For generations, the Black community has been fighting for the reparations we were promised. Nearly 4 million formerly enslaved had been promised land to start anew.
So why wasn't the promise ever kept?
We have white supremacy to blame for the inherently racist system we live in. Everything from student loans to credit scores has disproportionate effects on Black people.
These negatives could have been offset. How?
Union General William T. Sherman's plan was to redistribute 400,000 acres of land taken from Confederate landowners to the formerly enslaved. Lincoln even signed off on it. But his assassination put a hold on the plan.
When Johnson took office, his white supremacist ideals became abundantly clear.
The land that had already been granted to the formerly enslaved families was stripped from them. With the remaining land, Johnson reversed Sherman's order and put it back into slavers' hands. Johnson argued that the Civil War had been to preserve the Union and nothing more.
Johnson issued over 13,000 pardons for Confederate soldiers and returned their land, but ignored the newly freed being pressured back into forced labor through sharecropping. White supremacy is an old game in this country. They've been stacking the deck against us for over 200 years, but this one action set the stage for generations of suffering.