness testimony says he fired almost immediately. Barth was found guilty of manslaughter by a nearly all Black jury, but he appealed his conviction, got a new trial and was, ultimately, acquitted by an all white jury. | ||
| Henry: | I don’t see [inaudible 00:06:54] could take a chance like that. There a party going on and these people take a chance coming right out there in broad daylight. I got a feeling he must be owed somebody, something. What do you think? | |
| Aunt Patty: | I don’t think it was about money. I think it was about that Jim stood so firm on what he believed in. And it was like back there with slavery and everything, it was just getting over it. It was about how dare you think you can do this? How dare you walk around all proudly. So I think it was about that. | |
| April Simpson: | By all accounts, Jim was a proud man. He even became known as one of the Black kings of Edisto because he didn’t just get land for himself he got it for his community. | |
| But despite his crown, Jim’s 230 acres were nothing compared to the wealth of his white father. According to an 1880 census, Isaac Jenkins Michael’s land was worth well over 100 times the value of Jim’s. And 160 years later, the needle has only moved so much. | ||
| In 2022, for every $100 white Americans had, Black people had 15. And experts say that’s because today’s wealth is built on yesterday’s. And yesterday’s wealth is built, in large part, on slavery. | ||
| Despite everything Jim gained, this is still a story of loss. He was enslaved for most of his life. The promise of 40 acres turned out to be a lie. Then, he was killed on the very land he fought for years to get. And the wealth gap that started in Jim’s lifetime still exists in Greg’s. | ||
| And I’m just wondering, do descendants of Jim Hutchinson, like you, should they get reparations? Should you get reparations? What do you think about that? | ||
| Greg Estevez: | So if you look at the totality, the Middle Passage, free labor, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, yes, I think there should be some type of reparations. What that is, I can’t tell you, I’m not smart enough to know how to fix it. I don’t know how to fix it. Even today, a lot of people don’t even want to acknowledge. And if they do acknowledge it, they downplay it. Correct me if I’m wrong. | |
| April Simpson: | Yes. But I think we’ve experienced some of that just in our conversations with some folks here. Our impression is it’s hard for people to look at it straight and it makes them feel bad, so they’d rather not. | |
| Greg Estevez: | Yeah, you can turn it off. | |
| April Simpson: | Oh yeah? Okay. | |
| Greg asks us to turn off the mic because he starts to cry. He says he’s had conversations where people downplay the impacts of slavery over and over again. And talking about that now, with us, it all catches up to him. | ||
| But there’s something else about this moment, it’s the third time we’ve been asked to turn off the mic during our reporting, and that’s telling because if it’s still this hard to talk about, it means there’s still so much more to say. | ||
| Al Letson: | The Smithsonian’s African American History Museum in Washington DC was built only in the last decade. The slave cabin on display there is from Edisto. | |
| Greg and his family helped get it there. And if you were to read one of the museum panels around it, you’ll notice a now familiar name, Jim Hutchinson. Aunt Patty remembers visiting the museum, seeing that plaque and reading Jim’s story there for the first time. | ||
| Aunt Patty: | I started crying and I said, “That’s my great-grandfather. That’s my great-grandfather.” I had to tell somebody. I cried and I had to tell somebody. I said, “This is my great-grandfather.” I didn’t know who the people were. I just wanted somebody to know. That’s my great great-grandfather. I am so, so proud, I am. I always thought it was something special about us. | |
| Al Letson: | You’ve been listening to 40 Acres and a Lie, a new three-part, investigation from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity. Next week we go to a pristine gated community in Georgia, surrounded by nature. | |
| Speaker 8: | Oh my gosh, I think a heron caught a fish. | |
| Al Letson: | A place where wealthy retirees practice their golf swing. | |
| Speaker 9: | The pulse here is upbeat. Everyone is happy. | |
| Al Letson: | But the land has a history. | |
| Speaker 8: | So here I’m showing you two different land titles of two freedmen who got 40 acres on the plantation, that is where your house is located. | |
| Speaker 10: | This is breaking news, really. | |
| Al Letson: | That’s next time on 40 Acres and a Lie. | |
| In the meantime, to see the historical records for yourself, we’ve got links at revealnews.org/40acres. | ||
| This story was reported by April Simpson with help from Nadia Hamdan. Nadia was our lead producer. Roy Hurst also produced today’s episode. They had help from Steven Rascón. Cynthia Rodriguez is the series editor. Thanks to our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery. We also had help from genealogist Vicki McGill. For a full list of researchers and document transcribers, go to revealnews.org. | ||
| This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation. Victoria Baranetsky is Reveal’s general counsel. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound, designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda with vocals by Renn Woods, and additional music by Dave Linard. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. | ||
| Support for Reveal is provided by the listeners like you and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. | ||
| Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. | ||