I was especially interested in this week's EOTOs because they all featured stories that I had actually never heard of before. Francesca began by giving a talk about a post-slavery relief project called "Forty Acres and a Mule." In order to decide what to do with almost 400,000 acres of Confederate coastal land, General William Tecumseh Sherman met with twenty Black clergymen in Georgia in 1865. This was the beginning of the effort.
It didn't last, of course. By late 1865, Andrew Johnson had nearly immediately reversed the order after Lincoln was slain and he became the president. Tens of thousands of African Americans were compelled to return to their former enslavers' plantations as sharecroppers so as to pay off debts they never should have owed in the first place after that one decision stripped them of the land they had just settled on.
I learned about the first African American senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, and representative, Joseph Hayne Rainey, from Preston's talk. One thing that most shocked me was that both of them eventually left those historic roles to return to regular jobs: Rainey came back to banking, while Revels went back to teaching.
, which was founded in 1865, was the topic of Rilo's talk. It supplied food, education, and other basics to roughly four million former slaves. Unfortunately, it was never sufficiently backed and finally closed, just like a lot of other things from this era.
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