Art Summary: My Trip To Texas Southern

Our trip to Texas Southern was overall very interesting. We briefly visited with Dr. Thomas Freeman and learned about his long, incredible life, but before that, we walked some of the halls containing mural after mural. Many are elaborate paintings of various elements of the black lives matter movement. Others, like the police brutality mural, have connotations to today’s world and the injustices African American people face on a day to day basis. The mural that caught my eye, though, was the one depicting one mule on a vast stretch of land which, Mr. Ford said, is a symbol of the ‘one mule and forty acres’ the enslaved families were meant to receive after being emancipated. Even though the painting may seem bare, the history of the origin of “forty acres and a mule” is displayed by what is included and excluded because, the mural’s location on an otherwise bare portion of wall represents the hope from an otherwise hopeless position, the mural itself represents the metaphorical promise of forty acres and a mule, and the bareness of the tree and
While it does not seem like much effort if any was given to distribute the Confederates confiscated land among the heads of freedmen families, there were a few people who made a substantial effort. One of those people was General William T. Sherman who issued the Special Field Order Fifteen of 1865 which set “aside a large swath of land along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for settlement by black families” (Foner 10). This was initially a success, and “thousands of acres were allotted to blacks; negro communities grew up; the government was carried on, churches and schools were established and roads made” (Fleming 726). In the few short months the freedmen had possession of the land, the community thrived, but that would change in a matter of less than a