By 1917, using the fraud characterization developed by Walter Fleming and others, the Federal Government has effectively shut down the ex-slave pension movement by prosecuting and convicting Callie House and others. The theory is that Callie House and others were acting fraudulently by collecting money to fund a lobbying effort that instilled a false hope in ex-slaves that the Government would give them a pension.

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Did the US Government’s suppression of the ex-slave pension movement toll the operation of any statute of limitations applicable to reparations claims?

* See timeline entry for 1972 concerning article concluding that there was no evidence of fraud.

 

Reference: Deadria C. Farmer-Paellmann, Excerpt from Black Exodus: The Ex-Slave Pension Movement Reader,in Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations(ed. Raymond A. Winbush, PhD 2003) at p. 27

 

 

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In January of 1865, Major General W. T. Sherman issues Special Field Order No. 15, reserving land confiscated from rebellious landowners in for settlement by Africans freed under President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Each family was to be given a plot of up to 40 acres of tillable ground, and the Government would lend mules to work the land. The order confiscates, as Federal property, a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast (including Harris Neck, Georgia; see timeline entry for September 2, 1865).