This Act gave certain Americans seeking farmland the right to apply for ownership of government land or the public domain.
[2] According to data published by the National Park Service and the University of Nebraska, some 6000 homesteads of an average of 160 acres (65 ha; 0.25 sq mi) were issued to Blacks in the years immediately following the war.
The Freedmen's Bureau was created by the government and President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to deal with the issue of the freed black people and their settlement in the abandoned land.
The lack of or inability to produce these items resulted in unequal access to programs and services that would have assisted them with both obtaining land and ensuring that it remained within the family.
[5] Another issue was that many freed slaves and their earlier descendants rarely had access to legal services which meant they couldn't write wills that would correctly pass down landownership and the proper titles.
[7] In the years following 1865, newly freed slaves experienced difficulty acquiring land because there was a lack of documents that proved their identity.
At this time the legal administration still heavily favored white Americans despite the ongoing Civil War and the slavery of the black people.
[9] To help freed slaves deal with starvation, housing issues and medical aid, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865.
This Act was meant to avail land in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi to acquisition by the people, which included the black population.
In line with this, black Americans formed the first cooperative union in Arkansas and the United States in order to fight for and protect their rights.
The rest of these eras is characterized by the Jim Crow policies that had been legalized by the Supreme Court under the Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 decision that allowed "separate but equal" treatment of whites and blacks.
[13] Further research has suggested that additional reasons for black land loss was discrimination by the Department of Agriculture and discriminatory policies put in place by the Farmers Home Administration.
[14] Eventually, the Emergency Land Fund merged with other federations with similar goals and in 1990 they petitioned for the passage of laws to offer assistance to black farmers.
Another lawsuit was filed based on the black farmers' plight, prompting the Department of Agriculture to agree to offer a class payment in 1999.
[17] In the year 2010, President Barack Obama authorized the payment of 1.25 billion dollars from the USDA to black American farmers as a settlement in Pigford v. Glickman.
[18] Land ownership is important because it is a type of wealth that people can establish and benefit from themselves but also pass down (if properly maintained) for generations.
[17] Since redlining limited blacks to certain areas, not only did overcrowding become an issue, but there were fewer options for owning land (let alone space enough to establish farms).