A stretch of land in Mississippi helped build their legacy. Now they're working to restore the property, and highlighting it as a case for reparations.
Patrice E. Jones likes to say her family got its 40 acres — the amount of land promised, then denied, to formerly enslaved people in the U.S. government’s only real attempt at reparations for centuries of treating Black people as property.
Jones’s great-grandfather, Rev. William Talbot Handy, born on the forested property only three decades after the end of the Civil War, even joined the Tuskegee Quartet and sang at Booker T. Washington’s funeral, Jones said. That was while Handy was paying his way through the Tuskegee Institute, the school Washington founded, with the labor and skills he’d earned from working the land in Copiah County, Miss., where more than half of the population had been enslaved in 1860, Jones said.
Still, it’s no surprise that Jones’s family, the Handys, left behind the expanse of acreage to which they owed their initial successes. While the Handys had a legacy worth protecting in Hazlehurst, moving North or to more urban areas of the South during the Great Migration often meant better job and educational opportunities, as well as the hope of escaping racial violence, for many Black rural families.
Altogether, between 1920 and 1997, Black farmers in the U.S. lost almost all their land, worth roughly $326 billion in today’s dollars by one estimate. “We have a whole history of ministers, teachers, artists, entrepreneurs,” said Tisch Jones, Jones’s mother, a professor emerita in the University of Iowa’s Theatre Arts Department and a civil-rights activist. “This land allowed that to happen, which is why I fight for reparations so much. This is an example of what would have happened if we had received our 40 acres from the beginning. We received it. Look what has happened to our family as a result of landownership.
— Patrick Rhone, Patrice E. Jones’s brother Later in 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, spurring dialogue about reparations and racial equity across the country. Jones’s family’s ancestral land felt crucial to a greater understanding of what Black people were owed, and her mother made the move from Minneapolis down to New Orleans to help see Jones’s work through.
The reverend’s wife, Dorothy Pauline Pleasant Handy, perhaps further recognizing the importance of what her family had created, also set up a trust in the 1970s to help maintain the land’s upkeep. The trust was eventually passed down through generations of women in the family; in 2020, Jones endeavored to become a trustee, a role she now shares with two other family members.
All the while, she has documented the restoration process on TikTok and Instagram META , garnering millions of views on videos showcasing the property’s history, as well as her joy associated with it. In many of the clips, she’s dancing.
Jones has also tapped her personal savings and money left in the trust by her great-grandmother, which together totaled approximately $60,000. “I believe all Black people need land access, because we worked the land in this country and built the economy we have today,” Jones said. “We need this space. We need the space to rest, we need the space to grow, we need the place to learn. We need a safe space.”
Whether that ownership would be exclusive, earned over time or merely temporary was unclear, said Thomas W. Mitchell, a professor and director for the Initiative on Land, Housing and Property Rights at Boston College Law School. But it was nonetheless seen as a firm promise by recently freed enslaved people, who were not deterred from landownership even after then-president Andrew Johnson reneged on the short-lived commitment to 40 acres.
One of the newly minted Black landowners was Jones’s great-great-grandmother, Florence Geneva Handy, who was acknowledged as the child of her white father, Ephraim Peyton Jr., and raised partially in his home. Her mother and grandmother, whom Peyton Jr.’s father once enslaved, continued to work for the family after emancipation, Jones said.
It was also a period marked by racial terror, Mitchell said, as Black landowners were targeted for white violence. For example, Anthony Crawford, a Black farmer who owned 427 acres of land, was beaten, stabbed, shot and hung by white people in Abbeville, S.C., in 1916 after an alleged dispute with a white merchant over the price of cottonseed, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, which has documented thousands of lynchings.
The fact that the family was able to hold on to the property while many other members relocated was a “miracle,” thanks in large part to the trust established by Jones’s great-grandmother Dorothy, Jones said. Historically, many Black farming households have been skeptical of the legal system because it’s so rarely served them, said Andrea’ Barnes, the director of the Heirs’ Property Campaign at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which provides families in the state legal assistance so they can keep, protect and utilize ancestral land. They also often lacked money to pay an attorney to set up their estate, or access to an attorney willing to work with Black people.
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