PART THREE: 40 ACRES AND A LIE

By Alexia Fernanandez Campbell, April Simpson and Pratheek Rebala
Mother Jones Magazine
July+August 2024
Special to the New Journal and Guide

Months later, in November 1866, a federal agent issued Pompey Jackson a “first-class warrant” to buy land in Beaufort County as consolation for his now worthless title to part of William Habersham’s plantation. But Jackson wouldn’t leave Georgia, instead joining a number of freedmen who stayed in the Savannah area and found jobs as porters, housekeepers, and dockworkers.

Jackson was hired as a carpenter for a white man named William Carmichael, who had bought Causton’s Bluff, one of the Habersham family’s rice plantations. Jackson built shotgun houses for formerly enslaved workers who lived on the land for free, were paid 71 cents per day, and were permitted to use some of the land to plant their own cotton to sell. In 1867, he married Patience Simmons, a freedwoman from South Carolina, according to public records we reviewed. He registered to vote in Savannah.

“When [the land] was taken away, they didn’t wallow in despair,” wrote Cook Bell, now a historian at Bowie State University, noting that many of the freedmen gathered to build Black towns and found work fishing and raising livestock—and invested in land.

Pompey and Patience had seven children. Their daughter Florence Jackson described Pompey as a tall, quiet man who regretted never learning to write, according to Mila Rios, her great-granddaughter. But Pompey did learn to sign his name. A Freedmen’s Bureau Bank record from 1874 shows his signature at the bottom. It would take 20 years from the day he opened that bank account until he was finally able to buy his own piece of land.

In 1894, Jackson paid $75 to purchase a parcel in East Savannah, then an unincorporated part of the city where freed slaves lived. The deed mentioned that Jackson was president of the East Savannah Home Protection Society, which Rios believes was a mutual aid organization he founded for freed people.

Florence recalled growing up in a shotgun house her father built on that land, and learning to make lye soap from hog fat and dandelion wine from their garden. Pompey ensured all his children learned to read and write, Rios said. Florence completed eighth grade, the highest available to her. But she would spend her life disappointed that, despite her education, the only job she could get in Savannah was washing clothes for white families.

Some of Jackson’s descendants joined the wave of Black Americans who migrated north in the early decades of the 20th century. His granddaughter Louise—Florence’s daughter—moved to Philadelphia in 1923 because her husband, a construction worker, was being paid less than his white co-workers, Rios said. Florence and her husband followed them north.

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By then, the promise of 40 Acres and a Mule had long faded, and the land title Jackson received was worthless. It would take decades for his granddaughter Louise, who worked as a nurse in a hospital maternity ward, and her husband to save enough money to purchase real estate. In 1951, they bought a quarter of an acre plot in a racially mixed Philadelphia suburb.

On a warm spring day in 2022, a “No Trespassing” sign dangled from a chain-link fence around a stretch of overgrown fields that were once part of Grove Hill. 

Some of that land is now for sale—the future location of a luxury gated community called The Habersham Plantation. An ad describes it as one of “Savannah’s hidden gems,” and promised fishing, crabbing, boating, and kayaking on the Grove River.

An empty 4-acre lot—the size of Pompey Jackson’s plot—sold for $250,000 in October 2023. Based on that sale, 40 acres on Grove Hill could be worth about $2.5 million today.

That kind of generational wealth could have had a huge impact on freedmen and their descendants, said William “Sandy” Darity Jr., an economics professor at Duke University and a leading advocate for reparations.