In the quiet of a merchant’s hall, Where the shadows of the conflict fall, Twenty men with spirits unbowed Stood before the powerful and the proud. Garrison Frazier, with gold-bought breath, Spoke for a people escaped from death: “What do we want? To till the soil, To reap the fruit of our own long toil.”
Then came the Order, the radical hand, Carving a map of “Sherman Land.” Four hundred thousand acres of tide, Where the Sea Islands met the ocean wide. From Charleston’s gates to the Florida sun, The promise of justice had finally begun; Forty-acre plots for the newly free, A down payment made on Liberty.
Forty thousand souls began to build, With corn and sweet potatoes, the fields were filled. They raised up cabins, they raised up prayer, A “Black New England” was rising there. With bank books held like a sacred trust, They saved their wages from the Georgia dust, Building a bridge of sweat and silver coin To a future where the free and the landed join.
But the winter of mercy was short and thin, And the counter-revolution soon crept in. With a President’s pen and a planter’s plea, They stole back the “land of the used-to-be.” The pardoned masters reclaimed the gate, While the Bureau stood by and left it to fate; The certificates of possession, once held so tight, Became mere scraps in the fading light.
Then the bank collapsed, a final blow, Taking the savings they’d struggled to grow. Two pillars of hope—the soil and the cent— Were broken and scattered wherever they went. The “divine right” claimed by the laborer’s hand Was buried deep in the stolen land; A shattered chance for a legacy, A hollowed-out version of being free.
Now the marker stands in the city square, A ghost of the promise that once was there. In every ledger and archive page, Lies the unhealed wound of a stolen age. The question remains as the tide rolls in, Where does the healing of history begin? For what is freedom, if the hands that toil Are never allowed to own the soil?