The land was not taken. It was divided.
Ninety percent of Black-owned farmland is gone. The mechanism has a name almost nobody knows.
Flint River Farms, Georgia, 1939. Marion Post Wolcott, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.
In January of 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. It set aside four hundred thousand acres of confiscated coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for formerly enslaved families. Forty acres apiece. The Army's idle mules were to follow.
President Andrew Johnson revoked it before the year was out. The land went back to the men who had held people on it.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — the Freedmen's Bureau — had been created in part to manage that settlement. When the land went back, the Bureau's money went elsewhere. Some of it bought the campus of a university in Washington that still carries its commissioner's name.
That is where the story usually starts and stops: a promise made and unmade in a single year.
What happened next is less famous and more consequential.
They bought it anyway
Black families bought land without any of it.
By 1910, the number of Black farmers in the Deep South — Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi — had reached 212,972, roughly double the previous decade. It was supported, contemporaneous accounts note, by Black-owned banks and Black-owned businesses operating in something close to fair competition.
How much land they held is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly rather than resolving falsely. The Brookings Institution, citing census data, puts the peak at 41.4 million acres in 1920. Farm Aid puts it at 16 to 19 million. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives says about 15 million.
Those are not small differences. They reflect real disagreement about what counted as ownership, what counted as a farm, and who was doing the counting.
What no source disputes is the direction.
Today the figure is somewhere between two and five million acres. Black farmers make up just over one percent of American farmers. Roughly ninety percent of what was held is gone.
One estimate of the wealth that went with it: $326 billion.
The part that gets called a mystery
The common explanation is discrimination, and the discrimination is documented and ongoing.
In 2022, Black farms received an average of $7,774 in federal payments. White farms averaged $16,417 — a fifty-three percent gap. That same year, the USDA approved loans for seventy-two percent of white applicants and thirty-six percent of Black applicants.
Between 1992 and 2002, ninety-four percent of Black farmers lost part or all of their land — three times the rate at which white farmers did.
All of that is true. None of it fully explains the loss, because a great deal of the land was not foreclosed on, and it was not seized.
It was divided.
Heirs' property
When a landowner dies without a will, the land does not pass to one person. It passes to every heir at once, in undivided fractional shares. Nobody owns a field. Everybody owns a percentage of the whole thing.
That arrangement can survive one generation. It rarely survives three. By then a single farm may be held by dozens or hundreds of people, scattered across states, many of whom have never seen it.
And here is the mechanism. Any one of those heirs can sell their share. A speculator who buys a single fractional interest — from a distant cousin who needs money and has never walked the property — becomes a co-owner with the legal standing to force a partition sale of the entire tract.
The sale is often at auction. The price is often below market. The other heirs, who may be farming the land and living on it, frequently learn about it late or not at all.
No one is defrauded in a way a court would recognize. The land simply leaves.
The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which has worked on land retention since 1967, calls heirs' property the most notable cause of the loss of rural Black land.
The scale: heirs' property is estimated to account for more than a third of all Southern Black-owned land — roughly 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28 billion.
Why this is a Georgia story
Sherman's order applied to the Georgia coast. The Freedmen's Bureau operated here. The 1910 peak was concentrated in this state and the two beside it.
And the institutions built in that same window — the ones this network covers — were built on the same question. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 created Black land-grant colleges: schools funded by grants of land, for people who had just been denied it.
Florida A&M sits on a plantation. Grambling sits on twenty-three acres a group of Black farmers bought for five dollars each. Xavier sits on ground a Black university was pushed off of.
Every founding story this network has published is a story about land. This is the one underneath them.
What we are doing next: requesting records and speaking with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and attorneys working on heirs' property in Georgia. If your family holds land in undivided shares — or lost land you believe was sold out from under it — we would like to hear from you.
Sources: Brookings Institution · Farm Aid · FoodPrint · Federation of Southern Cooperatives · Berkeley Food Institute · U.S. Census of Agriculture · USDA.
Corrections and additions: whnn@willieherman.com
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