Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Center for Public Integrity’s landmark project, 40 Acres and a Lie has taken second place in the annual Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, which recognizes the best use of social science research methods in journalism.

Black Americans have been demanding compensation and restitution for their suffering since the end of the Civil War.

40 Acres and a Mule remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Today, it is largely remembered as a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy. Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres. Freedmen and women built homes, established local governments, and farmed the land. But their utopia didn’t last long. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, stripped property from formerly enslaved Black residents across the South and returned it to their past enslavers.

Over the course of two and a half years, a team of Public Integrity reporters, editors, and researchers identified 1,250 Black men and women who had earned land as reparations after the Civil War. From there, the team conducted genealogical research to locate living descendants of many of those who had received and then lost the land. For the first time, these living Black Americans were made aware of the specific land that had been given to and then taken away from their ancestors.

Published in collaboration with Reveal and Mother Jones, this project is an unprecedented and innovative use of Freedmen’s Bureau records—an impossible task for most of American history, until recent advances in genealogical research and the digitization of thousands of pages of Reconstruction-era documents made it feasible.

Read the full investigation

A government program gave formerly enslaved people land after the Civil War, only to take nearly all of it back a year and a half later. We used artificial intelligence to track down the people, places, and stories that had long been misunderstood and forgotten, then asked their descendants about what’s owed now.

This project was led by Public Integrity’s Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, with additional support from editors Mc Nelly Torres, Jamie Smith Hopkins, Wesley Lowery and Matt DeRienzo. Public Integrity’s fact checking team included Peter Newbatt Smith, Ileana Garnand, Sophie Austin. Other contributors from Public Integrity included Janeen Jones, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman and Lisa Yanick Litwiller.

Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous other honors, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards and nominations for Peabody and Ambie awards. 

In August of 2023, the newsroom was named a finalist for the Online Journalism Awards’ general excellence award and won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence.

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

The post Public Integrity’s “40 Acres and a Lie” project is honored by the Philip Meyer Journalism Awards appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.