Can the whole reason that some African Americans are wealthier than others be explained by one simple factor? Henry Louis Gate’s essay, “Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth,” reveals that there’s a close relationship to the reason why some African American families are wealthier than others. Henry Louis did a lot of research, he looked at a lot of successful families and studied their family trees a long way back and in doing this discovered that the families that were given the property promised to them after the Civil war were more successful. During the last stages of the Civil war the American Government came up with a policy called “40 Acres and a Mule”, where they would give forty acres of arable land and a mule to each former slave, but once the war was over, the policy was not really enforced and hardly any former slaves were given what they were promised. Henry Gates states in his essay “…25 percent of all African Americans owned property.” Referring to the fact that only twenty five percent of all the former slaves after the Civil war were given their property promised by the policy created by the American Government, which is not even close to half! Although you may think it means nothing now, but as Henry researched the families whose descendents received the property promised by this, he discovered that they were all successful families with wealth. Where on the other hand, whenever he researched a family that he found had descendents who didn’t receive the property, he discovered that those families were not doing so well and not wealthy, especially like the ones whose descendents got the property. One may wonder what America would be like if all one hundred percent of the former slaves had in fact received their property promised, instead of just a mere twenty five percent.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth.” Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition. A. Rosa and P. Eschholz. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2010. 519-522.
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