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Fourteen trillion dollars.
That’s the total amount of money that the federal government owes to Black people in America for the legacy of slavery, according to economist William Darity and his colleagues.
It’s not an abstract figure. As Darity explains in the final episode of our “40 Acres and a Lie” series—a groundbreaking collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, Reveal, and Mother Jones—that number is based on a series of calculations, beginning with the broken promise that newly freed people would receive 40 acres of land. This famous pledge went largely unfulfilled. But in many cases, the betrayal was event deeper. Our two-year investigation, based on Reconstruction-era documents, identified 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans given land by the government, only to have it taken away soon after.
“I think that there’s no doubt that there’s …