Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule, is named after a particularly shameful episode in American history. Back in 1865, after a closed-door meeting with black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, Union Army General William Sherman confiscated some 400,000 acres of land along the Southern Atlantic Coast. He then divided it into 40-acre parcels to distribute—along with mules—to the thousands of freed slave families, now refugees, who’d joined the general on his famous March to the Sea.

But, following the assassination of President Lincoln, his successor, President Andrew Johnson, had little time for aiding the former slaves, even going so far as to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866. So he confiscated all of the land and mules that had been given to the freed slaves, returning it all to its previous white owners. He was, of course, later impeached.
 

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