The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

On January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman handed down Special Field Order No. 15, which reserved a tract of land for black families 30 miles wide and 245 miles long along the east coast extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. He promised each family a mule to help them work the land. Sherman’s special order gave vitality to the dream of “40 acres and mule”—a hope for a redistribution of the land that would provide those formerly enslaved with a means of economic self-determination.3 Yet the dream was short-lived. The blatantly racist President Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the redistributed lands be returned to former enslavers, and many freed people went back to working the land under the sharecropping system.