Monroe Dispatch - No Struggle, No Progress

There was a promise of 40 acres to enslaved Blacks, and this is why it never happened! Many wondered having heard while never knowing why? Blacks have been played in America since our arrival and the more we don’t vote, we will constantly be played. Will we ever wake up or have to die to find our prosperity? Blacks have been enslaved in different ways still in 2020 knowingly and for many unknowingly. In any city in the United States, the despair is seen and felt. Just in Monroe LA look south and north from Louisville Ave. it obvious the haves and have nots! When legal slavery ended in 1865, there was great hope for formerly enslaved people. Between 1865 and 1870, the Reconstruction Amendments established birthright citizenship, making all black people citizens and granting them equal protection under the law and gave black men the right to vote. There was also the promise of compensation. In January 1865, Gen. William Sherman issued an order reallocating hundreds of thousands of acres of white-owned land along the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina for settlement by black families in 40-acre plots. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom, and the Freedman’s Savings Bank was formed to help four million formerly enslaved people gain financial freedom. When Lincoln was assassinated, Vice President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Sherman’s order by pardoning white plantation owners and returning to them the land on which 40,000 or so black families had settled. “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men,” Johnson declared in 1866. The Freedmen’s Bureau, always meant to be temporary, was dismantled in 1872. More than 60,000 black people deposited more than $1 million into the Freedman’s Savings Bank, but its all-white trustees began issuing speculative loans to white investors and corporations, and when it failed in 1874, many black depositors lost much of their savings.