Aerial view of Skidaway Island, Georgia.Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress
The mostly white residents that call Skidaway Island, Georgia home today consider it a paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities.
Rewind to 1865: The island was a thriving Black community, where freedmen farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story. It began when the government gave them land under Field Order No. 15, also known as the 40 acres program. But it wouldn’t last.
Within two years, the government had taken that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.
Over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million.
“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.
This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity and in honor of Black History Month, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.
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