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Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools and other amenities.\\xa0

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn\\u2019t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.\\xa0

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what\\u2019s now The Landings.\\xa0

\\u201cYou could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,\\u201d said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor\\u2019s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.

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