Feagin also tackled the land issue, to demonstrate that historical federal largess to whites dwarfs current Black reparations claims:
“Passed under the Abraham Lincoln administration, the Homestead Act provided access to productive land and wealth, mostly for white families, from the 1860s to the 1930s. Some 246 million acres were provided by the federal government, at minimal cost, for some 1.5 million homesteads. Depending on calculations of multiple ownership, mortality, marriage, and childbearing patterns – somewhere between 20 and 93 million Americans are now the beneficiaries of this large wealth-generating program over several generations. Almost all of these beneficiaries have been white, as only 4,000 African Americans made entries under the Homestead Act.”
The disparity 246 million for whites, many new immigrants from Europe, when set against 40 million for Blacks once again explains the roots of wealth disparity in 2007 and validates the long held belief by Blacks that the reneging of the promise by the white Administration in the United States to make only 40 acres available to each former slave was an act of calculated callousness that was designed to keep Blacks in perpetual servitude.
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