Forty Acres and a Mule

Alexander, D. (2004). Forty Acres and a Mule the Ruined Hope of Reconstruction. NEH Humanities, 25(1) (January/February). Retrieved January 6, 2009, from http //www.neh.gov/ news/humanities/2004-01/reconstruction.html... 

Bond s unfinished manuscript has been gathering dust for sixty years. Forty Acres and a Mule provides fascinating insights into lynching, race relations, and the history of a black farming community. It also tells us about Horace Mann Bond as a black intellectual and the ideas that influenced him. 

Bond s description of how blood lines crisscrossed the color line is perhaps the least accessible part of Forty Acres and a Mule. Today s reader might be confused, puzzled, or even offended by his excessively detailed account of racial intermingling. In the 1930s, however, miscegenation was still a subject of intense fascination for many whites and... 

Yet most black families in the postbellum South did not become landowners although common and even predominant in some localities, landownership eluded the great majority. Bond therefore intended Forty Acres and a Mule to be much more than a dramatic account of a shootout and a lynching, more even than a treatise on the black family. Developing his own ideas as a historian. Bond turned the tragedy of the Wilson family into a metaphor for the larger historical tragedy of African Americans since slavery. 

As a contribution to the study of lynching, therefore, Forty Acres and a Mule may be unique. Bond placed a single lynching in the context of one black family s history since slavery. He reminds us that behind each life claimed by lynching there was a person, a family, and a community—individual histories that are, in their own way, more informative than statistics, more eloquent than propaganda, and more illuminating than general histories. 

Portrait of Washington Parish incorporates a report written for the Rosenwald Fund and various drafts of Bond s unpublished manuscript, The First Lynching of 1935. They have been edited to form a coherent whole. Star Creek Diary is published here as it was written save for minor editing. Forty Acres and a Mule has been edited more substantially, especially in the two middle chapters. The genealogical charts are Bond s own, as amplified and amended by the editor. Horace Mann Bond was responsible for writing the texts in this collection. Julia Bond made a substantial contribution to her husband s research and is hence listed as a co-author of the volume. All endnotes are the editor s. 

John Wilson, the farmer and landowner whose life was shattered by the violent deaths of two sons in 1934 and 1935. He provided Horace Mann Bond with much of the material for Forty Acres and a Mule. ... 

Bond started writing Forty Acres and a Mule with a view to helping the Wilsons. Offering the partially completed manuscript to Harper and Brothers, he explained that John Wilson should receive half of the royalties, and that a further quarter would be given to the Rosenwald School in Bethel—a memorial to Jerome Wilson. ... 

Said Isom, When the niters got free, we all got notice that they was going to give us all forty acres and a mule. They was to be furnished until they made a crop. Didn t nobody get a mule the mule come in parts of the country, but the niters had to buy em. By my mas r give me an ole wore out plough-horse. The old horse died of old age I kep him until he died. ... 

Horace Mann Bond, Forty Acres and a Mule, Opportunity 13 (May 1935) 140-41, 151. 

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