At 8 p.m. on January 12, 1865, just days after his historic "March to the Sea," Major General William Tecumseh Sherman convened a meeting with 20 Black ministers on the second floor of his headquarters in Savannah, Georgia.

With the Civil War nearing its end, the discussion that night carried urgent significance. Sherman, alongside President Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, sought counsel from the ministers on a pressing issue: How would the nation ensure the protection of thousands of Black refugees who had followed Sherman's army through Georgia? And how would newly freed Black people sustain themselves after centuries of enslavement and unpaid labor?

Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, seizing Confederate land along the rice coast. The order granted "40 acres and a mule" to thousands of Black families—a policy later recognized as the nation's first attempt at reparations for formerly enslaved people.

However, the promise was short-lived. Following Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, the order was rescinded, and the land was returned to white Confederate landowners. More than a century later, "40 acres and a mule" would endure as a rallying cry for Black Americans demanding reparations for slavery.