The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

The Roosevelt White House had formed an organization called the Farm Security Administration, which among other things purchased plantations from industrialist types who didn’t want them anymore, which allowed the wealthy capitalists to reinvest that money in more modern parts of the struggling economy, especially petroleum and steel, and allowed the government to try to help small-time farmers finally achieve Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman dream, which the free market would never allow. The FSA wanted to remove the Black families who’d been living on Sunflower for generations, removal having long ago become the default solution for any problem, and replace them with mostly white farmers from other states. Each family picked for the helping hand would get forty acres and a newly built house for $5,500 to $6,500. Each homestead came with a smokehouse and a shed. The government financed loans and set payment between $250 and $325 a year at 3 percent interest for forty years. These were sweetheart loans, designed to allow poor white families to build capital and wealth. That kind of helping hand could have changed the lives of the Black families who’d worked on the Sunflower Plantation. The land came with communal barns and mules and equipment and wells. It turns out that during the Roosevelt administration the United States did give folks forty acres and a mule.