Time for Blacks to Get Their Forty Acres and A Mule, Gates says.

In a column in the New York Times Sunday, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said the only way to deal with the increasing wealth gap in the black community, and between blacks and whites, is for African-Americans to obtain the modern-day equivalent of forty acres and a mule.

After the end of slavery, black slaves were promised forty acres of land and a mule, which they never received. Gates said the legacy of non-ownership in the black community needs to be reversed and that property ownership is the key to dealing with black poverty. He mentioned the recent Pew Research Study that showed blacks are more divided along class lines than ever before.

Gates examined the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans (Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg and others) and discovered that many of their ancestors owned property before 1920, an accomplishment that allowed their descendents to achieve middle-class status.

He said this same strategy needs to be used to resolve the class divide in the black community:

“If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively. If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as property.”