The Book Report: (Forty Acres and A Mule) The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership

The Book Review Series: Highlights of some very great books about American history. A list of books everyone should have in their libraries. First published in 1978, Claude F. Oubre’s Forty Acres and a Mule has since become a definitive study in the history of American Reconstruction. Drawing on a vast collection of government records and newspapers, Oubre examines what he sees as the crucial question of Reconstruction: Why were the vast majority of freed slaves denied the opportunity to own land during the Reconstruction era, leaving them vulnerable to a persecution that strongly resembled slavery? Oubre recounts the struggle of black families to acquire land and how the U.S. government agency Freedmen’s Bureau both served and obstructed them. Claude F. Oubre (1937-2011) was a professor of history and political science at Louisiana State University at Eunice and coauthor of Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country.

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