“Forty acres and a mule” is nothing more than opportunity to (modestly) thrive through hard work.Education is exactly the same thing.
People who want “reparations” should go to Africa long enough to be eager to come back to America. And if that’s never, nobody is the worse.
The emancipated slaves did fine without the giveaway, and probably would have achieved equality if not for their subsequent repression through Jim Crow.
The original history of post-emancipation experience of emancipated slaves was one of racial inferiority. In this view, the Klan played a heroic role saving the South from the black and tans.
Revisionist history then blamed black lack of progress on the rise of the Klan, Jim Crow, segregation, and so forth. The Klan went from the good guys to the bad guys. But, this revisionist history kind of side-stepped black inferiority. Maybe the majority of blacks were inferior, but there was a black elite that was superior.
In one of the few challenges to this revisionism, is ...
Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914.
He shows that blacks actually made progress since emancipation.