slave reparations essay

Why we need reparations for Black Americans

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Rashawn ray and rashawn ray senior fellow - governance studies andre m. perry andre m. perry senior fellow - brookings metro , director - center for community uplift.

April 15, 2020

14 min read

Central to the idea of the American Dream lies an assumption that we all have an equal opportunity to generate the kind of wealth that brings meaning to the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” boldly penned in the Declaration of Independence. The American Dream portends that with hard work, a person can own a home, start a business, and grow a nest egg for generations to draw upon. This belief, however, has been defied repeatedly by the United States government’s own decrees that denied wealth-building opportunities to Black Americans.

Today, the average white family has roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. White college graduates have over seven times more wealth than Black college graduates. Making the American Dream an equitable reality demands the same U.S. government that denied wealth to Blacks restore that deferred wealth through reparations to their descendants in the form of individual cash payments in the amount that will close the Black-white racial wealth divide. Additionally, reparations should come in the form of wealth-building opportunities that address racial disparities in education, housing, and business ownership.

In 1860, over $3 billion was the value assigned to the physical bodies of enslaved Black Americans to be used as free labor and production. This was more money than was invested in factories and railroads combined. In 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Blacks was $250 million. Slavery enriched white slave owners and their descendants, and it fueled the country’s economy while suppressing wealth building for the enslaved. The United States has yet to compensate descendants of enslaved Black Americans for their labor. Nor has the federal government atoned for the lost equity from anti-Black housing, transportation, and business policy. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, anti-Black practices like redlining, and other discriminatory public policies in criminal justice and education have robbed Black Americans of the opportunities to build wealth (defined as assets minus debt) afforded to their white peers.

Bootstrapping isn’t going to erase racial wealth divides. As economists William “Sandy” Darity and Darrick Hamilton point out in their 2018 report , What We Get Wrong About Closing the Wealth Gap , “Blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by changing their individual behavior –i.e. by assuming more ‘personal responsibility’ or acquiring the portfolio management insights associated with ‘[financial] literacy.’” In fact, white high school dropouts have more wealth than Black college graduates . Moreover, the racial wealth gap did not result from a lack of labor. Rather, it came from a lack of financial capital.

Not only do racial wealth disparities reveal fallacies in the American Dream, the financial and social consequences are significant and wide-ranging. Wealth is positively correlated with better health, educational, and economic outcomes. Furthermore, assets from homes, stocks, bonds, and retirement savings provide a financial safety net for the inevitable shocks to the economy and personal finances that happen throughout a person’s lifespan.

Recessions impact everyone, but wealth is distributed quite unevenly in the U.S. The woeful inadequacy of a government-sponsored safety net was made apparent in the wake of economic disasters like the 2008 housing crisis and natural ones like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Those who can draw upon the equity in a home, savings, and securities are able to recover faster after economic downturns than those without wealth. The lack of a social safety net and the racial wealth divide are currently on display amid the COVID-19 crisis. Disparities in access to health care along with inequities in economic policies combine to make Black people more vulnerable to negative consequences than white individuals.

Below, we provide a history of reparations in the United States, missed opportunities to redress the racial wealth gap, and specific details of a viable reparations package for Black Americans.

History of reparations in the United States

Reparations—a system of redress for egregious injustices—are not foreign to the United States. Native Americans have received land and billions of dollars for various benefits and programs for being forcibly exiled from their native lands. For Japanese Americans, $1.5 billion was paid to those who were interned during World War II . Additionally, the United States, via the Marshall Plan , helped to ensure that Jews received reparations for the Holocaust, including making various investments over time. In 1952, West Germany agreed to pay 3.45 billion Deutsche Marks to Holocaust survivors.

Black Americans are the only group that has not received reparations for state-sanctioned racial discrimination, while slavery afforded some white families the ability to accrue tremendous wealth. And, we must note that American slavery was particularly brutal. About 15 percent of the enslaved shipped from Western Africa died during transport. The enslaved were regularly beaten and lynched for frivolous infractions. Slavery also disrupted families as one in three marriages were split up and one in five children were separated from their parents. The case for reparations can be made on economic, social, and moral grounds. The United States had multiple opportunities to atone for slavery—each a missed chance to make the American Dream a reality—but has yet to undertake significant action.

Missed policy opportunities to atone for slavery with reparations

40 Acres and a Mule

The first major opportunity that the United States had and where it should have atoned for slavery was right after the Civil War. Union leaders including General William Sherman concluded that each Black family should receive 40 acres. Sherman signed Field Order 15 and allocated 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land to Black families. Additionally, some families were to receive mules left over from the war, hence 40 acres and a mule .

Yet, after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Field Order 15 and returned land back to former slave owners. Instead of giving Blacks the means to support themselves, the federal government empowered former enslavers. For example, in Washington D.C., slave owners were actually paid reparations for lost property —the formally enslaved. This practice was also common in nearby states. Many Black Americans with limited work options returned as sharecroppers to till the same land for the very slave owners to whom they were once enslaved. Slave owners not only made money off the chattel enslavement of Black Americans, but they then made money multiple times over off the land that the formerly enslaved had no choice but to work.

The New Deal

There’s never a bad time to do what’s morally right, but the United States has had prime opportunities to atone for slavery. In the 1930s, the United States was reeling from the 1929 stock market crash and was firmly engulfed in the Great Depression. The Franklin Roosevelt administration implemented a series of policies as part of his New Deal legislation, estimated to cost roughly $50 billion then, to catapult the country out of depression. Current estimates price the New Deal at about $50 trillion.

Two particular policies of the New Deal fell short in redressing American’s racial wrongs—the G.I. Bill and Social Security. Though white and Black Americans fought in WWII, Black veterans could not redeem their post-war benefits like their white peers. While the G.I. Bill was mandated federally, it was implemented locally. The presence of racial housing covenants and redlining among local municipalities prohibited Blacks from utilizing federal benefits. White soldiers were afforded the opportunity to build wealth by sending themselves and their children to college and by obtaining housing and small business grants.

Regarding Social Security, two key professions that would have improved equity in America were excluded from the legislation—domestic and farm workers. These omissions effectively excluded 60 percent of Blacks across the U.S. and 75 percent in southern states who worked in these occupations. Roosevelt bargained these exclusionary provisions in the legislation on the backs of Black veterans and workers in order to propel mostly white America out of the Great Depression.

There are other policies and practices that contributed to racial wealth gap. Government-sanctioned discrimination related to the 1862 Homestead Act, redlining, restrictive covenants, and convict leasing blocked Blacks from the ability to gain wealth at similar rates as whites. Separate from slavery, damages should be awarded to Black people who were harmed by these policies and practices.

Reparations for slavery and anti-Black policies

We know the monetary value that was placed on enslaved Blacks and the productivity of their labor, as well as the amount of the racial wealth gap. We’ve seen other groups receive restitutions while the federal government pulled back reparations for Black Americans. Accordingly, if we want to close the racial wealth gap and live up to our moral creed to protect “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” a federal reparations package for Black Americans is in order. This package should include individual and collective public benefits that simultaneously builds wealth and eliminates debt among Black citizens. We assert that it should be similar to the Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act, which was recently heard before the Maryland General Assembly where Ray testified on its behalf . The Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act aims to atone for slavery and its legacy by addressing education, homeownership, and business ownership barriers.

Individual payments for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

The U.S. government owes lost wages as well as damages to the people it helped enslave. In addition to the lost wages, the accumulative amount of restitution for individuals should eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently exists. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent numbers in 2016, based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, white families had the highest median family wealth at $171,000, compared to Black and Hispanic families, which had $17,600 and $20,700, respectively.

College tuition to 4-year or 2-year colleges and universities for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

People should be able to use the tuition remission to obtain a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s/vocational or technical degree. Tuition should be available for public or private universities. Considering the racial gap in the ability to obtain degrees at private schools, this part of the package will further help to reduce racial disparities by affording more social network access and opportunity structures.

Student loan forgiveness for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Student loan debt continues to be a significant barrier to wealth creation for Black college graduates. Among 25-55 year olds, about 40 percent of Blacks compared to 30 percent of whites have student loan debt . Blacks also have nearly $45,000 of student loan debt compared to about $30,000 for whites. Recent research finds that Blacks are more likely to be allocated unsubsidized loans. Furthermore, graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, compared to Predominately White Institutions, are more likely to receive subprime loans with higher interest rates.

Universities including Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary, which is the second-oldest seminary in the country, are aiming to atone for the fact that the sale of slaves helped to fortify their university endowments and establish them as elite institutions of higher education on a global scale. Descendants of the slaves sold by Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary are now entitled to full rights and benefits bestowed by those universities to obtain degrees across the higher education pipeline. The Virginia state legislature voted for some of its state universities to atone for slavery with reparations. Other universities, along with state legislatures and the federal government, should follow suit.

Down payment grants and housing revitalization grants for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Down payment grants will provide Black Americans with some initial equity in their homes relative to mortgage insurance loans. Housing revitalization grants will help Black Americans to refurbish existing homes in neighborhoods that have been neglected due to a lack of government and corporate investments in predominately Black communities. Given recent settlements for predatory lending , low and fixed interest rates as well as property tax caps in areas in which housing prices are significantly devalued should be part of the package. After accounting for factors such as housing quality, neighborhood quality, education, and crime, owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to a whopping $156 billion that homeowners would have received if their homes were priced at market rates, according to Brookings research .

As gentrification occurs, Blacks are typically priced out of neighborhoods they helped to maintain, while the historical and current remnants of redlining and restrictive covenants inhibited investments. Some Black Americans are being forced from their family home of decades because of tax increases as neighborhoods are gentrified. This is an important point because some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates aimed to redress the racial wealth gap by focusing on historically redlined districts. Perry’s research shows that these policies fall short of capturing a large segment of Black Americans.

Business grants for business starting up, business expansion to hire more employees, or purchasing property for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Black-owned businesses are more likely to be located in predominately Black neighborhoods that need the infrastructure and businesses. However, Black business owners are still less likely to obtain capital from banks to make their businesses successful.

This reparations package for Black Americans is about restoring the wealth that has been extracted from Black people and communities. Still, reparations are all for naught without enforcement of anti-discrimination policies that remove barriers to economic mobility and wealth building. The architecture of the economy must change in order to create an equitable society. The racial wealth gap was created by racist policies. Federal intervention is needed to remove the racism that undergirds those polices. In some respects, the question of who should receive reparations is more controversial than what or how much people should be awarded.

Who should receive reparations?

One key question after deciding what a reparations package should include is who should qualify. In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in U.S. states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages. For instance, a person like Senator Cory Booker whose parents are descendants of slaves would qualify for slavery reparations whereas Senator Kamala Harris (Jamaican immigrant father and Indian immigrant mother) and President Barack Obama (Kenyan immigrant father and white mother) may seek redress for housing and/or education segregation. Sasha and Malia Obama (whose mother is Michelle Robinson Obama, a descendant of enslaved Africans) would qualify.

To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification . Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage. This is how Senator Booker, who first introduced a reparations bill in the Senate, learned that his lineage stemmed from Sierra Leone.

For the descendants of the 12.5 million Blacks who were shipped in chains from Western Africa, “America has a genetic birth defect when it comes to the question of race,” as stated recently by U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries. If America is to atone for this defect, reparations for Black Americans is part of the healing and reconciliation process.

With April 4 marking the fifty-second year since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, we think it is appropriate to end with an oft-forgotten quote from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” that he gave in 1963 in Washington, D.C. This statement is still one of the unfulfilled aspects of this policy-related speech:

We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. … It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

Given the lingering legacy of slavery on the racial wealth gap, the monetary value we know that was placed on enslaved Blacks, the fact that other groups have received reparations, and the fact that Blacks were originally awarded reparations only to have them rescinded provide overwhelming evidence that it is time to pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved Blacks.

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Editor’s note: On February 1, 2023, the College Board announced its finalized curriculum for an AP African American Studies course. It has removed work—present in the pilot program—by writers such as bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of this article.

We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here .

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith t he LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

— John Locke, “Second Treatise”

By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.

— Anonymous, 1861

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”

C lyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns , Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17.

“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”

The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”

Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

Explore Redlining in Chicago

“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth :

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties . “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”

The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.”

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.

“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was.

“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.”

But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League —a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.

The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.”

Video: The Contract Buyers League

In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.”

Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.

II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”

A ccording to the most-recent statistics , North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.

North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City , he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.”

Interactive Census Map

In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.”

The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.

This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”

The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back .

Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.

The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”

The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative.

The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality.

III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”

In 1783 , the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:

The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude. WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.

Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.

“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”

As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ”

Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.”

In his book Forever Free , Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:

Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.” Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?”

In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America ( N’COBRA ). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.

But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.”

Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA , says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”

That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.

There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.

We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.

IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”

A merica begins in black plunder and white democracy , two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”

When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.

One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.

This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.

For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”

In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”

The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”

Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.

When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:

The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.

In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”

V. The Quiet Plunder

The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House , slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review , which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.

“This country was formed for the white , not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white , not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction , Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”

Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.

The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.

“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”

The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill , that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”

In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”

But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”

The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline.

Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”

That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”

The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.

“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier , a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued.

The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.

Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.

It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.

In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.

Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.

In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.

When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight , implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”

Speculators in North Lawndale , and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.

To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.

“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.”

Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.

Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks .”

Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ”

In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’

“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.”

Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ”

I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.

“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”

“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected.

“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.”

Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.

“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ”

VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”

On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”

Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.”

Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.”

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q ,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012 . The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.

“That’s their corner,” he said.

We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.”

Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.”

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.

Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.

After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.”

The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.

This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”

Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.

Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.

The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.

“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.

Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them.

The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ”

IX. Toward A New Country

W hen Clyde Ross was a child , his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.

“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.”

Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery , “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.”

When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body.

And this was just one of their losses.

Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.

T he early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

On some level, we have always grasped this.

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”

W e are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.

In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.

“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar , “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”

Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”

Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.

Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”

Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.

Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.”

Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia.

Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.”

The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million . “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”

Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.

Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.

Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:

For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.

Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”

A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

I n 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.

“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.”

Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times , affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”

“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times . “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”

In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.

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About the Author

The Case for Black Reparations

The texts in this section detail major arguments in favor of reparations. These arguments emerge in a variety of disciplines–legal studies, economics, history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy–and are generally focused on arguing for African American reparations.

America, Richard F. The Wealth of Races: The Present Value of Benefits from Past Injustices . Praeger: 2002. This collection of essays takes an economic approach to the issue of reparations by addressing the need to collectively redistribute wealth in response to the history of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination in the United States. The essays take a variety of perspectives, but focus on proposals, justifications, and the possible effects of black reparations.

Baraka, Amiri. The Essence of Reparations . House of Nehesi Publishers, 2003. In this collection of essays, Amiri Baraka ties the project of reparations to the wider struggle for civil rights and participation in American democracy.

Beckles, Hilary. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide . University of West Indies Press, 2013. In this book, Hilary Beckles argues that reparations are owed from Britain to present-day ancestors of slaves in Caribbean plantations. Noting both the spiritual, physical, and social remnants of slavery in contemoprary Caribbean nations, Beckles presuasively argues for the contemporary necessity of reparations.

Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita. “ Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations .” New Politics 8 (2001): 46-64.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “ The Case for Reparations .” The Atlantic (2014). As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes near the end of his article, “Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.” His article approaches the case for reparations from an interdisciplinary perspective that stresses the entanglement of economics, politics, and culture, connecting the history of reparations proposals in the United States with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and its decimation of black wealth.

Davis, Adrenne D. “ The Case for Reparations to African Americans .” Human Rights Brief: Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, A Legal Resource for the International Human Rights Community , volume 7, issue 3 (Spring 2000): 3+.

Hakim, Ida. Reparations, the Cure for America’s Race Problem: A Collaborative Effort in Reparations Advocacy by the Founding Members of C.U.R.E . U.B. & U.S. Communication Systems, 1994.

Jeffries, Judson L. “ Juneteenth, Black Texans and the Case for Reparations. ” Negro Educational Review 55.2-3 (2004): 107-115. In this article, Judson Jeffries argues that black slaves in Texas are owed reparations on the basis that they were held in bondage until 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863.

The Reparations at UChicago Working Group. “ A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago .”

Westley, Robert. “ Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations? ” Boston College Third World Law Journal 19.1 (1998): 429-476. In this article, Robert Westley revisits legal debates over reparations and argues that reparations should be endorsed as a program of social justice that avoids some of the pitfalls of affirmative action.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Introduction: On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

By Anna Kirstine Schirrer

Emergent Conversation 10

A special series of essays, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

Juneteenth reparations rally to demand reparations from the United States government St. Paul, Minnesota June 19, 2020 About 300 people gathered outside the Minnesota capitol building to demand reparations from the United States government for years of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and violence against black people from police. On May 25, Minneapolis Police officers arrested George Floyd, handcuffed him, then held him down on his stomach while Derek Chauvin put a knee on his neck as Floyd pleaded for breath. George Floyd died soon after. The four officers at the scene have been fired. Derek Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter. By Fibonacci Blue . CC BY 2.0 .

This PoLAR Online series, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism , engages anthropological and socio-legal scholars to understand the challenges that new reparations movements simultaneously pose and confront. It seeks to contribute to an emergent research program that engages the social worlds that produce and are produced by reparations claims for historical injustices with a focus on slavery, colonialism, segregation, and racial discrimination. On the one hand, the series seeks to encourage scholars working in post-colonial, post-slavery, and settler societies to take seriously histories of structural violence in their scholarly work and to ponder the kinds of reparative demands these histories require of our analytical and theoretical frameworks and ethnographic engagements. On the other hand, this series offers a small overview of the complex legal, moral, and practical circumstances within which questions of reparatory justice emerge. While the series assumes that logics of repair have long histories, it also seeks to confront the stunning absence of ethnographic research on contemporary claims for reparations for slavery and colonialism within the discipline of anthropology.

The anthropology of reparations has principally focused on reparations for international human rights violations in the latter half of the twentieth century (see Dill 2009; Laplante and Theidon 2008; Phillips 2009). The limited anthropological works on reparation claims prior to this period have investigated post-World War II lawsuits and compensation programs in the context of the Japanese Empire (Koga 2013), as well as post-Holocaust Jewish reparations. Susan Slyomovics (2014) considers Holocaust reparations vis-à-vis the German notion of wiedergutmachung , or “to make good again,” problematizing the “monetization of guilt” and the impetus to render money a vehicle for forgiveness. Anthropological studies of reparatory justice and repair in the context of slavery and colonialism remains glaringly absent.

This series builds on Deborah Thomas’s guidance to conceive of reparations as an analytical framework for studying structural lineages of violence emanating from the New World encounter (Thomas 2011). Echoing the recently published article “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn” by Ryan Cecil Jobson and his conversation with PoLAR contributor Kamari Clarke conducted by Lucia Cantero, this series contends with a case for letting anthropology burn by seeking to prioritize political projects of reparations, repair, and abolition in our conceptual and methodical work (Jobson 2020). By “letting anthropology burn,” Jobson argues that anthropology must abandon liberal suppositions and the universal liberal subject to adopt and practice radical humanism. This series contributes to the project of “letting anthropology burn” by focusing on “political life in the wake of plantations” (Thomas 2019) within the context of transnational legal institutions and practices in the postcolonial aftermath.

The series also highlights a number of pressing questions for exploration. For example, what are the implications of quantifying Black suffering when thinking through international and national reparation programs (Thomas 2011)? And furthermore, what is the relationship between reparatory justice and an abolitionist anthropology (Shange 2019)? Or further still, what is the relationship between claims for reparations and our studies of repair, reparatory justice, and liberal progressive state logics? And what ethical demands does a critical orientation impose on our research?

By including contributors from disciplines beyond anthropology such as economics, law, and public policy, this series confronts limitations within anthropology as a discipline with regards to reparations studies. Research on how to ethnographically conceive of reparations for slavery and colonialism is long overdue; this series is a preliminary attempt to engage multiple disciplines with the histories and politics of repair, and to identify possible directions for ethnographic studies of reparatory justice for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

Contemporary Calls for Reparations

The statue of Colston is pushed into the river Avon. Edward Colston was a slave trader of the late 17th century who played a major role in the development of the city of Bristol, England, on June 7, 2020. Photo by Giulia Spadafora/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Calls for reparations are on the rise in both legal and political venues, nationally and internationally. Internationally, in 2013, the multi-state Caribbean Community (CARICOM) presented a Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice from Western European nation-states. Reparations are sought for both historical injustices and for ongoing racial harm, in recognition of the present and structuring legacies of these injustices. Reparations claims can be traced genealogically in a number of historical iterations. The historian Ana Araujo (2012), for example, provides a comparative and transnational historiography on reparations for slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, focusing on the central role of Black women in making reparations claims. Araujo shows how continuous demands have been shaped by their historical and social context (Araujo 2012). Danish philosopher and historian Astrid Nonbo Andersen has also documented the formation of a reparations movement in the U.S. Virgin Islands demanding redress from its former colonizer, Denmark, a decade prior to CARICOM making its official demand in 2013.

Claims for reparations in the Caribbean include iterations in Rastafari communities that have advocated for repatriation since the 1930s. Although the focus on relocation to the African continent is a separate, but recognized, issue in the CARICOM reparations program, the term repatriation—while related to reparatory justice—has a distinct set of historical and social meanings and significations (see Barnett 2012; Bedasse 2017; Rowe 1980; ). Other scholars have focused on the long history of the formation of reparations as a social movement within the U.S. Focusing on the history of The National Coalition for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), this scholarship examines a more recent turn to courts and law as instruments of justice, tensions within elite and non-elite Black populations over reparations, and the significance of competing ideologies within social movements for reparations (see Aiyetoro and Davis 2010).

More recently in the U.S., contemporary calls for reparations were already increasing before the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor directed national attention once more toward systemic racial injustices. The U.S. H.R. 40 bill first introduced in 1989, known as the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, was contentiously debated in the summer of 2018 during a congressional hearing. The term reparations was taken up more widely in U.S. domestic politics when Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris tentatively voiced support for reparations to African Americans during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. And more recently, the very week of George Floyd’s murder, Human Rights Watch published a report advocating reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 1921 race massacre. In June 2020, the state of California passed a bill to set up a Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, and in July 2020, the City Council of Asheville in North Carolina voted unanimously in favor of reparations for Black residents. Rather than individual payments based on ancestry, Asheville’s plan is focused on directing public funds toward populations in the city who have been collectively harmed over time by systemic and structural racism.

A number of reparative initiatives have also materialized at universities in North America and the UK. At Georgetown University, US, students voted for taxing themselves to pay descendants of enslaved persons. Working groups and other organizations have made cases for reparations in their respective universities such as “ A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago ” by Reparations at University Chicago Working Group. The University of Glasgow, in Scotland, and the University of the West Indies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing the two universities to working together to found a Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research. Glasgow has committed to raise £20 million as part of this programme of reparative justice. Although not addressing the question of reparatory justice, Columbia University has mapped out its historical relationship to the institution of slavery, and Harvard University has launched a similar mapping initiative.

CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan argues that Western European moral, legal, and political responses to the historical genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples in the region have been inadequate. In the same period, African countries such as Namibia demanded reparations from their former colonizers. Their case was brought to a New York court in 2017.

European governments’ willingness to embrace responsibility for historical injustices (Barkan 2001) is steadily growing and has recently extended to the crown of a former colonizing European nation-state. In late June of this year, the Belgian King Philippe issued a statement expressing his regret for the country’s harrowingly violent colonization of the Congo under the leadership of King Leopold II. Congolese politicians have demand ed that the conversation extend to reparations. The Belgium parliament has subsequently given mandate to a “ special commission ” to examine the country’s colonial occupation of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Similarly, civil society organizations in Suriname have long called for an official apology from the Netherlands, and in February of this year, the former Dutch colonizers announced their consideration of providing an apology to the Caribbean country. There is to date no coordinated effort on behalf of European former colonial powers to respond to CARICOM’s official claim. Importantly, the UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet (OHCHR) declared on June 17 th 2020 in an urgent debate during the 40th Meeting of the 43rd Regular Session Human Rights Council “We need to make amends for centuries of violence and discrimination, including through formal apologies, truth-telling processes, and reparations in various forms”. A reference to the Sustainable Development Goals could indicate a more substantial effort on the part of the UN to advocate for reparations. For now, the High Commissioner’s reference of the term “reparations” within the context of histories of slavery and colonialism is notable.

Although an international framework for reparation claims remains absent, these national and local initiatives indicate a larger global turn to reparatory justice in the early decades of the twenty-first century. While such willingness is welcomed, these new initiatives call for continued and increased scrutiny of the terms on which they are established.

Neither reparative logic nor appeals for mass reparations are new; what is new, however, is the conversation about material reparations occurring within governmental and international organizations, and the proliferation of various reparative rationales across multiple scales. Reparations are no longer considered merely in terms of apologies and other symbolic markers of redress. At this early stage of discussing material reparations at a larger institutional scale, the pieces in this feature are only a beginning for developing and thinking through ethnographically oriented research approaches to reparative justice.

“Clean up the Colonial Mess”

Press conference from the launch of the Centre of Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, in Kingston, Jamaica. From the left Mr. Eric Philips, Chair of the Guyana Reparations Committee, Honorable Olivia Grange Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sports, Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Sir Hilary Beckles, Ghanaian politician Samia Nkrumah and daughter of the the first president of Ghana and Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, Director of the Centre for Reparations Research Verene Shepherd, and Jomo Thomas former Speaker of the House of Assembly of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and representing Prime Minister of the twin islands Ralph Gonsalves.

The CARICOM reparation claim is ideological in its scope. It speaks to the moral imperative of reparatory justice, and it speaks directly to former colonial powers in Western Europe. The CARICOM demands are abundantly clear. Academics such as Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen (2020) have laid out a blueprint focusing on national reparations for Black Americans in their recent publication From Here to Equality. In contrast, the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan does not provide a blueprint for how to materialize their demands. I think of this indeterminacy as a strategic response to the law of consent in international law, and as a diplomatic gesture to encourage European states to voluntarily participate in dialogue on the matter and on how to resolve it.

“Clean up the colonial mess” is how Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, characterized reparations demands during the press conference at official launch of the Centre for Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in Kingston, Jamaica. [1] I attended the launch in the fall of 2017 as part of my dissertation research. This phrasing accentuates the historical and practical implications of CARICOM’s comprehensive Ten-Point Reparation Plan.

Reiterating the region’s official commitment during a recent seminar at the Centre for Reparations Research entitled “ From Apology to Action: CARICOM’s call for Reparatory Justice ,” Sir Hilary Beckles opened the meeting by calling for a three-day summit with European governments to “discuss phase two of the independence project.” In the same seminar, Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados reaffirmed her commitment to the regional CARICOM claim. She asserted that colonial powers left the region’s people with the expectation that newly independent governments would right the wrongs of prior colonial administrations, and renewed her call for a Caribbean Marshall Plan. Honorable Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sports, also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the claim.

Several other leaders from the Anglophone Caribbean have spoken on the issue in recent years. Vice President Ralph Gonsalves, of St Vincent and the Grenadines, who spearheaded an introduction of the claim to CARICOM heads of government, has repeatedly addressed the matter during the UN General Assembly over the last two decades. In November 2019, Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda went beyond the Ten-Point Plan and directly indicted Harvard University School of Law for founding its school with funding from a plantation owner in the twin islands. In 2016, President David Granger, of Guyana, published “Crime without Punishment: The Caribbean Case for Reparative Justice.”

The CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) insists on the twofold predicament of the claim: it is simultaneously an issue of past debt and an issue of future development. By proposing a summit, the CRC is effectively inviting former Western colonial powers to enter a conversation based on the premise that a debt exists and that the region, despite acquiring independence, was left with impossible conditions for development. It is now up to Western European states to mirror nascent U.S. state and private sector efforts in contributing to the organization of a summit and committing to attending.

“ Vicissitudes 3 .” The underwater sculpture “Visissitudes” in Moliniere Bay, Grenada. By SunCat. CC BY 2.0 .

This series emerged through the process of writing my doctoral dissertation focused on how international claims for redress for transatlantic slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean converge on or diverge from national organizations’ claims for land titling in Guyana. In my research we see how multiple, incommensurable claims to redress coexist within the single conceptual language of reparations. This project situates “political life in the wake of plantations” in relation to transnational legal institutions and practices in the postcolonial aftermath (Thomas 2019). It considers the legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. “Political life in the wake of plantations,” in my analytical orientation, encompasses the countries and regions of former colonizers as well. The Caribbean is an interesting point of entry for considering reparations because those in positions of power are themselves descendants of enslaved people. Caribbean nations are Black states seeking the institutional means to assert claims upon white European former colonizers. I investigate a relationship between the politics of post-colonial nation states and the moment at which reparatory justice comes to direct claims.

My research is in conversation with the contributions in the series through a shared concern with how international and national political and legal institutions embodying sovereignty formulate, administer, and adjudicate claims for redress. Read together, our research projects contend with the notion that reparatory justice demands we consider the structural lineages of violence undergirding European democracies, and their contemporary implications for our shared socio-economic and legal lives.

Contributions

Permanent Memorial to Honour Victims of Slavery The “Ark of Return”, the permanent memorial to honour the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, located at the Visitors’ Plaza of UN headquarters in New York. Designed by architect Rodney Leon, it was unveiled on 25 March 2015 . United Nations Photo/Rick Bajornas . CC BY NC ND 2.0 .

We have sought contributions from scholars who have focused directly on questions of reparations in their academic, and sometimes activist, work. Economist Keston Perry’s essay emphasizes international Black solidarity, connecting histories of ecologically extractive colonial slavery and of liberatory pan-Africanist movements to address the increasingly urgent need for climate justice. This approach sheds light on the ethical preoccupations of international reparations claims. By appealing to Black global solidarity, Perry pushes against the tendency to privilege nationally-oriented reparations programs.

Legal scholar Vasuki Nesiah’s essay considers nineteenth-century mixed tribunals, formed to implement slave trade abolition, in light of valorizing histories of human rights and international criminal law. She demonstrates how the history of categorizing humanity in law, and the current international regime’s origins in a racialized world order, actually work to erase those origins from the category of humanity itself. This historical analysis has profound implications for how Black subjects are conceived, or made inconceivable, in international law, and for judicial recognition of reparation claims for slavery and anti-Black racism today.

Drawing on his ethnographic research and a critical interest in the relationship between late liberalism and the twenty-first-century turn to reparatory justice, anthropologist Howard Rechavia-Taylor’s piece examines responses to a reparations case brought by descendants of Namibian genocide victims in a New York City court. Considering liberal common sense ideas about the emancipatory possibilities of international law in relation to slavery and colonialism, Rechavia-Taylor confronts the imaginary of a global liberal legal order and its ideological force.

Explicating the moral imperative of reparations, political scientist Thomas Craemer’s personal essay explores Holocaust reparations calculations to make the case for reparations for slavery. Craemer argues for scaling up per-victim Holocaust reparations to arrive at a would-be monetary amount for slavery reparations. He argues for settling a debt earlier rather than later, since postponement does not diffuse the debt, but rather exponentially compounds it.

Anthropologist and geographer Jovan Scott Lewis contributes a piece examining scamming in Jamaica as an articulation of reparative ethics, drawing from his forthcoming book Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica . Lewis argues that scamming remedies not only the injury of the colonial encounter but also the postcolonial retreading of the sites of inequality and injustice by newer actors like the United States government, its citizens, and its corporations.

Together, these pieces open a preliminary conversation about social worlds and logics of repair, and their pressing significance for anthropological research on reparations for slavery and colonialism.

We are introducing the series on August 1 st , Emancipation Day in the English-speaking Caribbean, with Keston Perry’s piece on climate reparations. We invite readers to continue their reflection and engagements in the coming weeks as we publish the above essays.

Anna Kirstine Schirrer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and a certificate fellow with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. She is currently curating a PoLAR Online series on the politics of reparations for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Her dissertation project focuses on how international claims for redress for transatlantic slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean converge on or diverge from national organizations’ claims for land titling in Guyana. Anna is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science Programs (Award Abstract #1823901). Her broader research interests are international law, reparations, race, human rights, and postcolonial Western Europe.

[1] Sir Hilary Beckles is also vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies

Works Cited

Aiyetoro, Adjoa and Davis, Adrienne D. 2010. “Historic and Modern Social Movements for Reparations: The National Coalition for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and its Antecedents.” 16 Texas Wesleyan Law Review 16:687; Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-06-08.

Araujo, Ana. 2012. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History . London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Barnett, Michael (Ed.). 2012. Rastafari in the New Millenium. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Bedasse, Monique A. 2017. Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the age of Decolonization . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Barkan, Elazar. 2001. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press.

Dill, Katherine. 2009. “Repairing” Plan de Sánchez: Reparations and the Subjects of History. In Anthropology News . Volume 25. Issue. 4, pp. 25-33. Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122(2): 259–27.

Koga, Yukiko. 2013. “Accounting for Silence, Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economoy of Legal Redress in China and Japan”. In American Ethnologist. 40(3): 494-507.

Laplante, Lisa J. and Theidon, Kimberly. 2008. “Truth with Consequences: Justice and Reparations in Post-Truth Commission Peru.” Human Rights Quarterly (29)2007: 228-250.

Rowe, Maureen. 1980. “The Woman in Rastafari” in Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture 26(4): 13-21.

Scott, David. 2014. “Preface: Debt, Redress.” Small Axe 18(1) March (43): vii-x.

Slyomovic, Susan. 2014. How to Accept German Reparations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2019. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery

Discussions about atonement for the enslavement of Black Americans have a long history in the United States , and efforts toward reparations for slavery and racial discrimination have moved forward in some places in recent years. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first U.S. city to create a reparations plan for its Black residents, and California that year set up the nation’s first state-level reparations task force . Earlier this year, Harvard University created a $100 million “Legacy of Slavery” fund to allow scholars and students to examine the university’s connections to slavery.

Americans view the prospect of reparations mostly negatively, a 2021 Pew Research Center survey found. Three-in-ten U.S. adults say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, such as given land or money. About seven-in-ten (68%) say these descendants should not be repaid.

This analysis examines differences in Americans’ views about reparations for slavery in the country. It is part of a larger project that aims to understand Americans’ views of racial inequity and social change in the United States.

For this analysis, we surveyed 3,912 Black U.S. adults from Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial, non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. We surveyed 6,513 U.S. adults on the ATP for the general population portion of the survey. White and Asian respondents include those who report being only one race and are not Hispanic. Hispanics are of any race.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling).

Here are the questions used for the survey, along with responses, and its methodology .

A bar chart showing that 77% of Black Americans – compared with 18% of White Americans – support reparations for descendants of enslaved people

Views of reparations for slavery vary widely by race and ethnicity, especially between Black and White Americans. Around three-quarters of Black adults (77%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, while 18% of White Americans say the same.

There are also notable differences by partisan affiliation. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, views are split: 48% say descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, while 49% say they shouldn’t be repaid. By comparison, only 8% of Republicans and GOP leaners say these descendants should be repaid in some way, and 91% say they should not.

When it comes to age, younger adults are more likely than older ones to say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid: 45% of adults under 30 take this view, compared with 18% of adults 65 and older.

A bar chart showing that Black Americans most likely to say legacy of slavery affects Black people in the U.S. at least a fair amount

When Americans are asked about the legacy of slavery’s effect on Black people today, 58% of the overall public says this affects the position of Black people in American society at least a fair amount, with 28% saying it affects them a great deal. Four-in-ten U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery has not much or not at all affected the position of Black Americans in the country today.

As with views of reparations, racial and ethnic differences on this question are notable. Black Americans (85%) are more likely than Hispanic (64%) and White (50%) Americans to say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. a fair amount or a great deal.

The partisan gap on this question is also wide. More than eight-in-ten Democrats (82%) say the legacy of slavery affects Black people in the U.S. a fair amount or a great deal, more than 50 percentage points greater than the share of Republicans who say this (29%).

Black Americans are much more likely to identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party ; only about one-in-ten Black voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party . As of 2020, White voters are slightly more evenly split, but the GOP has an advantage (53% to 42%).

Some racial, ethnic and partisan differences over who bears responsibility for reparations, what form they should take

In the Center’s 2021 survey , the 30% of Americans who favored reparations were also asked about the institutions and individuals who bear responsibility for repayment. They were presented with four options: the U.S. federal government, businesses and banks that profited from slavery, colleges and universities that benefited from slavery, and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade.

Three-quarters of reparations supporters say the federal government has all or most of the responsibility to repay descendants of enslaved people. A smaller share, though still a majority, say businesses and banks that profited from slavery (65%) have all or most of the responsibility. Fewer say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (53%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (44%).

A bar chart showing that three-quarters of Americans who support reparations say the federal government should be responsible for repayment

Reparations supporters were also asked how helpful the following forms of repayment would be: educational scholarships, financial assistance for starting or improving a business, financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home, and cash payments. These adults are most likely to say educational scholarships would be very or extremely helpful (82%), followed by financial assistance with businesses (75%), financial assistance with home buying or remodeling (73%) and cash payments (57%).

There are some racial, ethnic and partisan differences in Americans’ views of both the institutions that would be responsible for reparations, as well as the specific forms that reparations might take.

A bar chart showing that majorities of reparations supporters think financial assistance for education, businesses and homes would be helpful forms of repayment

For example, more than six-in-ten Black and Hispanic reparations supporters (63% and 69%, respectively) say colleges and universities that benefited from slavery bear all or most of the responsibility for repaying descendants of enslaved people. By comparison, White and Asian American supporters of reparations are notably less likely to hold this view (41% and 44%, respectively).

Among those who support reparations, Democrats are 20 points more likely than Republicans to say the federal government bears all or most of the responsibility for repayment (77% vs. 57%).

When it comes to various forms of repayment, majorities of Black American reparations supporters say all four forms of assistance would be extremely or very helpful, and those in other racial and ethnic groups largely agree. Americans in each racial and ethnic group are least likely to say cash payments would be helpful.

Low expectations for the likelihood of reparations

A bar chart showing that most Americans who support reparations for slavery say this is unlikely in their lifetime

Those who support reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. were also asked whether repayment – of any type or from any source – would happen in their lifetime. Most supporters of the idea say this is not likely.

Overall, three-quarters of U.S. adults who support repayment to descendants of enslaved people say it is a little or not at all likely that this will happen in their lifetime. Only 10% say it is extremely or very likely.

There are a few demographic differences among respondents on this question, too. Hispanic (21%) and Asian American (13%) reparations supporters are more likely than their White (6%) or Black (7%) counterparts to say it’s extremely or very likely that these descendants will be repaid in their lifetime. And supporters ages 18 to 49 (12%) are more likely than those 50 and older (5%) to say it’s extremely or very likely that these descendants will be repaid in their lifetime.

Note: Here are the questions used for the survey, along with responses, and its methodology .

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Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

Kiana Cox is a senior researcher focusing on race and ethnicity at Pew Research Center .

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Report and response, report of the brown university steering committee on slavery and justice, university steering committee on slavery and justice, executive summary, introduction, slavery, the slave trade, and brown university, confronting historical injustice: comparative perspectives, confronting slavery’s legacy: the reparations question, slavery and justice: concluding thoughts, recommendations, acknowledgments, response of brown university to the report of the steering committee on slavery and justice february 2007, challenging tomorrow, about the project, print 2 nd edition.

Context and Impact

“a simple question needed to be met with a straightforward answer” : an interview with brown university president emerita dr. ruth j. simmons, ruth j. simmons and anthony bogues, slavery and justice at brown — a personal reflection, james t. campbell, tactility, memory work, and martin puryear’s slavery memorial, the dialectics of racism and repair, seth rockman, teaching slavery after the slavery and justice report, emily a. owens, alumni reflections, a collective exploration of our history: an introduction, african american students and scholars at brown : activism, impact, and inspiration, spencer crew, in the service of ideas and actions, wilfred codrington iii, radical promises, sean siperstein, lessons and commitments, sophie kupetz, blueprints and pathways, chandra marshall, slavery, memory, and reconciliation at georgetown : a reckoning made possible by the slavery and justice report, marcia chatelain, confronting historical injustice — past, present, and future, anthony bogues, the evolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion work at brown university : an institution changed by the slavery and justice report, shontay delalue.

As we have seen , the quest for retrospective justice is a global phenomenon, with a host of different groups proffering claims for some form of acknowledgment or material consideration for historical injuries. In the United States alone, legislatures and courts have entertained reparations claims from Japanese Americans interned during World War II; Indigenous Hawaiians seeking compensation for lost land and sovereignty; Native Americans seeking the return of ancestral land and sacred relics; Korean “comfort women”; American veterans subjected to severe abuse in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II; descendants of victims of the Armenian genocide pursuing unpaid insurance claims from American corporations; Jews and non-Jews compelled to work as slave laborers by the Nazis; families of Holocaust victims seeking the return of artwork, bank deposits, and other assets stolen during World War II; and the families of people killed in the 9/11 terror attacks, to name only some of the recent cases. But the claims that have generated the most controversy — the claims that most Americans immediately think of when they hear the word “reparations” — are those advanced by African Americans seeking redress for the injuries of slavery. 124

The Modern Reparations Debate and Brown University

While debates over reparations for slavery have a long history in the United States, the recent salience of the issue can be traced to the 1990s. Inspired in part by the successes of other historical redress movements, a growing number of African American individuals and groups began to press for reparations for the injuries of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The resulting debate, unfolding in legislatures, federal courts, and in the court of public opinion, has proceeded along distinctly racial lines. Contrary to some media portrayals, not all African Americans advocate slavery reparations. Many regard the idea with indifference; some are vociferously opposed. But when surveyed on the matter, a majority of Black Americans express support for some form of reparations for slavery — somewhere between half and two-thirds, depending on how the question is posed. White Americans, in contrast, are almost unanimously opposed — and often intensely hostile — to the idea, particularly when the question centers on monetary payments. The most systematic study, conducted by scholars at Harvard and the University of Chicago, found that just four percent of white respondents believed that “the Federal Government [should] pay monetary compensation to African Americans whose ancestors were slaves.” 125

The theft of the newspapers by student protestors was widely cited in the national media as evidence of Brown’s failure to nurture the free exchange of ideas. Among the newspapers chiding the University was the New York Times , which noted that “overlooked in much of the uproar over [the Herald ’s] publication of the advertisement is the deeper national debate on reparations over slavery, which could have found fertile ground for discussion on this campus.”

Just as Brown was an important terrain in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battles over slavery and abolition, so did it find itself thrust into the middle of the modern slave reparations debate. In 2001, conservative author David Horowitz placed a paid advertisement, “Ten Ideas Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too,” in college newspapers around the country, including the Brown Daily Herald . As its title suggests, the advertisement offered a series of arguments against reparations: that Black as well as white Americans had benefited economically from slavery; that reparations had already been paid in the form of “welfare benefits and racial preferences”; that “most Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery”; that the continuing “hardships” of some African Americans were a “result of failures of individual character rather than the after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago.” The appearance of the advertisement provoked controversy on several college campuses, nowhere more than at Brown, where a group of student protestors demanded that the Herald print a retraction or at least relinquish the money it had received to run the ad. When the editors refused, some of the protestors stole an entire day’s press run of the paper. The papers were later returned, but the story of the theft appeared in newspapers all across the United States, often accompanied by editorials pillorying Brown for its failure to protect the free exchange of ideas. Among the newspapers chiding the University was the New York Times , which noted that “overlooked in much of the uproar over [the Herald ’s] publication of the advertisement is the deeper national debate on reparations over slavery, which could have found fertile ground for discussion on this campus.” 126

The issue resurfaced at Brown in 2002, with the filing of the first in a series of class-action lawsuits by descendants of African American slaves seeking monetary damages from private corporations alleged to have profited from slavery and the slave trade. As fate would have it, the first defendant in the first suit was FleetBoston, a bank whose lineage traces back to the Providence Bank, founded by the four Brown brothers in 1791. While Brown was not a named party in the action, it was mentioned (along with Harvard) in the narrative portion of the complaint as an example of a wealthy institution with assets derived from slavery and the slave trade. A few days later, Harvard University Law Professor Charles Ogletree, chair of a recently established Reparations Coordinating Committee, published an opinion essay in the New York Times announcing that Brown, Yale, and Harvard were all “probable targets” of a lawsuit to be filed by his organization later that year. 127

The threatened lawsuit was never filed. As for the other suits, federal courts have dismissed virtually all of them on various procedural grounds. At this writing, there seems to be little chance that federal courts will entertain slavery reparations claims. But this outcome was not clear when the Steering Committee began its work, which doubtless accounts for some of the public interest aroused by news of the Committee’s appointment.

Reparations in Historical Perspective

In keeping with its charge from President Simmons, the Steering Committee devoted a great deal of attention to the slavery reparations issue. We organized several programs on the topic, hosting public addresses by prominent supporters and critics of reparations, as well as by scholars studying the issue’s legal, theological, political, and philosophical underpinnings. Our goal, again in keeping with our charge, was not to resolve the issue but rather to “provide factual information and critical perspectives” to enrich discussion of the issue on our campus and in the nation as a whole. As our research proceeded, we became particularly interested in the historical roots of the reparations issue, a context that is almost completely ignored in the current controversy. What actually happened when slavery was abolished, first in northern states like Rhode Island and later in the American South? What burdens did slavery impose — not simply on the formerly enslaved, but on the nation as a whole — and what attempts were made to alleviate them? What forms have demands for redress taken at different times, and what responses have they elicited? In short, where did the reparations issue come from?

And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing to day.

Probably the most striking thing that our investigation revealed was just how long the debate has raged. In both the North and the South, the post-emancipation years saw widespread acknowledgment of slavery’s terrible legacy, as well as a variety of proposals for remedying it, from the colonization of Black people beyond the borders of the United States to programs of land redistribution and publicly funded education. A few such programs were begun. But in the end, very little was done to compensate the newly free for their years of unremunerated toil, and still less was done to bridge the racial chasm that slavery had carved in the nation. On the contrary, the years after abolition saw an intensification of white racist attitudes, accompanied by the enactment of policies designed to ensure continued Black subordination and to perpetuate the economic disparities inherited from slavery. What bearing this history has on current reparations demands is an issue on which different readers will draw different conclusions, but it certainly deserves to be entered into the debate.

Reparations Arguments in the Eighteenth Century

Surely the most common misconception about the slavery reparations issue is that it is new — a “scam” (in the words of a recent Providence Journal editorial) “devised by trial lawyers to keep the victim industry humming and themselves rich.” In fact, the debate reaches back to the eighteenth century, with Providence as one of the main theaters. The Quakers who spearheaded the anti-slavery movement in Rhode Island were virtually unanimous in insisting that manumitted slaves were entitled to reparations from their masters, finding warrant in Scripture (particularly the Book of Deuteronomy, which enjoins masters to share their estates with former slaves as a show of respect and appreciation) as well as in the demands of plain justice. If holding another person in slavery was sinful, the Quakers reckoned, then surely perpetrators should atone for the offense by offering some kind of amends to their victims. Moses Brown had not yet been formally admitted to Quaker meeting when he manumitted his slaves in 1773, but he recognized this obligation, providing his former slaves with access to land and a promise of education for their children. 128

The 1784 Rhode Island Gradual Abolition Law specified that the children of slaves were to be “instructed in reading, writing, and Arithmetic” at public expense. A year later, however, the legislature amended the law, after towns protested that providing “Support and Education” to the children of slaves was “extremely burthensome.”

In 1783, the Massachusetts legislature entertained one of the earliest extant reparations petitions. The appellant was an aged African-born woman named Belinda, who sought a small portion of the estate of her erstwhile master, Isaac Royall. A British loyalist, Royall had fled Massachusetts shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord. His property was confiscated by the legislature, and Belinda, who had served him for forty years, became free. But she was old and without any means to provide for herself and her invalid daughter, forcing her to turn to the state. While the petition’s authorship is unclear — other sources suggest that Belinda was illiterate — there is no doubting the power of the words, which traced her life from her capture in Africa to her current plight, in which, “by the very laws of the land, [she] is denied one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.” Whether motivated by sympathy, principle, or the pleasure of disbursing the estate of a disgraced Loyalist, the Massachusetts legislature awarded Belinda and her daughter a £15 annual pension, though it is unclear how long the payments were made. 129

Belinda’s petition is reprinted in Vincent Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 142–144. It appears that the pension ceased after a year or two, prompting Belinda to file another petition in 1787, after which she disappears from the historical record. Isaac Royall, who had made his fortune as a Caribbean planter before settling in Massachusetts, also has the distinction of endowing the first law professorship in American history, the Royall Professorship at Harvard Law School.

Freedom Dues and the Problem of Gradual Abolition

The idea that former slaves were entitled to reparations would not have seemed outlandish to most eighteenth-century Americans. In a society in which individual towns were responsible for the indigent, it was customary to provide the newly free with some form of provision to ensure that they did not become “chargeable” to the public. Apprentices acquired marketable skills as well as an elementary education. Indentured servants received “freedom dues” upon the end of their terms, typically land and a suit of clothes, to mark their new status. The question, put simply, was whether Black people emerging into freedom would receive similar consideration. The problem was complicated, in Rhode Island and in most other northern states, by the nature of the gradual abolition process. Rhode Island’s abolition law freed no one, but merely specified that individuals born in the state after March 1, 1784, would be free. The issue of slavery reparations was thus entangled with the immediate question of providing for the maintenance of small children whose parents, or at least mothers, were still enslaved.

The Rhode Island legislature recognized the problem, and debated how to address it. In the original Gradual Abolition Act, infants were left in the care of their mothers, while the responsibility for supporting them was placed on individual towns. This responsibility included a publicly funded education. In a passage that clearly bore the imprint of Moses Brown, the act specified that “such Children be educated in the Principles of Morality and Religion, and instructed in reading, writing, and Arithmetic” — a promise that routinely appeared in indenture agreements involving white children, but that had never previously been applied to Black children. A year later, however, the legislature amended the law, after towns protested that providing “Support and Education” to the children of slaves was “extremely burthensome.” The new act shifted the onus back onto individual masters, who became responsible for the upkeep of their female slaves’ freeborn children. To compensate the masters for assuming these costs, as well as for the loss of valuable property, the amended law required such children to serve their mothers’ owners — in effect, to serve as slaves — for terms of twenty-one years. The amended law said nothing about compensating or educating the newly free. The promise of publicly funded education simply fell away. 130

After Slavery: Free People of Color in Rhode Island

In the end, Rhode Island’s newly free received nothing, entering society not as independent citizens but as quasi-slaves, members of an impoverished and degraded class. A kind of self-fulfilling cycle was created, with Blacks’ degraded condition offering seeming proof of prevailing assumptions about their innate inferiority and dependence, thus justifying continued discrimination against them. Racial lines hardened. Free people of color faced exclusion from public facilities and all but the most menial jobs. They were subject to a nightly curfew, enforced by white patrols, and required to “bind out” their children as apprentices, as insurance against “idleness.” In 1798, the Rhode Island legislature, alarmed by an apparent increase in the free Black population, made it more difficult for masters to free their slaves, while also increasing the penalties for anyone caught abetting fugitives. Another law, passed the same year, prohibited the marriage of “any white person with any Negro, Indian, or mulatto.” (The law apparently did not prevent sexual congress across the color line, since two years later the legislature barred Black women, free or slave, from bringing paternity suits against white men.) Rhode Island was also one of two New England states to racialize the franchise. In 1822, a six-person committee of the legislature (including five Brown alumni and two members of the Brown Corporation) inserted the word “white” into the state’s voting laws, disenfranchising even the small number of Black men who met the property qualification. 131

A detail of a broadside shows a caricature drawing of a column of black, military-clad soldiers following their commander on a white horse.

The "Bobalition" broadside, a racist caricature produced in New England c. 1830, mocks Black pretensions to freedom and citizenship. The Broadsides Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

In Rhode Island, as elsewhere, the impulse to exclude free Black people existed in counterpoint with the impulse to control them. During slavery, most Black people lived in or near their masters’ homes, ensuring close supervision. The emergence of distinct Black neighborhoods after emancipation generated great anxiety among whites, who saw such districts as dangerously disorderly, vice-ridden places. The result, in cities all across the North, was a wave of “race riots” — essentially pogroms, in which white mobs rampaged through Black neighborhoods, burning buildings and beating inhabitants. Providence experienced two such riots. Hardscrabble, an aptly named Black neighborhood, was attacked by a mob in 1824. Snow Town was razed seven years later. Victims of the attacks were not compensated for their losses, nor were the perpetrators punished for their crimes. The Hardscrabble rioters were prosecuted, but they escaped with acquittals or token sentences after a rousing speech by their defense attorney, Joseph Tillinghast, a Brown alumnus and future member of the Brown Corporation, who compared the destroyed neighborhood to “ancient Babylon,” with its “graven images” and “idolatrous rites and sacrifices.” Hardscrabble, Tillinghast declared, was a “nuisance” and “sink of vice” whose destruction was a “benefit to the morals of the community.” 132

Black Rhode Islanders and the Quest for Education

Black Rhode Islanders did not simply submit to this regime. They created businesses, organized churches and benevolent societies, and defended their right to urban space. The Hardscrabble riot, for example, was sparked by a group of Black men refusing to cede the sidewalk to a group of approaching whites. Above all, they sought education. Denied the publicly funded education pledged in the original act of abolition and excluded from most private academies, Blacks in Providence launched a subscription campaign to build a school of their own. The fruit of their efforts was the “African Union Meeting and School-House,” which opened in 1821, on land donated by Moses Brown. 133

In 1858 and ’59, as the nation tumbled toward civil war, the politics of Rhode Island were consumed by the debate over integrating public schools. The terms of the debate eerily anticipated the struggle over southern integration a century later, with proponents of integration speaking of benefits of mingling “different classes of children” and their more numerous opponents dismissing the idea as the work of irresponsible “new comers and agitators.”

Broadside titled ‘Hard Scrabble, or Miss Philises Bobalition’

A broadside dated c. 1824 ridicules victims of the Hardscrabble riot and promises the same to other Black people settling in the city. The Broadsides Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.

After decades of petitions and proposals, the Rhode Island state legislature finally created a system of public education in 1828. But the system was racially segregated, with Blacks in Providence confined to a single, overcrowded school offering only elementary instruction. The segregated system persisted until the late 1850s, when Black citizens, inspired by successful litigation in neighboring Massachusetts, launched a campaign to integrate public schools. In 1858 and ’59, as the nation tumbled toward civil war, the politics of Rhode Island were consumed by the debate, the terms of which eerily anticipated the struggle over integrating southern schools a century later. While proponents of integration spoke of the principles of democracy and the benefits of mingling “different classes of children,” their more numerous opponents dismissed the proposal as the work of irresponsible “new comers and agitators.” Integrationists “would see our public schools quite broken up, and our means of public education quite destroyed, rather than that one little nigger boy should be compelled to go to the school that has been assigned to him,” the editors of the Providence Journal opined. “Nor is it proper,” they added in a subsequent editorial, “that our public education, supported at such great cost, should be made subordinate to any theories of a social equality that does not exist and never has existed … [S]eparation of the negro children from the white children … is best for both.” 134

Abolishing Southern Slavery, 1862–1865

The struggles over the meaning of Black freedom in Rhode Island and other northern states would be repeated, in different terms and on a vastly greater scale, in the American South. Southern slavery did not end through gradualist legislation but in the context of civil war. In April 1862, a year after the commencement of hostilities, the U.S. Congress passed the Compensated Emancipation Act, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. The compensation referred to in the title went not to the newly free but to their former owners, who received, on average, $300 from the federal government for each emancipated slave. Six months later, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863. As numerous historians have noted, the proclamation freed no one immediately; its provisions applied only to regions still in rebellion, leaving slavery intact in the border states and other areas under Union occupation. Even so, the proclamation radically altered the character of the war, transforming the advancing Union Army into an army of liberation. The proclamation also included provisions for enlisting Black soldiers, nearly a quarter million of whom eventually served in Union forces, further consolidating Black claims to freedom and citizenship. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in December 1865, slavery in the United States was formally abolished, and four million men, women, and children became free. 135

Reconstruction and the Reparations Question

The Civil War was followed by the era of Reconstruction. While much about the period is disputed, certain facts are clear. In the immediate aftermath of the war, southern legislatures, still dominated by the old planter class, sought to recreate slavery by other means, imposing curfews, vagrancy statutes, and other “Black Codes” designed to restrict the physical and economic mobility of the newly free. This period was followed, from 1866 to 1876, by Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction, which saw an attempt to extend basic rights of citizenship to African Americans. These years were highlighted by the adoption of two more amendments to the U.S. Constitution: the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred states from discriminating on the grounds of race, color, or prior condition of servitude; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from imposing racially based restrictions on voting. Over the next few years, southern Blacks entered the political system, voting and serving in public office, including in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The enfranchisement of African Americans generated bitter controversy. As in the post-emancipation North, the racial ideas forged in the crucible of slavery did not simply disappear with abolition; on the contrary, they became sharper, as white southerners found themselves forced to compete economically and politically with their former bondsmen. The result was a concerted campaign of violence and intimidation, culminating in the restoration of avowedly white supremacist regimes in all of the southern states. With the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, the Reconstruction experiment was essentially over. 136

Though the term “reparations” was rarely, if ever, used, emancipation triggered a wide-ranging debate over how and whether to provide for the newly free, a debate that began while the war was still going on and continued even after the collapse of Reconstruction. For some, including Abraham Lincoln for a time, the solution appeared to lie in government-subsidized colonization. Convinced that white southerners would never accept their former slaves as political equals, colonizationists argued that it was in Black people’s own interests to leave America and start afresh in a country of their own. Others insisted that African Americans had a fundamental right to remain in the United States, sharing in the wealth and opportunity that their unpaid labor had helped to create. A few argued that freedpeople were entitled to receive back wages for their years in slavery, offering various calculations of the amount due. At least one freedman sent a bill to his former owner for his years of unpaid labor. In the end, however, the reparations debate after the Civil War came to focus on land — the proverbial “forty acres and a mule.” 137

Forty Acres and a Mule

Few phrases in American history evoke such passion — or such disparate understandings — as forty acres and a mule. For many whites, at the time and still today, the idea of the federal government handing out land to freedpeople was and is a harebrained notion — “the Negroes’ forty acre delusion,” to quote one historian. For many African Americans, on the other hand, the granting of forty acres of land was a solemn promise on which the nation has yet to make good. Not surprisingly, the issue looms large in the modern slavery reparations movement. Plaintiffs in several prominent reparations suits have cited the promise of forty acres as the basis for tort action or for calculating the damages due to African Americans. (The most generous calculation, based on average southern land values in 1865 and six percent interest per annum, puts the current value of forty acres at about $1.5 million.) The power of the idea is also apparent in the designation of H.R. 40, a bill proposed by Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) to convene a national commission to study slavery and its legacy and to make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies. Originally introduced as H.R. 3745, the bill was later renamed H.R. 40 to link it with the historic claim to forty acres. 138

Few phrases in American history evoke such passion as “forty acres and a mule.” For many whites, at the time and still today, the idea of dispensing land to freedpeople was and is a delusion. For many African Americans, on the other hand, the promise of forty acres of land was a solemn pledge on which the nation has yet to make good. Not surprisingly, the issue looms large in the modern slavery reparations movement.

Today, as at the time, the status of the forty acre claim rests on the meaning of a series of laws and orders promulgated during and immediately after the Civil War. In 1862, shortly after the war began, Congress passed an act permitting the U.S. government to confiscate the property of those who had taken up arms against it. Most of the subsequent controversy over land redistribution centered on such property. What is often overlooked in discussions today is the fact that the bill authorized confiscation for only one generation, in deference to the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of bills of attainder; after the original owner died, title to the land was to revert to his heirs. Similar uncertainties underlay General Sherman’s famous Field Order #15 of January 1865, the order from which the phrase “forty acres and a mule” comes. Finding the mobility of his army hampered by thousands of Black refugees, Sherman designated a swath of abandoned rebel lands, stretching south from Charleston and thirty miles inland from the sea, for the exclusive occupation of Blacks. The order, which conferred only possessory, or temporary, title, specified that the land be divided into homesteads not exceeding forty acres per family, with use rights to surplus army mules for plowing. Six weeks later, the U.S. Congress gave an apparent statutory basis to Sherman’s order when it passed the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act. The act empowered the newly created bureau to resettle former slaves (and white refugees who had remained loyal to the Union) onto homesteads not exceeding forty acres, granting them an exclusive right to occupy the land for three years, in exchange for a nominal rent. At the end of the term, occupants would have an option to purchase the land. But this bill too was ambiguous, specifying that purchasers would receive only “such title … as the United States can convey” — an acknowledgment of Congress’ own uncertainty of its right to dispose of the land permanently. 139

Even these tentative steps were too much for Andrew Johnson, who acceded to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination. A former slaveowner, Johnson had accepted emancipation during the Civil War, but he was no friend to racial equality. “This is a country for white men,” he once declared, “and as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” True to his word, Johnson issued blanket pardons to former rebels and ordered the return of confiscated and abandoned land to its original owners. Black people occupying the land were given the option of signing labor contracts with restored white landlords or leaving. When Congress passed a second Freedmen’s Bureau bill in 1866, extending the life of the bureau, Johnson vetoed it, arguing that it conferred on Black people rights that the government had never granted to “our own people.” Johnson’s veto of the bill, as well as of the landmark 1866 Civil Rights bill, contributed to the escalating conflict between the executive and legislative branches of the government, which culminated in the President’s impeachment and near removal from office. But on the issue of land redistribution, the President carried the day. Congress eventually enacted a second Freedmen’s Bureau bill (over Johnson’s veto), but the idea of redistributing land to former slaves had disappeared. What little land Black southerners ultimately obtained from the federal government came not as reparations for slavery but through the operation of the 1866 Southern Homestead Act, which opened up a portion of public lands for private purchase, with freedmen (and loyal whites) enjoying an exclusive option for the first six months. But few former slaves had money to buy the land, most of which ended up in the hands of private timber companies. 140

The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes made free by acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States … each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground. . . . In order to carry out this system of settlement, a general officer will be detailed as Inspector of Settlements … who will furnish personally to each head of family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible a description of boundaries; and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory …

Whether the facts of the postwar struggle over land redistribution bolster the claims of advocates of reparations or their opponents is a matter of interpretation. Clearly there was widespread debate about the issue. Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Sumner warned that, without a thoroughgoing change in southern land titles, the old master class would retain political power and freedpeople would remain in a position of abject dependence. Others warned that redistributing land would itself breed dependency, teaching the freedpeople to rely on federal largesse rather than on their own industry. Still others opposed land redistribution precisely to ensure continued Black dependency. If Black people were given land, one Pennsylvania senator asked, “Who would black boots and curry the horses, who would do the menial offices of the world?” As for the freedpeople themselves, most assumed that the land they had been allotted under Field Order #15 and later under the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act would be theirs in perpetuity, and the federal government’s decision to restore it to white rebels was a shattering and bewildering betrayal. One hundred and forty years later, the phrase “forty acres and a mule” still carries the resonance of their feelings. 141

Black life in the Era of Jim Crow

The single inescapable fact is that freedpeople did not receive land during Reconstruction. Nor did they receive monetary compensation, access to credit, use rights to surplus government mules, or anything else that might have provided a material foundation for their newly acquired civil and political rights. In the decades that followed, they would be dispossessed of these rights as well. By century’s end, Black southerners had been effectively disenfranchised and consigned to a rigid system of “Jim Crow” segregation, encompassing everything from schools and streetcars to the separate “white” and “colored” Bibles used to swear witnesses in southern courtrooms. The process was abetted by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, which narrowed Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection of the laws down to a nullity while giving a constitutional seal of approval to the various devices — poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, closed primaries — invented by southern states to nullify Blacks’ right to vote. Ultimately it would take nearly a century, until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, for African Americans to reclaim the rights they had briefly enjoyed during Reconstruction. 142

While Radical Republicans promoted land redistribution as the only way to guarantee the economic independence of the newly free, others opposed it precisely to ensure continued Black dependency. If Black people were given land, one Pennsylvania senator asked, “Who would black boots and curry the horses, who would do the menial offices of the world?”

The character of the political and economic regime that emerged during the Jim Crow era was starkly revealed in convict leasing, one of the signatures of the “New South” criminal justice system. Under the system, the roots of which traced back to slavery, Black male prisoners were leased out as forced laborers. The prisoners, many of whom had been arrested for vagrancy or other petty crimes, worked not only on roads and other public works but also in private enterprises, including farms, mines, and factories. Numerous historians have documented the substantial profits that flowed to the system’s operators, as well as the brutal treatment meted out to leased Black convicts, many of whom died before completing their sentences. 143

White supremacy was reinforced by other, less dramatic forms of social control, ranging from cultural practices such as “coon songs” and blackface minstrelsy to scholarly treatises in emerging disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. Social Darwinism, the signature ideology of the late nineteenth century, gave a seemingly scientific imprimatur to stereotypes of Blacks as “unfit” racial stock, incapable of bearing the responsibilities of citizenship. Drawing on what was later shown to be specious census data, many scholars predicted that African Americans would soon become extinct. Incapable of surviving as free people in a competitive economy, Black people in America were destined to die out, just like the allegedly “vanishing Indian.” White insurance companies used such beliefs to justify their refusal to insure African Americans, a practice that continued long after the underlying arguments had been discredited. 144

Lynch Law and the 2005 U.S. Senate Apology

Black southerners resisted assaults on their freedom. They struggled to acquire land and voted when they could. They armed themselves, organizing militias and Union clubs to repel nightriders. Denied service by white banks, hotels, and insurance companies, they created their own. But resistance carried its own risks. Between 1880 and 1930, at least thirty-five hundred African Americans were lynched in the United States. As Memphis editor Ida B. Wells noted at the time, lynch mobs, while typically justifying their actions in terms of protecting white women from rapacious Black men, routinely targeted those who were economically successful or simply defiant. In virtually no cases were perpetrators convicted of or even tried for their crimes. Recognizing the impossibility of securing convictions in southern courts, activists waged a half-century campaign for a federal anti-lynching statute, but their bills invariably failed to pass in the U.S. Senate. It was this history that lay behind the 2005 Senate lynching apology. 145

Education and the Meaning of Black Freedom

If the struggle over land redistribution was the most important arena for determining the meaning of Black freedom after the Civil War, then the struggle over schooling was the second most important. In the nineteenth century, even more than in our own time, education was the cornerstone of America’s democratic faith, the foundation of cherished ideas about opportunity, meritocracy, and mobility. It was also an arena in which the legacy of slavery could not have been more blatant: in most southern states, it was a crime to teach a slave to read. As a member of the Virginia state legislature declared in 1832, “we have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light can enter. If we could extinguish the capacity to see light, our work would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe.” 146

With the coming of emancipation, many people, Black and white, saw education as the best means to repair the damage of slavery and prepare the newly free for the full enjoyment of their rights as citizens. Even before the war was over, northern teachers and missionaries had begun flocking south in what W.E.B. Du Bois later dubbed “the crusade of the New England schoolm’am.” Hundreds of schools were opened across the region, some by Black people themselves, others under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau or reconstructed state governments. Though typically understaffed and underfunded, these schools enabled hundreds of thousands of African Americans, adults as well as children, to learn to read. 147

Not everyone approved of the idea of educating freedpeople, and Black schools were a frequent target of vandals and arsonists. With the onset of Jim Crow, education came in for renewed assault. Though the Fourteenth Amendment prevented southern legislatures from closing Black schools outright, such schools were rigidly segregated and starved of resources. In contrast to the idea of redistributing land, the idea that former slaves were entitled to an education equal to that available to whites persisted in Republic Party circles for more than a generation. Three times in the 1880s Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the Blair Bill, offering states millions of dollars in federal funds for public schools, proportionate to their illiteracy rates — in effect, offering federal resources to underwrite the education of southern freedpeople. Three times Senate Democrats refused to allow the bill to come to a vote. 148

In no arena was the legacy of slavery more blatant than in education: in most southern states, it was a crime to teach a slave to read. “We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light can enter,” a Virginia state legislator declared in 1832. “If we could extinguish the capacity to see light, our work would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe.”

The dream of an equal education for former slaves was finally extinguished in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s embrace of the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. Of course, separate facilities were never equal. Over the next half century, white students in southern schools routinely received five to ten times more funding per capita than their Black peers. Curricula in Black schools were canted toward “practical” subjects like agriculture and domestic science, intended to prepare Black students for the menial positions awaiting them. In many areas, instruction was limited to the elementary grades, and even that was restricted to a few months per year to ensure that Black children’s labor was available during planting and harvesting seasons. At the time of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which finally repudiated the doctrine of “separate but equal,” only about a third of African American children completed high school. In some southern states, the figure was less than ten percent. In sum, a medium that many in the 1860s had seen as the means to repair the legacy of slavery became a means of perpetuating that legacy for another century and beyond. 149

African Americans and Higher Education: The Case of Brown University

Educational inequality was even greater at the tertiary level. The Reconstruction era saw the creation of the South’s first Black colleges, including Howard and Fisk, both founded in 1866. But the total number of students that these colleges could accommodate was initially very small — typically less than a hundred per year. The number of Black students in historically white universities was even smaller. One need look no further than the experience of Brown. Like many of its peer institutions, Brown did not admit Black students before the Civil War, at least not knowingly. In 1877, it produced its first two Black graduates, George Washington Milford and Inman Page. Over the next seventy years, from the end of Reconstruction through the end of World War II, Brown graduated about sixty more African Americans — a little less than one Black student per year. Many of these individuals, it should be noted, went on to lead careers of great distinction. Inman Page became a distinguished educator in the Oklahoma Territory, where his students included the novelist Ralph Ellison. John Hope, Class of 1894, became president of Atlanta University. (He also became the namesake of historian John Hope Franklin, one of the speakers hosted by the Steering Committee.) Fritz Pollard, Class of 1919, became the first African American coach in the National Football League. His classmate Rudolph Fisher was one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, though at Brown he studied medicine. J. Saunders Redding, Class of 1928, became a distinguished author and scholar, a pioneer in the study of African American literature. In 1949, he spent a semester as a visiting professor at Brown, becoming the first Black member of the University’s faculty, before returning to his position at the historically Black Hampton Institute. At least half a dozen other graduates became university professors. Others became lawyers and doctors. Yet the number of Black students admitted to Brown did not increase beyond one or two a year until the 1950s. 150

In 1877, Inman Page, portrayed here by Richard Yarde, and George Washington Milford became the first African Americans to graduate from Brown University. The Brown University Portrait Collection.

The night school has been frequently disturbed. One evening a mob called out of the school house, the teacher, who upon presenting himself was confronted with four revolvers, and menacing expressions of shooting him, if he did not promise to quit the place, and close the school. The freedmen promptly came to his aid and the mob dispersed. About the 18th or 19th of the month … a formidable disturbance took place at the school. The same mob threatened to destroy the school that night, and the freedmen, learning this, assembled … at their place of instruction in a condition of self-defense.

Reparations Demands in the Age of Jim Crow

The dream of reparations for slavery did not end with Reconstruction: the late nineteenth century witnessed a variety of proposals. In the 1880s, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, a Black political leader in Georgia during Reconstruction and later the chief apostle of the “back-to-Africa” movement, argued that African Americans were owed “forty billions of dollars for actual services rendered,” a figure based on two million people earning one hundred dollars per year for two hundred years. Turner offered to settle accounts for $100 million, the amount he calculated was necessary to transport all African Americans to Liberia. Little came of the proposal, though it did receive a backhanded endorsement from two of the U.S. Senate’s most notorious white supremacists, Matthew Butler of South Carolina and John Morgan of Alabama, who in 1890 facetiously introduced a bill to transport any African Americans unhappy in the South to the Congo. 151

The year 1890 also saw the submission to the U.S. Congress of an “Ex-slave Pension and Bounty Bill.” Written by a white southerner concerned with the plight of aged former slaves, the bill never came up for discussion in Congress. But it did become the unlikely foundation of the first popular reparations movement, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association, under the leadership of a Black seamstress named Callie House. House’s twenty-year campaign to get a slave pension bill onto the floor of Congress proved unavailing, but her efforts were sufficient to antagonize federal officials, who prosecuted her for mail fraud. Though the government produced no evidence of misconduct, she was convicted nonetheless on grounds that her activities were prima facie fraudulent, since there was no realistic chance that Congress would enact the proposed legislation. 152

House’s efforts also laid the foundations of the first slave reparations lawsuit. In 1916, activists with ties to the ex-slave pension movement filed a suit in federal court, seeking some $68 million from the U.S. government, a sum based on the revenues the government had collected in taxes and duties on southern cotton in the last years of slavery. Like later reparations suits against the federal government, the case, Johnson v. McAdoo , was dismissed on procedural grounds, including the government’s sovereign immunity from suit. 153

By the time Johnson v. McAdoo was filed, half a century had passed since emancipation, and a majority of former slaves had passed away. In decades to come, the balance would follow. One of the last recorded reparations claims by living survivors of slavery came in an appeal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression. Was there “any way to consider the old slaves,” the authors asked, some way of “giving us pensions in payment for our long days of servitude?” The answer, as on previous occasions, was no, but the timing of the question is noteworthy. Just one year later, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the nation’s first federal system of old-age pensions. The act is rightly remembered as the most important piece of social welfare legislation in American history. Less frequently noted is the fact that the system was deliberately designed to exclude domestic and agricultural workers, the two largest Black employment categories, thus ensuring that neither “the old slaves” nor millions of their descendants were eligible to receive benefits. 154

Race and the Making of the Welfare State

The exclusion of millions of African Americans from participation in the Social Security system was not mere happenstance. On the contrary, most of the signature programs of the New Deal — Social Security, industrial wage codes, agricultural subsidies — were crafted in ways that directed virtually all of the benefits to whites. Even governmental programs that were ostensibly colorblind often operated in racially discriminatory ways. Eligibility for Aid to Dependent Children, for example, the primary component of what we today call “welfare,” was determined by local administrative bodies, which routinely denied Black people benefits to which they were entitled, a pattern that continued into the 1960s. The same would later be true of the G.I. Bill, under the auspices of which millions of returning servicemen were able to attend college. Contrary to modern stereotypes about Blacks and welfare, the American welfare state was a crucial element in perpetuating the tradition of white entitlement and Black exclusion inherited from slavery and Jim Crow. 155

Thus in the underground of our unwritten history, much of that which is ignored defies our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences. . . . Perhaps if we learned more of what has happened and why it happened, we will learn more of who we really are, and perhaps if we learn more about our unwritten history, we won’t be so vulnerable to the capriciousness of events as we are today. . . . Such individuals as Dr. Page … worked, it seems to me, to such an end. Ultimately theirs was an act of faith: faith in themselves, faith in the potentialities of their own people, and despite their social status as Negroes, faith in the potentialities of the democratic ideal. Coming so soon after the betrayal of the Reconstruction, theirs was a heroic effort. It is my good fortune that their heroism became my heritage, and thanks to Inman Page and Brown University is it also now a part of the heritage of all Americans who would become conscious of who they are.

Nowhere was racial discrimination more blatant or of greater long-term significance than in federal housing policy. Facing a record number of home foreclosures during the Depression, the U.S. government set out to transform the way in which Americans were housed. The cornerstones of this system were the Home Owners Loan Corporation (H.O.L.C.), established in 1933, and the Federal Housing Administration (F.H.A), founded a year later. These two agencies, later joined by the Veterans Administration, essentially offered federal guarantees of private mortgages, greatly reducing the costs, complexity, and risks of the existing system. The policy’s object was to make America a nation of homeowners, and it succeeded spectacularly. In the space of four decades, some thirty-five million American families capitalized on these federal programs to add home equity to their estates. One can scarcely overstate the significance of this development. In a nation in which upward of eighty percent of wealth is accumulated through intergenerational transfers, and in which home equity represents the single largest component of such transfers, the H.O.L.C. and F.H.A. dramatically enhanced the life chances of well over one hundred million Americans. 156

Was there “any way to consider the old slaves,” the authors of the appeal asked the President, some way of “giving us pensions in payment for our long days of servitude?” The answer, as on previous occasions, was no, but the timing is noteworthy. One year later, Roosevelt signed legislation creating the Social Security system — a system from which agricultural and domestic workers, the two largest Black employment categories, were excluded.

Virtually all of those Americans were white. The F.H.A. and H.O.L.C. circulated color-coded maps to real estate agents and lenders, with Black and mixed-race neighborhoods marked in red. Such neighborhoods were automatically classified as economically unstable, making residents ineligible to receive federal mortgage guarantees to purchase or repair homes. At the same time, the F.H.A. refused to underwrite mortgages to “incompatible groups” — that is, to African Americans trying to move into white neighborhoods — on the grounds that mixing people of different “social and racial classes” led to “instability and a reduction in values.” The explicitly racial language was later stricken from F.H.A. manuals, but the policy persisted. A study by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found that Black people had been excluded from access to ninety-eight percent of all F.H.A.-guaranteed mortgages between 1948 and 1961, precisely the period in which the American suburban system was created. Only with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, enacted as a tribute to the slain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., did racial discrimination in mortgage provision become illegal. By that time the racial character of America’s cities and suburbs — and with it the racial character of the nation’s public school system — had become firmly entrenched. 157

Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Revival of the Reparations Question

The 1968 Fair Housing Act, coming on the heels of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, represented the last great legislative victory of the Civil Rights era. In law, if not yet in practice, African Americans had finally achieved the full American citizenship promised a century before. Yet 1968 was also a year of bitter disillusionment, marked by the murder of Dr. King, the eruption of ghetto revolts in more than a hundred American cities, and a growing awareness of the profound economic disparities that continued to divide Black and white Americans, notwithstanding the recent legislative gains. As King himself famously put it, “What good is it to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford a hamburger?” The modern slave reparations movement was a product of this historical moment.

The slave reparations movement that emerged in the late 1960s was distinguished from its predecessors in at least two important respects. Most obviously, it was a movement of descendants of slaves rather than of the formerly enslaved themselves, all but a handful of whom had died. It was also a movement profoundly shaped by the contemporary Black Power movement, with its emphasis on Black autonomy and economic empowerment and its deep skepticism about the value of integration. The most visible of the new reparations organizations was the Republic of New Africa, a Black nationalist organization founded in 1968 in Detroit, site of the bloodiest of the era’s ghetto revolts. Founded by two brothers, Gaida and Imari Obadele (née Milton and Richard Henry), the Republic of New Africa demanded $400 billion in “slavery damages” from the U.S. government, along with the cession of five southern states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — as the territorial basis of a separate Black nation. (In the 1990s, Imari Obadele would reemerge as the president and founder of N’COBRA, the National Committee of Blacks for Reparations in America.) 158

The Black Manifesto

Detroit was also the birthplace of the “Black Manifesto.” Drafted at the National Black Economic Development Conference, which met in the city in 1969, the manifesto was announced to the world a short time later when a group of civil rights movement veterans, led by James Forman, disrupted services at New York’s Riverside Church to present its demands. Addressing “the White Christian Churches and the Jewish Synagogues in the United States of America and All Other Racist Institutions,” the manifesto demanded $500 million “as the beginning of the reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed, and persecuted.” It went on to specify the uses to which the fund would be put, including the establishment of a southern land bank, the creation of Black publishing houses and television networks, a strike fund for Black workers, and the founding of a Black university. While authors of the Black Manifesto did not envision a separate Black nation, as leaders of the Republic of New Africa did, their proposals were clearly intended to enhance Black autonomy and self-determination. 159

The Black Manifesto provoked a brief flurry of media comment, much of it condemning the disruptive tactics employed by Forman and his comrades. The substance of the appeal was largely ignored, or at best dismissed as hopelessly quixotic. “[T]here is neither wealth nor wisdom enough in the world to compensate in money for all the wrongs in history,” the New York Times editorialized. The manifesto generated more sustained discussion in academic circles, including among legal scholars. Probably the most authoritative examination of the issue was The Case for Black Reparations by Boris Bittker, the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale. By his own account, Bittker began his research as a skeptic, and he emerged convinced that the legal obstacles to slavery reparations claims were indeed all but insurmountable, particularly when cast in terms of individual payments. But he also concluded that a compelling case for collective reparations could be made for the injuries of Jim Crow, especially for the long denial of equal education. To “concentrate on slavery,” he wrote, “is to understate the case for compensation, so much so that one might almost suspect that the distant past is serving to suppress the ugly facts of the recent past and of contemporary life.” For better or worse, few reparations advocates have attended to Bittker’s observation. 160

The slavery reparations movement that emerged in the late 1960s was distinguished from its predecessors in at least two important respects. Most obviously, it was a movement of descendants of slaves rather than of the formerly enslaved themselves, all but a handful of whom had died. It was also a movement profoundly shaped by the contemporary Black Power movement, with its emphasis on Black autonomy and economic empowerment.

The slavery reparations issue continued to bubble through the 1970s and ’80s, chiefly in Black nationalist circles. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the issue burst back into national prominence, attracting unprecedented interest and support. To some extent, this revival was a response to the proliferation of retrospective justice movements and claims in the United States and around the world. But it also reflected the specific circumstances of Black America, including widespread anger and frustration at the conservative turn in American politics. With ebbing support for civil rights legislation, federal courts increasingly unreceptive to racial discrimination claims, and affirmative action under political and legal assault, some African Americans concluded that reparations were the only means left to address the persistent racial inequalities plaguing American society. “Affirmative action for Black Americans as a form of remediation for perpetuation of past injustice is almost dead,” wrote legal scholar Robert Westley in an influential article. The time had come to “revitalize the discussion of reparations.” 161

The 1988 Civil Liberties Act

African American interest in the reparations issue also received an enormous boost from the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted a formal apology and monetary reparations of $20,000 to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Given the salience of the Japanese American case in the reparations debate, it is worth briefly examining the act. Aside from a 1948 law providing token compensation to some internees for lost property, the internment was little discussed in the decades after the war. Former internees themselves often buried the experience, regarding it as a source of shame and embarrassment. The daughter of Fred Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent who had taken a case to the Supreme Court in 1944 in a vain effort to stop the internment, learned about her father’s experience only after stumbling across a reference to the case in her high school history textbook. Her father had never mentioned it. 162

After decades of silence, a broad redress movement emerged in the 1970s and ’80s. While surviving internees were well represented in the movement, much of the impetus came from younger Japanese Americans seeking acknowledgment of the injuries endured by their aging parents and grandparents. The movement drew strength from new research on the internment by scholars working in the emerging field of Asian American studies. Its influence was further enhanced by the presence in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives of individuals who had been directly touched by wartime events, including two who were interned and two who fought in the U.S. Army as members of a highly decorated Japanese American regiment. The movement achieved an early victory in 1976, when President Gerald Ford formally apologized for the government’s action, but organizers pressed for more. While some pursued reparations through class-action litigation (the case, Hohri v. United States , was eventually dismissed on statute-of-limitations and other procedural grounds), others followed the legislative route, securing the passage of a law appointing a national commission to investigate the history of the episode and to recommend appropriate remedies. The outcome of the process was the Civil Liberties Act, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. 163

The Japanese American Case as a Precedent for Slavery Reparations

Whether the Civil Liberties Act represents a precedent for slavery reparations is questionable. Most obviously, the act paid reparations only to surviving internees, not to their descendants. The authors of the Civil Liberties Act were also careful to present the internment not as an injury to a particular group but as a constitutional violation that had injured the entire nation. This strategy was apparent not only in the act’s title, which made no mention of Japanese Americans, but also in the opening section, which described the bill as an effort to “discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future; and make more credible and sincere any declaration of concern by the United States over violations of human rights committed by other nations.” Finally, the bill included a rider, attached by Senator Jesse Helms, explicitly “to preclude … this legislation from being used as a precedent in the courts or elsewhere to give precedent or standing to any future claims on the part of … any other citizen or group claiming to have been dealt an injustice by the American Government at some time in the past.” (Helms proposed another amendment, not adopted by his colleagues, withholding all payments until the government of Japan had compensated families of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor, a proposal that precisely recapitulated the racist logic of the original internment.) 164

Whatever the relevance of the Civil Liberties Act to slavery redress, it was certainly embraced as a precedent by reparations advocates. If nothing else, the law showed that it was possible for the American nation to confront a historical injustice in a serious way, to apologize publicly for it, and to offer material amends. The act unleashed a torrent of articles in magazines and law reviews, reexamining slavery reparations claims in the context of the Japanese American case. Its influence was also manifest in H.R. 40, introduced by Congressman John Conyers in April 1989. Conyers’ bill called for the appointment of a nonpartisan commission “to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of those forces on living African Americans,” and to recommend remedies to Congress — a formulation almost identical to the language of the bill that established the internment commission. (Although Conyers has regularly reintroduced the bill, he has yet to muster the votes to move it from committee onto the floor of the House.) 165

Seeking Reparations through Litigation

While the Civil Liberties Act and H.R. 40 exemplify the pursuit of reparations through the legislature, others pursued reparations through courts. Berry v. United States and Cato v. United States , filed in California in 1994 and 1995, respectively, both sought reparations for slavery from the federal government. The two cases based their claims on different legal theories. Berry referenced the promise of forty acres of land during Reconstruction, and sought forty acres in compensatory damages. (The acreage specified in the suit included most of downtown San Francisco.) Cato sought monetary damages for the crime of slavery itself, including “kidnapping of ancestors from Africa” and “forced ancestral indoctrination into a foreign society.” In the end, neither theory was tested. Both cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, including the sovereign immunity of the federal government from lawsuits, the failure of plaintiffs to establish legally actionable harms, and the political questions doctrine. 166

A second batch of reparations cases was filed in the early 2000s, targeting not the federal government but corporations alleged to have profited from slavery, the slave trade, and slave-related industries. The cases were clearly inspired by recent settlements in class-action suits brought by Holocaust victims and their descendants against Swiss banks and German corporations complicit in Nazi forced-labor practices; indeed, some of the lawyers who filed slavery cases had previously worked on Holocaust claims. In March 2002, Deadria Farmer-Paellman, a longtime reparations activist, and Edwin Fagan, one of the lead attorneys in the German forced-labor litigation, filed suit in federal court in Brooklyn against Fleet-Boston Bank, railroad giant CSX, Aetna Insurance, and up to one thousand “Corporate [John] Does” to be named later. Though the suit specified no damages, Farmer-Paellman and Fagan publicly mentioned the figure of $1.4 trillion, their calculation of the current value of the forty-acre plots denied to freedpeople after the Civil War. 167

Senator Helms proposed another amendment to the Civil Liberties Act, withholding all reparations payments to former internees until the government of Japan had compensated families of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor. The proposal, which precisely recapitulated the racist logic of the original internment, was not adopted.

Several other suits followed. Consolidated into a single case, “in re: African-American Slave Descendants Litigation,” the cases were argued in the Northern District of Illinois in 2004. The result was a thoroughgoing defeat for reparations advocates. The plaintiffs, the presiding judge ruled, had failed to clear the procedural hurdles necessary for the court even to consider the merits of the case. The judge identified three main deficiencies in the filing, including lack of standing (the plaintiffs’ failure to establish a direct line of descent between themselves and a specific injured party), the expiration of statutes of limitations in all jurisdictions, and the political question doctrine. The plaintiffs were given leave to file an amended complaint, but it too was dismissed on the same grounds. In 2005, the case was resubmitted with additional arguments and materials (including DNA evidence establishing a genetic link between African Americans today and Africans transported to the Americas on slave ships) but this case too was dismissed. Although an appeal of this last dismissal is pending, the idea of securing reparations for slavery through litigation against private companies appears to have come to a dead end, at least for the time being. 168

Municipal Disclosure Ordinances

Even as these suits wound their way through the federal courts, a new front was being opened. In October 2002, the Board of Aldermen of the city of Chicago unanimously adopted the nation’s first “Slave-Era Disclosure Ordinance,” requiring companies with city contracts to examine their historical records, including records of predecessor companies, and to disclose profits derived from slavery. Under terms of the ordinance, companies found to have ties to slavery suffer no penalties; sanctions are reserved for companies that fail to disclose such ties. Los Angeles adopted a similar ordinance in May 2003. Detroit followed a month later. With the failure of litigation, the reparations movement appears to have redirected its energies toward this front, and there are now more than a dozen major cities with ordinances in place or in prospect. 169

Thus far, the impact of the new disclosure ordinances has been borne by large American banks, which tend to have many predecessor companies, as well as many municipal contracts. In December 2004, J.P. Morgan Chase, the nation’s second-largest bank, submitted an amended disclosure statement to the city of Chicago, revealing that two of its predecessor banks in Louisiana had accepted some thirteen thousand enslaved African Americans as collateral for loans. Through defaults, the banks eventually owned — and, in turn, sold — about ten percent of these people. The disclosure was accompanied by a public letter of apology from the bank’s president, as well as the announcement of a $5-million scholarship fund for African American students from Louisiana. Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, made a similar disclosure in June 2005. Thus far only one institution appears to have been disqualified from a city contract. In October 2005, Lehman Brothers of New York was removed as co-underwriter of a $1.5-billion bond issue for Chicago’s O’Hare Airport after failing to submit an amended disclosure statement, an action that reportedly cost the firm $500,000. 170

Disclosures by Private Institutions

Recent years have also seen a series of voluntary disclosures by private institutions. Churches have played the leading role, with denominations ranging from the Southern Baptist Convention to the Church of England adopting resolutions acknowledging and expressing contrition for their historical ties to slavery and the slave trade. The most recent institution to act is the Episcopal Church, which adopted a resolution in June 2006 expressing “profound regret” for its complicity in slavery, as well as its for its long silence about racial discrimination in the era of Jim Crow. In addition to the apology, the church announced a three-year self-study of its relationship to slavery and the slave trade, to be accompanied by a sustained process of dialogue and reflection on possible remedies. The expressed goal of the exercise is to try to “repair the breach” that slavery carved in the life of the church and the nation. 171

In December 2004, J.P. Morgan Chase, the nation’s second-largest bank, submitted an amended disclosure statement to the city of Chicago, revealing that two of its predecessor banks in Louisiana had accepted some thirteen thousand enslaved African Americans as collateral for loans. The disclosure was accompanied by a public letter of apology from the bank’s president, as well as the announcement of a $5-million scholarship fund for African American students from Louisiana.

If the Episcopal Church’s efforts reflect its identity as a religious institution, the action of the Hartford Courant , the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper, bespeaks its institutional identity. In searching the paper’s archives for background on reparations claims against Aetna, a local insurance company, Courant reporters uncovered an entire forgotten history of slavery and slave trading in Connecticut. This history embraced the newspaper itself, which routinely ran paid advertisements for runaway slaves and upcoming slave auctions. On July 4, 2000, the paper published a front-page editorial, “A Courant Complicity, an Old Wrong,” apologizing for “any involvement by our predecessors at the Courant in the terrible practice of buying and selling human beings.” The paper went on to produce a special edition focusing on Connecticut and slavery, entitled “Complicity.” The edition, later published in expanded form as a book, has been distributed to schools across the state. 172

Universities have also been important sites of historical discovery and dialogue. While the venture at Brown has generated the most national attention, other institutions have also confronted their historical ties to slavery. In 2004, the Faculty Senate of the University of Alabama adopted a resolution apologizing for the faculty’s complicity in slavery in the years before the Civil War. The apology focused on previous faculty members’ role in whipping slaves on campus, a responsibility formally assigned to the faculty by the Board of Trustees in the 1840s to forestall students whipping their personal slaves excessively. In 2005, the University of North Carolina unveiled a public memorial, Unsung Founders, honoring the people of color, enslaved and free, who had helped to build the university. At the same time, Emory University announced a “Transforming Community Project,” a five-year program of activities and workshops designed to facilitate dialogue on the university’s historical relationship to slavery and Jim Crow, as well as on the current politics of race on the campus. 173

Racial Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

Time will tell whether recent initiatives by churches, newspapers, and universities represent isolated gestures or the beginning of a broad national discussion about slavery and its legacies. What is certain is that there is much still to discuss. While the nature and sources of racial inequality today are fiercely debated, there is no question that we live in a society characterized by dramatic racial disparities. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more than one in five African Americans — and nearly one in three African American children — lives below the federal poverty line. Recorded in the midst of a booming economy, these figures are the lowest in U.S. history, yet they are still more than three times the comparable figures for non-Hispanic whites. Median white family income is about fifty percent higher than the median Black income; the gulf in wealth, a measure of assets accumulated over generations, is vastly greater. Average Black life expectancy is six years less than for white Americans, while the Black infant mortality rate is twice as high. African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to be ill-housed and ill-educated, and to lack essential medical care. Racial disparities are perhaps most dramatic in rates of incarceration, with African Americans, and Black males in particular, about seven times more likely than whites (and three times more likely than Latinos) to be lodged in state or federal prison. 174

The persistence of racial inequality in America today was thrown into sharp relief by Hurricane Katrina, one of the signal events of the Steering Committee’s three-year tenure. Had the Committee wished to contrive an event to illustrate the continuing relevance of our nation’s racial history it could scarcely have done better than Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in September 2005. As President George W. Bush noted in a national address from the devastated city of New Orleans, the hurricane and ensuing flood exposed the reality of “deep, persistent poverty” in the United States, poverty with “roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.” Equally important, Katrina exposed a vast gulf in the way in which different Americans see their worlds. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the various arguments, the angry allegations hurled in the aftermath of the storm — accusations of government indifference and betrayal, the attempt to shift responsibility for the suffering onto victims themselves, charges and countercharges of misrepresentation and media bias — clearly bespoke a nation that remains deeply conflicted about the meaning of its past.

The problems exposed by Katrina take us back once more to the challenge of retrospective justice. How does a society “repair” such deeply rooted economic, political, and psychological divisions? Is the discourse of reparations, with its emphasis on “healing injuries” and remedying past injustice, a useful medium for thinking about our responsibilities in the present? Are exercises in retrospective justice inherently divisive and backward looking, as some critics have alleged, or can they provide a way to nurture common citizenship and awaken new visions of the future? How might such programs work in practice? These are just some of the questions that might be taken up in a continuing national dialogue about slavery and justice. It is our hope that this Report, in providing information about the history of our University and our nation, as well as about the efforts of other institutions and societies to confront legacies of historical injustice, may enable Americans of all persuasions to discuss such questions more openly and thoughtfully.

Details of the Armenian cases can be reviewed at https://web.archive.org/web/20040611235441/http://armenianinsurancesettlement.com/home.htm . On cases involving human remains, sacred relics, and other cultural property, see Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds.), Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002) and Barkan, The Guilt of Nations , 169–215. On recent litigation involving World War II era atrocities committed by officials and soldiers of Imperial Japan, see in re World War II Era Japanese Forced Labor Litigation, 114 F. Supp. 2d 939 (N.D. Cal. 2000); in re World War II Era Japanese Forced Labor Litigation, 164 F. Supp. 2d 1160 (N.D. Cal. 2001); and Hwang Geum Joo v. Japan , 172 F. Supp. 2d (D.D.C., 2001). Other cases are discussed elsewhere in the report.

Michael C. Dawson and Rovana Popoff, “Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White,” Du Bois Review 1 (2004), 47–91. A USA Today survey produced similar numbers; see USA Today Feb. 22, 2002. Arguments against reparations for slavery can be sampled at https://web.archive.org/web/20060526171749/http://www.wewontpay.com/oldnews.html . Some of the most strenuous opposition to reparations has come from African Americans. See, for example, John McWhorter, “Against Reparations: Why African Americans Can Believe in America,” New Republic , July 23, 2001; and Shelby Steele, “… or a Childish Illusion of Justice? Reparations Ensure Victimhood, Dishonoring our Ancestors,” Newsweek , August 27, 2001. For a critique from the left, see Adolph Reed, “The Case Against Reparations,” Progressive , December 2000.

David Horowitz, “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too,” Brown Daily Herald , March 13, 2001. On the ensuing controversy, see Norman Boucher, “The War Over Words,” Brown Alumni Magazine 101, 5 (2001), 34–41; and David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002). Ruth Simmons, who assumed the presidency of Brown a few months after the episode, referred obliquely to the controversy in her speech to entering freshmen at the university’s Fall 2001 Convocation. “Knowledge is rooted in freedom of speech and inquiry,” she reminded students, adding that anyone who had come to Brown expecting to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas should leave now. See https://web.archive.org/web/20060919105919/http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol26/26GSJ02a.html .

Charles Ogletree, “Litigating the Legacy of Slavery,” New York Times , March 31, 2002. See also Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000), which singles out Brown as an example of an institution resting on profits derived from slavery and the slave trade. The FleetBoston case is discussed, along with other reparations lawsuits, below.

Providence Journal , August 21, 2002. For an early example of slavery reparations advocacy, citing the authority of the Old Testament, see James Swan, “A Dissuasion to Great-Britain and the Colonies, From the Slave Trade to Africa … 1772,” in Roger Bruns (ed.), Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788 (New York: Chelsea House, 1977).

See Roy E. Finkenbine, “Belinda’s Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” The William and Mary Quarterly , 64, 1 (2007), 95–104. Accessed June 6, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4491599 .

See “An Act authorizing the Manumission of Negroes, Molattoes & Others, and for the gradual Abolition of Slavery. February 26, 1784,” Acts and Resolved … of Rhode Island , vol. 23, c# 00210; and “Act repealing Part of the act respecting the Manumission of Slaves. October, 1785,” Acts and Resolves … of Rhode Island , vol. 24, 132. See also Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” The Journal of Legal Studies 3, 2 (1974), 377–401.

“An Act to prevent clandestine Marriages,” Public Laws of the State of Rhode-Island … January, 1798 (Providence: Carter and Wilkinson, 1798), 483; Public Laws of the State of Rhode-Island … Passed since … 1798 (Providence: Jones and Wheeler, 1810), 31. On escalating racial discrimination in the age of gradual abolition, see Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On disenfranchisement, see Public Laws of the State of Rhode-Island, as Revised by a Committee … January, 1822 (Providence: Miller and Hutchinson, 1822); Newport Mercury , January 19, 1822; and James T. Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” American Historical Review 30 (1925), 543–546. Blacks in Rhode Island recovered the franchise through the new state constitution of 1842; see Stanley J. Lemons and Michael A. McKenna, “The Re-enfranchisement of Rhode Island Negroes,” Rhode Island History 30 (1971), 3–13. For the experience of gradual abolition in other northern states, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); and David Menschel, “Abolition Without Deliverance: The Law of Connecticut Slavery, 1784–1848,” Yale Law Journal 111, 1 (2001), 183–222.

On Hardscrabble and its aftermath, see Sweet, Bodies Politic , 353–397. See also Howard Chudacoff and Theodore C. Hirt, “Social Thought and Governmental Reform in Providence, 1820–1832,” Rhode Island History 31, 1 (1972), 23–31. For a contemporary account of the trial, including Tillinghast’s oration, see Hardscrabble Calendar: Report of the Trials of Oliver Cummins [et al.] … for a Riot … at Hard Scrabble (Providence: n.p., 1824).

See A Short History of the African Union Meeting and School-House, erected in Providence (R.I.) in the years 1819, ’20, ’21: with rules for its future government (Providence: Rhode Island Council for the Humanities and Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 2004, orig. pub. 1821). On Black life in Providence, including efforts to secure education, see Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport: Greenwood, 1982); Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, Creative Survival: The Providence Black Community in the Nineteenth Century (Providence: RIBHS, 1985); and William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown, of Providence, R.I. With personal recollections of incidents in Rhode Island (Providence: Angell & Co., 1883).

The campaign for integrated schools can be traced through a series of published broadsides from the late 1850s, most of them penned by George T. Downing, a leader of Providence’s Black community. All are held in the Hay Library at Brown University. See “Will the General Assembly Put Down Caste Schools?” (1857); “Abolition of Colored Schools” (1857); “Dear Sir, The Interest and Anxiety We Feel in the Matter of Educating our Children …” (1858); “We Would Ask, Why Deny Us Our School Rights” (1859); and “To the Friends of Equal Rights in Rhode Island” (1859). The Providence Journal editorials appeared on March 29, 1859 and April 2, 1859. See also Laurence Grossman, “George T. Downing and the Desegregation of Rhode Island Public Schools, 1855–1866,” Rhode Island History 36, 4 (1977), 99–102, and Rachel Van Cleve, “The Fight for Rhode Island School Integration, 1856–1866,” unpublished undergraduate essay, Brown University, 2005.

On compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia, see Michael J. Kurtz, “Emancipation in the Federal City,” Civil War History 24, 2 (1978), 250–267. On the Emancipation Proclamation, see Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). On the Thirteenth Amendment, see Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

The best overview of Reconstruction is Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). See also W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct American Democracy, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935), and Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). On the collapse of Reconstruction, see C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); and Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). On violent conflict during Reconstruction, including the strenuous resistance of Black southerners to efforts to restore white supremacy, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Michael Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization,” in Thomas F. Schwartz (ed.), “For a Vast Future Also”: Essays from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). On demands for back wages and other kinds of compensation, see Foner, Reconstruction , 104–108, passim.

The “delusion” comment, by historian George R. Benson is quoted in John David Smith, “The Enduring Myth of ‘Forty Acres and a Mule’ ,” Chronicle of Higher Education , February 21, 2003. The calculation of the current value of the claim is by William A. Darity Jr., an economist who has written extensively on reparations issues and one of the speakers hosted by the Steering Committee. See Darity, “Reparations,” in Samuel L. Myers (ed.), Civil Rights and Race Relations in the Post-Reagan-Bush Era (Westport: Praeger, 1997), and Darity, “Forty Acres and a Mule in the Twenty-First Century,” unpublished paper, 2004. On H.R. 40, see below.

The text of Field Order #15 is available at http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sfo15.htm , archived at https://perma.cc/8FGW-CXHG . On the status of confiscated land, including the problem of uncertain title, see LaWanda Cox, “The Promise of Land for the Freedmen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (1958), 413–440, and Daniel Wilson Hamilton, “The Limits of Sovereignty: Legislative Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy,” Ph.D. dissertation in history, Harvard University, 2003.

See Foner, Reconstruction , 124–227, 392–411, passim. See also LaWanda Cox, “Andrew Johnson and his Ghost Writers: An Analysis of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Veto Messages,” in Donald G. Nieman (ed.), Freedom, Racism, and Reconstruction: Collected Writings of LaWanda Cox (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). On the Southern Homestead Act, see Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). In the absence of land redistribution, what emerged in the South was a system of Black sharecropping on white land — an arrangement that, in the context of usurious credit practices, racially discriminatory lien laws, and falling cotton prices, frequently devolved into debt peonage. See Harold D. Woodman, New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Donald G. Nieman, From Slavery to Sharecropping: White Land and Black Labor in the Rural South, 1865–1900 (New York: Garland, 1994); and Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens submitted H.R. 29, a bill for the permanent confiscation and redistribution of southern land. The bill, which did not pass, is reprinted in Raymond A. Winbush (ed.), Should America Pay: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations (New York: Amistad, 2003), 328–330. See also Eric Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Roy E. Finkenbine, “Wendell Phillips and ‘The Negro’s Claim’: A Neglected Reparations Document,” Massachusetts Historical Review 7 (2005), 105–119. The query of the Pennsylvania senator, Edgar Cowens, is quoted in Foner, Reconstruction , 237.

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow , 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). On Black life in the Jim Crow South, see Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Litwack, “How Did Segregation Enforce Racial Subordination,” in John David Smith (ed.), When Did Segregation Begin: Readings (Boston: Bedford Books, 2002); and Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet , op. cit.

On the convict lease system, see Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996); Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); David Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); and Karin Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

The best overview of the subject is still George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). On African Americans’ allegedly imminent extinction, see Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (New York: American Economic Association, 1896). On minstrelsy, see Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). For a sampling of late nineteenth-century racist tracts, see John David Smith (ed.), Racial Determinism and the Fear of Miscegenation, Pre-1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993).

Jacqueline Royster (ed.), Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997). See also Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Williamson, “Hellhounds,” in James Allen, et al. (eds.), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). The images of Without Sanctuary , an exhibition of lynching photographs and postcards, can be viewed at http://www.withoutsanctuary.org , archived at https://perma.cc/S64V-6THF . On the 2005 U.S. Senate apology, see above.

Quoted in Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Amistad, 2005), 106.

See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” The Atlantic Monthly , March 1, 1901. On Lincoln’s Reconstruction Proclamation, see Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Washington: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1959), vol. 7, 55, and Michael Vorenberg, “Slavery Reparations in Theory and Practice: Lincoln’s Approach,” in Brian Dirck (ed.), Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). On Freedmen’s Bureau schools, see Roy G. Finkenbine, “Law, Reconstruction, and African American Education in the Post-Emancipation South,” in Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (eds.), Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and William S. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

On proposals for federal funding of education, see Daniel W. Crofts, “The Blair Bill and the Elections Bill: The Congressional Aftermath of Reconstruction,” Ph.D. dissertation in history, Yale University, 1968.

On Black education in the Jim Crow era, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868–1915 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); and Brooke Thomas (ed.), Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).

In a 1979 visit to Brown University, Ralph Ellison spoke of his debts to Inman Page, and on the broader significance of Page’s life. See “Speech on the Dedication of a Portrait of Inman Page” and “Going to the Territory,” both in John F. Callahan (ed.), The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995). Redding’s brief career as a Brown professor is noted in Mitchell (ed.), Encyclopedia Brunoniana , 459.

On Henry Turner and the late nineteenth-century debate over African emigration, see Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Redkey, Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner (New York: Arno, 1971); and James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 99–135. For a modern version of the argument, see Robert Johnson Jr., “Repatriation as Reparations for Slavery and Jim-Crowism,” in Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn’t Enough , 427–434.

For the ex-slave pension bill, see H.R. 1119, 51st Cong., 1st Sess. (1890). On House, see Mary Frances Berry, My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Knopf, 2005).

Johnson v. McAdoo , 45 App. D.C. 440 (1917). The case eventually proceeded to the Supreme Court, which confirmed the dismissal; see Johnson v. McAdoo , 244 U.S. 643 (1917).

The letter to Roosevelt is cited in David Blight, “If You Don’t Tell It Like It Was, It Can Never Be As It Ought To Be,” unpublished address, September, 2002, available at https://glc.yale.edu/events/memory , archived at https://perma.cc/NNP3-RMTC .

The role of federal social welfare policy in underwriting white privilege has generated a large scholarly literature — a literature that has had little impact on American popular opinion, which continues to incline to the view that government policies differentially benefit African Americans. For a sampling, see Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Edwin D. Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and, most recently, Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in American (New York: Norton, 2005).

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

See U.S. Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual: Underwriting and Validation Procedure for Title III of the National Housing Act (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936). See also David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in the Modern American Suburb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Kenneth T. Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,” Journal of Urban History 6, 4 (1980), 419–452; and Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier , 197–217. The N.A.A.C.P. study is cited in Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Latham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 153. For local case studies of the process, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Power in Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Raymond A. Mohl, “Trouble in Paradise: Housing in Miami During the New Deal Era,” Prologue 19 (1987), 7–21.

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disturbances (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). For background and primary source materials relating to the Republic of New Africa, see https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/FreedomNow/ , archived at https://perma.cc/PUQ6-5NNQ?type=image . See also Raymond L. Hall, Black Separatism in the United States (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1978). On N’COBRA, see Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, “The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA): Its Creation and Contribution to the Reparations Movement,” in Winbush, Should America Pay? , 209–225.

The Black Manifesto is reprinted in Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright (eds.), Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969). See also James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account ( New York: Macmillan, 1972), 543–550.

New York Times , September 9, 1969. Boris I. Bittker, The Case for Black Reparations (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003, orig. pub. 1973). (This quotation is on 12.) For a recent restatement of Bittker’s argument, see Boris I. Bittker and Roy L. Brooks, “The Constitutionality of Black Reparations,” in Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn’t Enough , op. cit. Other scholarly works inspired by the Black Manifesto include Daisy G. Collins, “The United States Owes Reparations to its Black Citizens,” Howard Law Journal 16 (1970), 82–117; Gary Elden, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule,’ with Interest: The Constitutionality of Black Capitalism, Benign School Quotas, and other Statutory Racial Classifications,” Journal of Urban Law 47, 3 (1970), 591–652; and Robert S. Browne, “The Economic Case for Reparations to Black America,” American Economic Review 62, 1 (1972), 39–46. See also Bernard Boxhill, “The Morality of Reparations,” in Barry R. Gross (ed.), Reverse Discrimination (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1977).

See Robert Westley, “Many Billions Gone: Is it Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations?” Boston College Law Review 40, 1 (1998), 429–476. Randall Robinson’s The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000) offers a similar argument. See also Martha Biondi, “The Rise of the Reparations Movement,” Radical History Review 87, 1 (2003), 5–18, and Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed , 109–132.

Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness , 94–95. See also Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed , 78–106.

Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians , 2 vols. (Washington: U.S. General Printing Office, 1982). For the history of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, see Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H.L. Kitano (eds.), Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress , revised edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Weiner, Sins of the Fathers , op. cit. Hohri v. United States (793 F. 2d 304 (D.C. Cir. 1986) is discussed in Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness , 112–119. For an assortment of relevant documents, see Brooks (ed.), When Sorry Isn’t Enough , 153–228. On the meaning of the act to former internees, see Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed , 78–106.

Weiner, Sins of the Parents , 68, 72, 82, 165–166, 190 n. 13.

For the text of H.R. 40 and related documents, see https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/40/text , archived at https://perma.cc/6J2T-G5MH . There is today a substantial scholarly literature on the reparations issue, examining the historical, philosophical, and moral underpinnings of reparations demands in general and slavery reparations in particular. See, for example, Charles S. Maier, “Overcoming the Past? Narrative and Negotiation, Remembering, and Reparation: Issues at the Interface of History and the Law,” in Torpey (ed.), Politics and the Past ; and Thomas McCarthy, “Coming to Terms with the Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery,” Political Theory 32, 5 (2004), 750–772. Interest in slavery reparations is especially apparent in law reviews, which have published a host of articles and forums examining the legal foundations of the issue, including the possible value of the Japanese American precedent. Significant works include: Mari J. Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,” Harvard Civil Rights — Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1987), 323–399; Rhonda V. Magee, “The Master’s Tools, From the Bottom Up: Responses to African American Reparations Theory in Mainstream and Outsider Remedies Discourse,” Virginia Law Review 79, 4 (1993), 863–916; Vincene Verdun, “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It: An Analysis of Reparations to African Americans,” Tulane Law Review 67, 3 (1993), 597–668; Eric K. Yamamoto, “Racial Reparations: Japanese American Redress and African American Claims,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 40 (1998), 477–523; Tuneen E. Chisholm, “Sweep Around Your Own Front Door: Examining the Argument for Legislative African American Reparations,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 147, 3 (1999), 677–727; Adrienne D. Davis, “The Case for United States Reparations to African Americans,” Human Rights Briefs 7 (2000), 3–25; “Bridging the Color Line: The Power of African American Reparations to Redirect America’s Future,” (unsigned legal note) Harvard Law Review 115, 6 (2002), 1689–1712; and Charles J. Ogletree, “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate,” Harvard Civil Rights — Civil Liberties Law Review 38, 2 (2003), 279–320. See also “A Dream Deferred: Comparative and Practical Considerations for the Black Reparations Movement,” special issue of the New York University Annual Survey of American Law 58, 4 (2003). While most legal scholars writing on the subject tend to be supportive of the notion of reparations, several distinguished scholars reject it utterly; see, for example, Richard Epstein, “Against Redress,” Daedalus 131 (2002), 39–48, and Epstein, “The Case Against Black Reparations,” Boston University Law Review 84, 5 (2004), 1177–1192.

See Cato v. United States , 70 F. 3d 1103 (9th Cir. 1995); Berry v. United States 1994 U.S. Dist LEXIS 9665 (N.D. Cal 1994); and Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness , 120–123. Other cases include Jackson v. United States , Lewis v. United States , Powell v. United States , all filed in the Northern District of California in 1994, and Bell v. United States , filed in 2001 in the Northern District of Texas. All were ultimately dismissed.

Farmer-Paellman v. FleetBoston Financial Corporation … and Corporate Does Nos. 1–1000 . See https://dockets.justia.com/docket/illinois/ilndce/1:2002cv07766/126269 , archived at https://perma.cc/FE85-SQTT . See also Burt Neuborne, “Holocaust Reparations Litigation: Lessons for the Slavery Reparations Movement,” New York University Annual Survey of American Law 58 (2003).

See in re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, 2004 U.S. Dist. Lexis 872 (N.D. Ill. 2004). For the rehearing, see 375 F. Supp. 2d 721 (N.D. Ill. 2005).

See “Business, Corporate, and Slavery Era Insurance Ordinance,” Municipal Code of Chicago §2-92-585 (2002). While slave-era disclosure ordinances typically operate at the municipal level, the state of California has enacted similar legislation, requiring insurance companies operating in the state to disclose any policies written on slaves, whose names are entered on a state register; see http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/150-other-prog/10-seir/ , archived at https://perma.cc/LM8B-PTGW .

For the Wachovia apology, see https://web.archive.org/web/20060107133641/http://www.wachovia.com/inside/page/0,,134_307%5E1191,00.html . See also Fran Spielman, “Lehman Takes a Hit Over Ties to Slavery; Firm Fails to Amend Disclosure Statement, Loses O’Hare Bond Job,” Chicago Sun-Times , October 2, 2005.

See https://episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2006-C011 , archived at https://perma.cc/8VNV-F8GA , for an account of recent Episcopal Church resolutions.

Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine, 2005). For the original special issue, see https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2000-07-04-0007040049-story.html , archived at https://perma.cc/3ZAR-D6H5 .

On the Alabama apology, see https://facultysenate.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2013/05/Resolution-Acknowledging-and-Apologizing-for-Slavery-at-UA-4-20-04.pdf , archived at https://perma.cc/GW9N-FWA4 . On the University of North Carolina’s Unsung Founders memorial, see https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/45/ , archived at https://perma.cc/2MZ3-WD5P . On Emory’s Transforming Community Project, see http://emoryhistory.emory.edu/issues/discrimination/transforming-community-project.html , archived at https://perma.cc/W3VN-XF8C . At least two other universities, Yale and the University of Virginia, have recently been the site of campus controversies about historical ties with slavery, but thus far neither has launched any sustained investigation. At Yale, the controversy has focused on a report, “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” published by three doctoral students; see http://www.yaleslavery.org/YSA.pdf , archived at https://perma.cc/HT6B-H49S .

Data from the 2000 Census is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20071017005418/http://www.prcdc.org:80/summaries/blacks/blacks.html . See also U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics, “Prison Statistics,” available online at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm , archived at https://perma.cc/8VL4-W538 . The disparities within the criminal justice system are doubly significant, given felon disenfranchisement policies prevailing in many states. In Rhode Island, which has one of the country’s most stringent policies, over twenty percent of Black men currently lack the right to vote. See Nina Keough and Marshall Clement, Political Punishment: The Consequences of Felon Disenfranchisement for Rhode Island Communities (Providence: Rhode Island Family Life Center, 2005). The literature on the sources of and remedies for racial disparity is voluminous and contentious, with some emphasizing the persistence of inequality and highlighting the historical and structural impediments to Black progress and others emphasizing deficiencies of character and culture, as well as the influence of ill-advised government welfare policies. Important contributions to the debate over the last two decades include: William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael B. Katz (ed.), The ‘Underclass’ Debate: Views from History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California, 1999); Adolph Reed (ed.), Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Joe R. Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000); John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000); David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo (eds.), Racialized Politics: The Debate About Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Michael K. Brown, et al. (eds.), Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

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Where Reparations Stand in the U.S.

Despite pockets of momentum in various cities, the fight for reparations is an uphill struggle.

People at a rally hold signs that say “California Black Power Network” while a young man holds up his fist.

By Adeel Hassan

This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here .

After 50 years in slavery, Belinda Sutton was freed and given a pension drawn from the estate of the man who had enslaved her, but it was not out of his generosity. Sutton, a native of Ghana, had to go to court to receive an income for her work, performed on an estate near Boston. And she had to keep returning , to enforce the legal decision that she would be paid.

Her struggle in 1783 to win repayment — one of the earliest known cases in the United States — foreshadowed the difficulties that formerly enslaved people and their descendants face in seeking similar compensation.

Black Americans have made a renewed case for reparations that would redress slavery, post-Civil War landowning restrictions for the newly freed, Jim Crow laws, redlining, discriminatory lending practices and employment discrimination.

The first state-level task force to consider reparations , in California, officially submitted a sweeping report that recommended a formal apology and called for payments to eligible Black residents.

Despite pockets of momentum in various cities , the fight for reparations is an uphill struggle.

What are reparations?

Reparations are measures that seek to rectify a heinous injustice with an acknowledgment and an apology. In this context, they refer to an attempt to remedy the unpaid labor of millions of Africans who arrived in the English North American colonies as human chattel. Their work was vital to the accumulation of American capital, but neither they nor their descendants shared in the benefits.

The goal of any reparations plan today is to compensate the 40 million descendants of the enslaved people and, in theory, to narrow the disparities caused by slavery.

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America, It Is Time to Talk About Reparations

Demonstrators with fists raised in solidarity.

We are two months away from the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in what would become the United States of America. It is time to renew the public discussion about reparations to descendants of Africans who were enslaved as our country was forming and growing rich.

First as colonies and then as a nation, America has existed longer with slavery (1619-1865: 246 years) than without it (1865-2019: 154 years). And the reality of the institution of enslaving people is not the “good food and a decent place to live” narrative of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and others who minimize the horror of the practice. The first 100 of the 154 years without slavery were characterized by socially mandated and legally enforced white supremacy. There were 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950 (an average of a little over one lynching every week).

If the 1965 Civil Rights Act, passed the year after three civil rights workers were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, “leveled the playing field” in America, descendants of enslaved Africans have lived “free” in America for about 54 years. Of course, that 54 years has been characterized by the Republican-inspired war on drugs, the Democratic 1994 crime bill, and a report from the Economic Policy Institute last year that identified “no progress” since 1968 in closing gaps between whites and Blacks in home ownership, employment, or incarceration. In this world, freedom does start to sound like “nothing left to lose.”

President George H. Bush holds up a copy of the National Drug Control Strategy.

Credit: Associated Press

In 1980, Congress responded to a campaign led by Japanese-Americans and established a commission to investigate the legacy of America’s imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in “camps” during World War II. The final report of the commission called the imprisonment of Japanese-American families for 3½ years a “grave injustice” motivated by “racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership.”

In 1988, 43 years after the end of the war, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act that compensated more than 80,000 people of Japanese descent who were imprisoned in camps during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid out $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. America paid more than $1.6 billion as a symbol of trying to right this horrible wrong.

The legacy of enslaving Africans is no less a “grave injustice.” It too flourished because of racial prejudice and a failure in political leadership. America’s political leaders could not see the moral high ground because of notions of white supremacy and piles of money coming from enslaving a race of people. In 1619, some “20 and odd” enslaved people arrived in America. Less than 170 years later, the enslaved population had grown to about 700,000 humans, and America was producing 1.5 million pounds of cotton a year.

On the eve of the Civil War, America’s cotton production had grown to 2.3 billion pounds a year. It was 60% of all U.S. exports. The enslaved population was now almost 4 million humans. The estimated value of enslaved people in the American economy in 1860 was about $3.5 billion (about $100 billion in today’s money). The idea of reparations for slavery is not new. Most Americans know of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, but not many know about the Compensated Emancipation Act of the same year. That law authorized the payment of more than $1 million in 1862 money (more than $24 million in 2017) to D.C. owners of enslaved people for “lost property” when their enslaved people were freed. Believe it or not, America has already paid reparations for the practice of enslaving people — to those who did the enslaving.

An objective, fact-based evaluation of America’s history regarding home ownership, education, the use of the criminal legal system, and other critical areas of American life will reveal a government-supported philosophy that is best described by Thurgood Marshall in his Supreme Court argument in Brown v. the Board . He described the concept of separate but equal as part of “the inherent determination that people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.”

If reparations are the right path for America, how do we get there? Is it through litigation, legislation, state-based work, or is it all three and more? Should payments be made to individuals or should benefits be distributed in other ways? Should every descendant benefit or only those who have a “need”?

Numerous scholars, leaders, and organizations committed to racial justice have wrestled with these questions and others, and their work has made this opportunity for a public conversation possible.

Four years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ monumental essay on reparations for The Atlantic won over the minds of many who had previously bristled at the idea. Between 1989 and his resignation in 2017, former U.S. Rep. John Conyers proposed H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.” It was defeated every Congress. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives called for reparations and published a list of solutions ranging from open access to public universities to a universal basic income.Now, Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee has re-introduced HR 40. Presidential candidates are discussing the concept, and the 400th “anniversary” of the first enslaved people arriving in America provides an opportunity for serious consideration of this issue in terms of racial justice — an issue which is at the heart of America’s past and present.

The ACLU believes the issue of reparations should be seriously considered by all Americans, and in furtherance of that belief, we are beginning a series of essays on the concept of reparations written by those who have labored on this issue for decades.

Congresswoman Jackson Lee has authored the first article on H.R. 40. You will hear from scholars and leaders associated with the National African American Reparations Commission, like Nkechi Taifa, who writes on her experience on being on the frontlines of the reparations movement since the 1960s. Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a political economist and president emeritus at Bennett College of Women, writes on post-13th Amendment terrorism and economic justice. Dr. V.P. Franklin, who edits the Journal of African American History, writes on his views about college tuition and technical training for descendants of enslaved people. Activist and lawyer Aislinn Pulley writes about the Chicago reparations ordinance, created in response to Chicago Police Department’s torture ring, and how that could be a model for reparations for enslaved African Americans. And Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and a chairman at the CARICOM Reparations Commission, writes about how the 21st century will know no greater global movement than the reparations movement. The ACLU is convinced that it is critical for these voices to be heard at this important moment in American history, and we want to do our part in making that happen.

When we talk about race in America, we are always trying to skirt the edges because getting to the heart of the matter requires a journey to a place where people and nations seldom want to go. William Burroughs described it as avoiding the “Naked Lunch” — that moment when everyone has to look at what is really on the end of their fork. It requires a journey to the front of the mirror, with all the lights on, to see who we really are as a nation and how we got to this point.

George Orwell warned us that who controls the past controls the future. It is only by confronting the truth about how we got to 2019 that we can move forward together. We look forward to exploring the truth about reparations with the rest of America.

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Black Reparations

States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations of North America are demanding the return of their tribal lands from Europeans as reparations; Eastern Europeans dispossessed by socialist governments are demanding the return of their property as reparations; and U.S. blacks (black people whose genealogy traces back to slavery within the U.S. [ 1 ] ) are demanding reparations from the United States of America for the harmful wrongdoings to them caused by U.S. slavery and its aftermath. The last of these demands is our subject.

1. History of U.S. Reparations to Blacks

2. john locke on reparations, 3. reparations, restitution, and compensation, 4. kinds of reparations, 5. ethical approaches to reparations, 6. reparations for slavery, 7. the harm argument, 8. the inheritance argument, 9. supersession and historic injustices, 10. reparations policies, other internet resources, related entries.

Oddly, Thomas Jefferson was probably the first to imply that the U.S. ought to make reparation to its slaves. He did not explicitly say that it did or ought to, and his proposal to send them off to “such place as circumstances of the time should render most proper” and to “declare them a free and independent people” was mainly motivated by a desire to rid the U.S. of them, but it also suggests that they were a people and that the U.S. was under some obligation to set them up as a people (Jefferson 1785a [1954: 138]). Some years after Jefferson’s proposal, American slaveholders founded (1816) the American Colonization Society whose ostensible object, made plausible by the presence of some white Quakers among its founders, was to help African Americans to go to Liberia and get a fresh start in a country free of racial discrimination. But the real object of the Society, or at least that of the white slaveholders who founded it, was to rid the country of free blacks who they feared endangered their peculiar institution. Their stratagem was therefore dealt a deadly blow when Martin Delany, who agreed with Jefferson that U.S. blacks were a people and needed a territory on which to become a state, declared that Liberia was “not an independent nation at all; but a poor miserable mockery —a burlesque on a government—a pitiful dependency on the American Colonizationists” and its “principal man, called President, in Liberia” was a “mere parrot” of these individuals (Delany 1852 [2004]: 185, emphasis in original).

Demands for compensation related to slavery frequently arose during the U.S. Civil War, but not do so in the way present day U.S. citizens would expect. The demands were not to compensate the black slaves for the injuries of slavery, but to compensate the white slaveholders for the anticipated loss of their slaves. These demands were voiced in the South when they faced the prospect of having to free their slaves, but they were also voiced in the North, and from the highest sources. President Abraham Lincoln, for example, repeatedly urged compensated emancipation, which meant paying the slaveholders for the loss of their slaves who would then be deported from the U.S.. Indeed, at one time he appeared to be ready to propose paying the South $400,000,000, for the loss of their slaves. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed dryly: “Lincoln was impressed by the loss of capital invested in slaves, but curiously never seemed seriously to consider the correlative loss of wage and opportunity of slave workers, the tangible results of whose exploitation had gone into the planters’ pockets for two centuries.” (Du Bois 1992 [1935]: 150). And Lincoln did not even sugar coat his deportation proposal with the suggestion that the freedmen were a nation and therefore needed a separate territory on which to govern themselves.

Thaddeus Stevens, congressman from Pennsylvania, argued that it was not enough to free the slaves and give them the right of suffrage; but that in addition they should be given land confiscated from the rebels. Charles Summer, senator from Massachusetts eventually came to agree with him, but surprisingly the radical ex-slave Frederick Douglass did not. Peter C. Myers (2008) speculated that Douglass’s “moderation” at this point was a reflection of “what was politically possible,” and of his concern that benevolent missions organized by whites might encourage dependence in the freedmen and prevent them from developing and exercising the virtues of a free people. Douglass’ proposed instead a federal corporation that would purchase tracts of land and then resell or lease them on favorable terms to the freedmen, urging that this arrangement was “more fully consistent with the principle of self-reliance” and give “greater societal recognition of the freed people’s virtue in providing for themselves.” Myers suggested that Douglass was following Jefferson in emphasizing the corrupting effects of dependence. But while Jefferson had indeed identified dependence as a crucial corrupter, it “begets subservience and venality, suffocates virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition” (Jefferson 1785a [1954: 165]) he declared, he was equally clear that legislators must protect the independence of the small yeoman farmer “the most precious part of the state” from the usurpation of the powerful (Jefferson 1785b [2006: 154]). In other words, Stevens had proposed his scheme for the freed people for exactly the reasons Jefferson proposed legislation for protecting the white yeomen. Years later Douglass evidently saw the error of his moderation. Myers cites his comment in 1882 that had the counsels of Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and ‘leading stalwart Republicans’ prevailed, “the terrible evils from which we now suffer would have been averted”, and “the Negro to-day”, would be “tilling his soil in comparative independence” (Myers 2008: 239, quoting Douglass 1882, Appendix A, 440–441). The theme continues to the present day.

Perhaps the most noteworthy demand for U.S. black reparations after the Civil War occurred in 1969 when James Foreman, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), read his “Black Manifesto” at the National Black Economic Development Conference, in Detroit, and later on in Riverside Church in New York City. The “Manifesto” demanded $500,000,000, in reparations from Christian white churches and Jewish synagogues, or as the “Manifesto” put it, “15 dollars per nigger.” This demand for reparations, the Manifesto argued, was justified because for over three and a half centuries, whites with the assistance and collaboration of their churches and synagogues had unjustly, through slavery and discrimination, wrested enormous economic advantages from blacks. Although this argument relied on widely accepted moral intuitions, the Manifesto received little popular support. It did, however, provoke discussion in newspapers and news magazines, as well as some scholarly discussion. Boris Bittker included it as an appendix in his book The Case for Black Reparations (1973); Hugo Bedau provided and extended analysis in his “Compensatory Justice and the Black Manifesto” (1972); Michael Harrington and Arnold Kaufman debated its merits in “Black Reparations—Two Views” (1969); and a number of philosophers wrote essays inspired by its argument, most notably, Bernard R. Boxill (1972).

Although interest in the topic remained high among U.S. black philosophers, the wider community of political philosophers preoccupied with Rawlsian ideal theory generally ignored it. But broad and vigorous interest has been rekindled. Perhaps the causes lie outside of academia; in 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act which authorized payment of reparations to Japanese American citizens who had been imprisoned during World War II; U.S. Congressman John Conyers had in each session of Congress since 1989 introduced a bill to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and segregation; in 2000 Randall Robinson published his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks ; in 2003 David Horowitz published his Uncivil Wars ; and in 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates’s widely discussed essay “The Case for Reparations”, appeared in The Atlantic . In September 2020, California Assembly Bill 3121 established the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans , in connection with the enslavement of blacks in the U.S.

John Locke provided an early and very clear argument for the reparations owed a lawful conqueror, and many arguments for black reparations follow the outlines of his argument. [ 2 ] For Locke people have natural rights they get directly from Natural Law and rights they have acquired in accordance with Natural law. To restrain violations of rights, he proposed punishment; punishment must be administered “with so much Severity as will suffice to make it an ill bargain to the Offender, give him cause to repent, and terrifie others from doing the like.” (Locke 1689: sec 8) And to repair the damage that crime “commonly” causes “some person or other,” Locke proposed reparations. As he put it, reparation must give the “satisfaction due to any private Man, for the damage he has received” (Locke 1689: sec 11). According to Locke, reparations were rights stemming from the right of self-preservation. But he insisted that the rights can be pressed only against the “goods or service of the Offender” (Locke 1689: sec 11). More precisely, while the person damaged can seek help from anyone, she, the victim, has a right to reparations only against the one who wrongly caused her damage. But Locke does not say that she must be the immediate victim of the “Offender”. His claim that crime commonly damages “some person or other” suggests that she may be anyone damaged as a result of the offender’s violation of right. For example, she may be damaged because someone murdered her father and thus caused her to live in straitened conditions. On Locke’s account, she may be entitled to press her right to reparations against the murderer for the damage he caused her to suffer. On the other hand, Locke’s claim that crime “commonly” damages someone suggests that crime or violations of rights do not always cause damage and consequently do not always generate rights to reparations, though it does not suggest that such violations of right do not deserve to be punished. But even when the violation of right does not cause material losses, it may cause damages to its victim’s self-respect and moral standing, and in such cases the satisfaction due to her may include an admission of wrong doing from the wrongdoer, a plea for her forgiveness, and an apology. If such admission, plea, and apology require that the wrongdoer repent, reparations may seem to require that the wrongdoer be punished, given Locke’s view that repentance is among the objects of punishment (Locke 1689: sec 8). But Locke seems clear that the rights to reparations and the right to punish are different rights. On his view, we give up the right to punish to the state, but retain the rights to reparations. He writes that the “Magistrate, … can often, where the publick good demands not the execution of the Law, remit the punishment of Criminal Offences …, but cannot yet remit the satisfaction due to any private Man, for the damage he has received” (Locke 1689: sec 11). Arguably, then, the apology the wrongdoer must give to his victim in order to give her the satisfaction she has a right to does not require that he repent and perhaps therefore does not require that his apology be sincere. It is also worth noting that although unjust enrichment from crime should not be tolerated, it has little if anything to do with reparations. Reparations focus on getting satisfaction for the injured victim of crime and the criminal need not unjustly enrich himself as a result of the crime to have wrongfully injured her. He owes her reparations even if he impoverished himself in the process of injuring her. Finally given Locke’s separation of the right to punish from the rights of reparations, and his claim that the rights to reparations is about making satisfaction to the victim of wrongdoing, Locke would seem committed to holding that when an act of wrong doing is excused though it causes harm that the victim has a right to reparations although the magistrate may well decide that the public good does not require that the state exercise its right to punish the wrongdoer.

In its primary sense, restitution is “restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner” (The New Oxford American Dictionary 2001). Clearly, then, reparations and restitution both presuppose the separation of something from its proper owner. But, equally clearly, reparations do not constitute restitution. Reparations can only occur after some losses or damage due to a prior wrongdoing. But though restitution can only occur after some loss or damage, that loss or damage need not be due to a prior wrongdoing. If A loses his wallet and B finds it and returns it to A , restitution has been made although no wrongdoing was committed. Further, while reparations is a right (or a cluster of rights), restitution is not always a right. If B finds but leaves A ’s wallet where it is, restitution has not been made, but it is not clear that a right was violated. It is doubtful that a person who loses things has a right that others find it for him. If B finds but keeps A’s wallet, then again restitution has not been made, and A has a right that B return it. But in that case A has a right that B return it because A has a right to reparations and restitution can sometimes be part of reparations. Some authors seem to think that B ought to return the wallet because otherwise B will have unjustly enriched himself at A ’s expense. But it is not clear why B’s unjust enrichment is a necessary condition for B’s obligation to return the wallet to A . Even if the wallet is worthless and B is not unjustly enriched by keeping it, B has no business holding on to it since it is not his property.

Restitution is neither necessary nor sufficient for reparations even when the thing to be restored to its proper owner was stolen. If A steals a bicycle from B , B has a right to reparations and consequently to restitution if A has the bicycle; reparations must give satisfaction, and A ’s satisfaction may depend on her getting back the very thing that was stolen from her. But she may have lost more than the bicycle as a direct result of its theft and her right to reparations requires satisfaction for that further loss. Consequently, restitution is not always sufficient for reparations. On the other hand, the bicycle may have been destroyed or loss after its theft, making restitution but not reparations impossible. Consequently, restitution is not necessary for reparations.

Compensation is related to reparations and restitution but is not the same thing as either. It is not reparation because it simply makes up for damage, harm or loss or lack whether or not it was caused by wrongdoing. Robert Nozick’s famous definition of compensation makes this sufficiently clear: “Something fully compensates a person for a loss if and only if it makes him no worse off than he would otherwise have been; it compensates person X for person’s Y ’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, if Y had not done A .” (Nozick 1974: 57)

Note that Nozick (correctly) does not say that the loss or the action A must be wrongful. Thus a person may be compensated for a loss though he does not have a right to reparations. If a person deserves a loss he has no right to reparations for it, but he may be compensated for it, probably unjustifiably. Even if he has a right to compensation, he may still have no right to reparations. For example, he may have a right to be compensated for a loss if he is insured against it, but his right is a right to compensation not a right to reparations if no wrongdoing caused his loss.

But if a person has a right to reparations, he will also often have a right to compensation. This is because his right to reparations is a right to satisfaction for the damages he suffered and such satisfaction often requires that he be made no worse off than he would have been had he not suffered the loss. This does not make a right to compensation the same thing as a right to reparations since a right to reparations can only be generated by damages caused by wrongdoing.

Since a right to reparations is always generated by a wrongful harm, such rights are part of corrective justice or to use Rawls’s term, “partial compliance theory” (Rawls 1971: 8, 9). But Rawls must allow that there can be rights to compensation in full compliance theory. This follows since people can suffer damages that result from no one’s wrongdoing, and may have insured themselves against such damages. Consider too Rawls’s “principle of redress”. This is a principle of compensation for full compliance theory. It may be objected that it cannot be such a principle, but must be instead a principle of non-ideal justice, since according to Rawls himself it requires that “undeserved inequalities”, such as the “inequalities of birth and natural endowment” be “somehow compensated for” (Rawls 1999: 100). But Rawls’s use of “undeserved” at this point is not meant to imply that he is referring to inequalities that are the result of injustice. It only means that those with the inequalities in question did nothing to deserve them.

Kinds of reparations are at least two in number: compensatory, as discussed above, and non-compensatory. In either case, reparations are to be understood as matters of rights to those wrongfully harmed by a group or a state. However, while compensatory reparations amount to rights to monetary compensation paid by a responsible party to those they have harmed, as discussed in section 4 above, non-compensatory reparations constitute rights to enactments of social justice in non-monetary forms such as the removal of symbols of injustice from official governmental spaces, the accurate teaching of history of a society in non-exclusionary terms, etc. (Corlett 2010: 1-17). In either case, reparations can serve as a condition of an apology with an eye toward social forgiveness and reconciliation (Corlett 2010: 187–212).

Generally, there are two ethical approaches that might be used to ground or justify reparations: utilitarian versus rights-based. Utilitarian approaches to reparations seek to justify and articulate reparations in terms of equity for oppressed citizens relative to other citizens of a society, no matter to which, say, “racial” or ethnic groups they belong. Further, their commitment to a suitably described principle of utility will attempt to promote rights to reparations up to a point wherein social utility maximization and equality amongst the citizenry are threatened based on the perceived consequences of the application of a particular reparative policy. But this level of commitment to the rights to reparations is criticized for its inadequate commitment to honoring said rights qua rights, thereby subsuming the rights to reparations under the utilitarian commitments to social utility considerations and equality (Corlett 2010: 33–79), something the rights-based approach would reject concerning rights in general (Feinberg 1980; Rawls 1999). For the rights-based approach to reparative justice, a right to reparations fashioned by social utility maximal considerations is no right at all. The rights to reparations, like other rights, must be honored, not merely promoted in accordance with the ethics of a utilitarian calculation. For if X is a right at all, X as a right trumps social utility considerations.

For the rights-based approach to reparations, such rights include at least the following rights-cluster: The set of rights to corrective justice honored in proportion to the wrongful harm experienced by either the proximate cause of the harm caused to the group or to the group responsible for honoring the reparations in question. It is important to note that a group can be responsible for compensating a harm without that group being guilty of causing the harm (Feinberg 1970). Hence in the case under consideration, the U.S. government is said to owe reparations to U.S. blacks for the enslavement of said blacks on what is currently considered to be U.S. soil.

This entry focuses on making a case for reparations for contemporary U.S. blacks for the enslavement of their U.S.-enslaved ancestors, partly because slavery was one of the most horrific experiences that said blacks have endured in the U.S., and the one for which the immediate victims of the experience most clearly deserve reparations; and partly because making the case in question nevertheless presents peculiar, difficult, and particularly interesting philosophical problems. As we will see, much of that case will depend on the argument that the injustices U.S. blacks endured after emancipation have caused some of the injuries of the slaves to persist into the present. But there is no reason to suppose that these injustices did not themselves cause damages to their victims, quite apart from causing the damages of slavery to persist, and that these damages may also deserve reparations. In fact, there is good reason to suppose that arguments to that effect may be more important politically than slave-based arguments for black reparations.

Stevens’s argument for slave reparations was simply that the slave holders had committed serious harmful transgressions against the slaves, who consequently had rights for reparation against their masters that could plausibly be satisfied by some of their masters’ land. Today, few would challenge that argument, at least publicly. The argument that many challenge today is that present day U.S. blacks have rights to reparations from contemporary U.S. citizens or the U.S. government because generations ago the U.S. government permitted many U.S. citizens to enslave several blacks. That argument seems to get no support from the undeniable fact that enslaved black ancestors had rights to reparations from their respective masters. People do not have rights to reparations for the wrongful harms others suffer. Two arguments, the harm argument and the inheritance argument, each attempt to circumvent this difficulty.

The harm argument relies on the idea that the transgressions of slavery initiated an unbroken chain of harms linked as cause and effect that began with the slaves and continues among U.S. blacks to the present day. Therefore, since the transgressions of slavery harm present day U.S. blacks they have rights to reparations against those who committed those transgressions. It differs crucially from the inheritance argument because it assumes that slavery’s transgressions against the slaves have harmed present day U.S. blacks but the inheritance argument does not. The inheritance argument relies on the idea that present-day U.S. blacks have inherited the rights to reparation that was owed their enslaved ancestors and was never paid.

Three main objections have been urged against the harm argument against U.S. reparations to blacks. First, that although the transgressions of slavery harmed the slaves, and present-day U.S. blacks do suffer from many disadvantages, these disadvantages may not be the result of the transgressions of slavery; they could easily be the result of vast economic and political changes that have occurred since slavery ended. The present harms may not be the “automatic effects of slavery” (Sher 1981: 7). Second, that even if present day U.S. blacks have been harmed by the slaveholders’ transgressions against their ancestors, and have rights to reparations against these slaveholders, such rights can only be pressed against the slaveholders who are now all dead. Third that if present-day U.S. blacks demand reparations for the harms that the transgressions of slavery caused them, then since reparation implies compensation, they demand to be made no worse off than they would have been had the transgressions of slavery never occurred. But if these transgressions had never occurred present-day U.S. blacks would not exist. Consequently, the harm argument is incoherent (Morris 1984, Levin 1980).

Fullinwider reformulated the harm argument so that it avoids the first two objections. The reformulated argument goes as follows: the U.S. government after 1865 failed “to vindicate the rights to full and equal citizenship the Civil War Amendments extended to U.S. blacks;” but, had that government “vigorously” protected those rights, “the legacy of slavery would have faded considerably if not wholly by now through the industry of blacks themselves”. Consequently if present day blacks do suffer from various aspects of the legacy of slavery, the real cause of those harms is not slavery, but the U.S. governments after 1865, for if those governments had vigorously protected the rights of the freed people and their descendants, the legacy of slavery would have faded and present day U.S. blacks would not be disadvantaged by it (Fullinwider 2004).

Boris Bittker made a similar suggestion. His main argument is that had the goals of Reconstruction not been foiled by the “political settlement of 1877” and the network of Jim Crow laws not been introduced and finally fully authorized by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the “only identifiable residue of slavery today would have been cultural”, and the descendants of U.S. slaves and the descendants of U.S. slaveholders would lead the same lives (Bittker 2003: 12, 13). In other words, Bittker seems to go a little further than the first one, suggesting that the legacy of U.S. slavery would have disappeared completely if the U.S. government had protected the rights of the freed people and their descendants, the second line of reasoning too concludes that any responsibility for the legacy of slavery that persists today must be attributed to post Civil War governments.

These arguments of Fullinwider and Bittker are clear improvements on the original harm argument. But they seem to assume that post-Civil War governments committed only one transgression against their black populations, namely those governments failed to protect the civil rights of the members of those populations. In fact, however, these governments committed another and quite distinct transgression against their black populations; they failed to make reparations to those populations. These two transgressions are not the same thing. The duty of government to protect its citizens’ civil and political rights is one thing; its duty to pay and/or make reparations to them if it has wrongly injured them is quite another.

Fullinwider seems aware that protecting civil and political rights is not the same as making reparations, that the U.S. government did not fulfill all of its obligations to the Japanese it interred during World War II just because it released them after the war and protected their civil and political rights after that. But some write as if they believe that the post-Civil War governments would have fulfilled all of their obligations to their black citizens if only they had protected those citizens’ civil and political rights (Fullinwider 2004: 148). Others write that compensation in 1865 to the slaves for their forced or unpaid might have been “strong” (Bittker 2003: 12), and that “compensation in 1865 for blacks’ forced labor would certainly have been appropriate” (Bittker 2003: 28). But having conceded that monetary compensation would have been in order in 1865, Bittker then drops the point without comment. Interestingly, too, he seems to think that unpaid labor is the only harm the transgressions of slavery caused the slaves or that merits any mention. This is a strange position to hold for a book titled The Case for Black Reparations , for of course unpaid labor was perhaps the least of the harms that the transgressions of slavery visited on the slaves. What about reparation for the theft of their liberty?

But the claim that “Had the federal government done nothing after 1865 except vigorously protect the civil and voting rights of blacks, the legacy of slavery would have faded considerably if not wholly by now through the industry of blacks themselves” (Fullinwider 2004: 148) suggests that only the governments’ failure to protect the civil and political rights of the freed people and their descendants caused any problem. An obvious difficulty with this view is that large economic inequalities make it difficult for the government to protect the rights of the poor. That problem aside, these authors give no argument to support their view that the freed peoples’ descendants would have recovered from the wrongful harms of slavery without the help of reparations if only government had protected their civil and political rights. Fullinwider’s confidence seems to rest on the “immigrant model”, by which is meant the path to success taken by the European immigrants who came to America after the Civil War, and with “little to offer but their physical labor”, and “by dint of hard work” eventually “blended into the larger American fabric”. The implication is that the freed people were sufficiently like these immigrants to justify the inference that had government vigorously protected their civil and voting rights then they too by would have blended into the larger American fabric (Fullinwider 2004: 148).

But the freed people and their descendants were not very much like the white immigrants arriving from Europe. To say the obvious, slavery is very bad for people. It prevents them from developing the useful dispositions and skills that people tend to develop in freedom. Although the immigrants had had a rough time in Europe—that is why they flocked to America—they were better prepared to take advantage of the opportunities available than the slaves. Consequently, they would likely have kept well ahead of the freed people and their descendants even if the civil and political rights of each group were equally protected. The issue is debatable of course. Some black writers, Douglass, for example, seem to think that human beings are resilient, equipped as they are with an almost ineradicable love of liberty, and consequently the slaves would recover readily from the rigors of slavery if only they were given justice. He liked to say that all he asked for the Negro was “simply justice”, though the contexts always left it unclear how much he included in justice, whether it would involve reparation, and whether he was simply denying that he was not asking for “benevolence” or “pity” for the Negro (Douglass 1865: 283). Alexander Crummell, on the other hand, seemed to worry about the enduring effects of slavery especially because of the tendency of its victims to remember its horrors, though interestingly Douglass thought that these memories could be bracing (Crummell 1891: 18, 19). The issue of the effects of the memory of enslavement and domination on recovery from the effects of these evils deserves further study. Whatever the results of that study, however, it does not follow straightaway that the wrongly injured are not owed reparations just because they are resilient enough to recover from the effects of their injuries without it.

Even if socio-economic advancement depends on informal contacts that involve the sharing and transfer of genuinely useful information and skills among people who enjoy what used to be called “social equality”. But social equality cannot be secured by even the most rigorous protection of the civil and political rights of the freed people; on the contrary such protection can help social inequality to persist since it entitles individuals to choose their friends and associates even if their choice is determined by color prejudice. Since color prejudice remained strong after the Civil War the white immigrants would more readily associate with well-placed and well-educated locals and learn useful information and skills from them. Finally, since social equals tend to marry each other rather than their inferiors, and since immigrant whites were more likely than the freed people and their descendants to become the social equals of prosperous native whites, they were also more likely to marry such individuals and thus to gain access to their wealth, much of it incidentally inherited from the spoils of slavery.

Bittker seems aware that the official enforcement of civil and political rights might not nullify the effects of personal prejudice and asks whether “personal” prejudice without official segregation would have produced segregation, “first in the home, then in Mrs Murphy’s boardinghouse, and then in business and politics”. This issue is of decisive importance for the implied contention that even without reparations blacks would have made themselves equal to whites if there had been no Jim Crow legislation. He rejects William Graham Sumner’s maxim “law-ways cannot alter folkways” which implies that segregation and prejudice could have persisted without the help of Jim Crow laws. However, there seems to be no argument to show that Sumner’s maxim is mistaken. Bittker takes it as a “working hypothesis” that “statutes, ordinances, and other official actions have been the predominant source of the racial discrimination that has blighted our public and private life,” given that we have no science “capable of producing a model of the United States as it would have been if blacks had come here as voluntary immigrants rather than as slaves, or if emancipation had been followed by an integrated society” (Bittker 2003: 26).

The many and various considerations just canvassed conclude that it is too optimistic to suppose that the descendants of the freed people, without reparations, would have achieved parity with the descendants of the white immigrants if only their civil and political rights had been protected. In any case, the issue they raise is a distraction from the central question whether U.S. blacks are owed reparations. Achieving parity with the descendants of immigrants is not the same thing as receiving the reparations one is owed. The point of reparations is not to make people equal to others; reparations is not defined as making the wrongly harmed equal to others. In fact, equality has little to do with reparations. People deserve reparations as a matter of right when they have been wrongfully harmed by transgression but a person may be harmed as a result of transgression and may therefore have a right to reparations and yet be better off than others. Similarly, a person may be worse off than others without having suffered from any harm or disadvantage for which he deserves reparations. If reparations necessarily requires compensation it requires that people be put as far as possible in the condition they would have been in had they not been wrongly injured. This may make them equal to others, but it may not. It can leave them worse off than others and it can also make them better off than others. Some philosophers may protest that we should not allow claims for reparations to get in the way of an ideal egalitarian society, but of course their position is as bad as the utilitarian arguments they disparage that rights may and should be violated in order to maximize utility (Corlett 2010).

But it is now time to consider the third main objection to the harm argument. This objection, let us recall, is that making reparations to the present U.S. black population for the harms that slavery caused it is impossible because if slavery had never occurred the present U.S. black population would not exist. This problem is now known as the non-identity problem. This difficulty might seem to reappear in the revised harm argument just described. For although this argument does not call for compensating the present U.S. black population for the harms that slavery caused it, it may seem to call for compensating the present U.S. black population for the harms it suffers because of policies enacted and enforced before it was conceived. Given that these policies would have affected who was conceived in succeeding U.S. black populations, had they not occurred the present U.S. black population would not exist.

The following discussion shows how this difficulty can be avoided. Imagine two slaves, Tom and Beulah released from slavery. They were released from slavery but the government continued to wrong them in at least two ways: first, by preventing them from exercising rights guaranteed to every citizen; second, by violating their rights to be compensated for the harms that it had caused them by supporting their enslavement. And both these wrongs probably harmed them. Obviously preventing them from voting or going to school probably harmed them; and the harm that often results when one’s right to be compensated is violated is an additional harm, on top of the harm caused by the first violation of right. If you owe me a hundred dollars to compensate me for wrongly breaking my arm, you wrong me again by refusing to give me what you owe me, and you might owe me another thousand dollars for the harms that second wrong might cause me, for example going around for a month with the pain and inconvenience of an unfixed broken arm. Now the government wronged Tom and Beulah in the two ways mentioned as soon as it caused them to be released from slavery and before Beulah conceived any child; but it also continued to wrong them in these ways after the conception of their daughter, Eulah. These wrongs to Tom and Beulah almost certainly harmed them by forcing them to remain longer in the poverty and ignorance that slavery had put them in. But it is more germane to the present argument that the wrongs also almost certainly harmed their daughter Eulah. They harmed her by keeping her parents in poverty and ignorance and by, therefore, also keeping her in ignorance and poverty. They also harmed her by causing her to be raised by parents with the various disabilities that the experience of slavery normally causes its victims. And if she acquired these disabilities from her parents by imitation and necessity, and if these disabilities harmed her, the government’s wrongs caused those harms too. If wrongdoers must make reparations for the damages their wrongdoing causes other people, then the government must make reparations to Eulah.

The argument is not that Eulah has a claim to the compensation her parents Tom and Beulah’s were owed and never paid. If that were the argument, we would have an inheritance argument, not a counterfactual argument. Eulah’s claim for compensation is for harms she herself suffered. And she can rightly press that claim against the government. It is not as though her parents could have done better by her but chose not to. The government’s wrongs prevented them from doing better by her. They had no choice but to raise her in poverty and ignorance. The government could have given them a choice if it had compensated for their wrongfully caused harms, or allowed to recover from them. But it did not. Second, the amount of the compensation she is owed does not depend on the amount of compensation they were owed. It depends on the harms she suffered. Though she suffered those harms because they were harmed and not compensated, compensating her for her harms may be much more, (or much less), than compensating them.

Third, she may have an inheritance-based claim to their compensation. The fact that she was harmed because they were not compensated and can claim compensation for that harm does not mean that they lose their claim to be compensated for their harms. If they were never compensated she may therefore inherit a right to their compensation. The counterfactual argument is compatible with the inheritance-based argument.

Fourth, her claim for compensation is not confounded by the argument that she would not exist had the wrongs that caused her harms not occurred. Those wrongs are not the wrongs of slavery, which occurred before she was conceived, and indeed were among the causes of her being conceived. And they are not the wrongs that government committed against her parents after it released them from slavery and before she was conceived. They are the wrongs that were all committed after her conception. They are the wrongs of not protecting her parents’ rights and failing to compensate them for the wrongs already committed against them. Had those wrongs not been committed, she would have lived in less straitened conditions, and would have been less constrained to imitate and duplicate her parents’ slavery induced qualities and habits.

The inheritance argument for black reparations states that the freed people had rights to reparations for their injuries; that they held these rights against the slave holders and also against the state and federal governments for failing in their duties to protect them from the slave holders; that these rights were never honored; and finally, that they passed on the right of inheritance to present day U.S. blacks who are their descendants and heirs. (Corlett 2010)

This argument avoids the objection that the present black population would not exist if their ancestors had never been enslaved. And each premise seems plausible. When people die their rights to their property are normally passed on to their heirs (Boxill 1972: 113–122; Kershnar 1999: 95–101). The reparations owed to the freed people was their property; it was never in their physical possession of course, but obviously something need not be in your possession to be your property. Neither did the freed people abandon their inheritance. Laws and guns very forcefully kept it from them. Consequently, it should pass, by right of inheritance, to their descendants, the present black population. [ 3 ]

Two important objections against the inheritance argument are: first that it relies on the counterfactual claim that the freed people and their descendants would have held on to their reparations had they received it; and second that it demands that people make reparations for the injuries of a crime that they could not have committed. Let us begin with the second.

Locke’s discussion of a lawful conqueror’s rights to reparations suggests how to solve it. “The right of Conquest”, Locke claims, “extends only to the Lives of those who joyn’d in the War, not to their Estates, but only in order to make reparation for the damages received, and the Charges of the War, and that too with reservation of the right of the innocent Wife and Children” (Locke 1689: sec. 180). Locke’s claim is that the lawful conqueror has rights to reparations from the estates of those who unjustly waged war against him, though some part of these estates should be reserved for their wives and children. The clear implication is that the wives and children would have gotten a larger part of the estates in question had their husbands and fathers not harmfully transgressed against the lawful conqueror; but Locke would be guilty of self-contradiction if he had meant that the wives and children were being forced to pay or make reparations for the harms their fathers’ and husbands’ the crimes caused. His view was that when people unjustly harm others, a portion of their estates may be used to make reparations to the people they harmed, and as a necessary result their children cannot inherit that portion of their estates.

The following argument parallels Locke’s argument: the slave holders harmed the slaves. Consequently the slaves had rights to reparations against the estates of the slave holders; these rights reduced the extent of the estates that the slave holders’ children would otherwise have inherited from them; the slaves were forcibly prevented from exercising those rights; but it is absurd to suppose that people lose rights just because they are forcibly prevented from exercising those rights; consequently the slaves retained their rights against the estates of the slave holders; present day U.S. blacks are their heirs; consequently present day U.S. blacks have rights against the estates of the slave holders. This argument does not prove much. Even if many descendants of the slave holders can be identified, proving that they inherited their property from their slave holding ancestors seems hopeless. But the argument can be improved. The first step is to see that the slaves did not have rights to reparations only against the slave holders. This step may seem to follow easily from Locke’s famous theory that residence in a state is tacit consent to it (Locke 1689: sec 119). This theory applied to the case of the lawful conqueror might seem to commit Locke to the view that the lawful conqueror had rights to reparations against all members of the state that waged the unjust war against him. But in fact Locke explicitly denied that it did. “The people” he said gave “to their governors no power to do an unjust thing, such as is to make an unjust War, (for they never had such power in themselves:) They ought not to be charged as guilty of the Violence and Injustice that is committed in an Unjust war, any further than they actually abet it” (Locke 1689: sec 179).

And he identified those who “actually abet” and unjust war as those who “assisted, concurred, or consented”, to that war (Locke 1689: sec 179). It may seem that Locke is guilty of self-contradiction here at least if we suppose that to consent to something, even tacitly, is to give the “power”, that is, the right to do it. But Locke evidently did not suppose that to consent to another’s action is to give the other the right to do it; and no one else supposes that it does, except perhaps confused philosophers. For such a supposition implies that one could not consent to another’s unjust action since of course one cannot give another a right to act unjustly, but of course people can and do often consent to another’s unjust action. To consent to another’s action is “to make oneself a partner in the other’s action and to accept a share in the responsibility for it” (Boxill 1993: 96–99). This suggestion may seem to leave us with the conclusion that if voluntary residence in a state is tacit consent to it, as Locke’s theory says, then all the residents of a state must have accepted responsibility for the state’s actions, including its unjust wars, and consequently that the just conqueror must have rights to reparations against all residents of the state. But, as we have seen, Locke denies that the lawful conqueror has such rights. The solution to this puzzle lies in a peculiarity of most signs of tacit consent. The peculiarity is that signs of tacit consent are normally conditions people have good reason to be in other than to give their consent. Thus voluntary residence in a state is a sign of tacit consent to it because most residents of a state have good reason to reside in the state other than to give consent to it. Since a sign of consent would be coerced, and consequently not a sign of consent if not making it is impossible or very costly, it follows that every sign of tacit consent, like residence in a state, must be such as to allow people to make the sign, while withdrawing their consent by making some cheap and easily performed sign of dissent. This reasoning suggests how Locke can say both that voluntary residence in a state is tacit consent to its actions and that the lawful conqueror has rights to reparations from only those who “assisted, concurred, or consented”, to their state’s unjust wars against him. All voluntary residents of a state have tacitly consented to its actions but only those who fail to make some sign of dissent to its unjust wars, have consented to its waging these wars, at least if there are signs of dissent that are relatively easy to make and are not too costly.

Returning to the question of reparations for slavery, U.S. citizens prior to the Civil War knew that their government permitted and supported slavery and also knew that slavery was a crime. The slave holding states certainly tried to conceal the full horrors of their “peculiar institution” but the evidence suggests that their efforts were not successful. Consequently, since few white U.S. citizens expressed dissent from their government’s complicity in the crime of slavery, although it did not punish such dissent, it seems fair to conclude that most white U.S. citizens voluntarily consented to their government’s complicity in the crime. In Locke’s language, they “assisted, concurred, or consented” to the government’s injustice against the slaves. Therefore, still following Locke, it follows that the slaves had rights to reparations against almost the entire white population of the United States for the damages that their enslavement caused them. This argument is perhaps open to the objection that there was in the period of slavery more than a little dissent to the government’s complicity in the crime of slavery; certainly the abolitionists strongly expressed their dissent. Or alternatively it could be objected that dissenting from the government’s complicity in slavery in the Deep South did carry considerable costs including costs not necessarily imposed by the government. Finally, the argument also requires a fuller account of what residents of a state must do in order to make appropriate signs of dissent from the injustice of their government, and consequently to avoid being rightly accused of consenting to that injustice. Presumably, confiding to a few friends that one was opposed to slavery would not be enough. But if these problems can be satisfactorily settled, then since the slaves had titles to reparations against the estates of those who assisted, concurred or consented to their enslavement, they would have titles to reparations against practically the entire white population, not just against the estates of the slave holders . These reparations were never paid. Instead each white generation specified that only whites of the succeeding generation were permitted to own, or compete for, or be educated by, the assets it was leaving behind. Since the slaves had titles to reparations against these assets, and the present generation of U.S. blacks is the slaves’ heir, the present generation of U.S. blacks has inherited titles to a portion of the assets held by the present white population. This includes the white immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery to take advantage of opportunities, funded by assets the slaves had titles to, or for the education the slaves and descendants were prevented from getting, or to take natural assets including land that the slaves also had titles to. The fact that they competed for these opportunities and worked hard misses the point since many of these “so called” opportunities had already been inherited by and were the property of, the slaves’ heirs (Corlett 2010: 161–186).

Locke put a limit on the right to reparations. In the case he discussed, the lawful conqueror’s right to reparations was limited by reservations made for the rights of the wife and children of those engaged in or consented to the unjust war against him. As Locke put it:

The Conqueror has a Title to Reparations for Damages received, and the Children have a Title to their Father’s Estate for their Subsistence…What must be done in the case? I answer; The Fundamental Law of Nature being, that all, as much as may be, should be preserved, it follows, that if there be not enough fully to satisfy both, viz, for the Conqueror’s Losses, and the Children’s Maintenance, he that hath, and to spare, must remit something of his full Satisfaction, and give way to the pressing and preferable Title of those, who are in danger to perish without it. (Locke 1689: sec.183)

Thus Locke appeals to the Fundamental Law of Nature which requires that all or as much as may be should be preserved in order to argue that that the lawful conqueror’s right to reparations must give way if it comes into conflict with the rights to subsistence and maintenance of the children of those who owe him reparations. But Locke does not say that the lawful conqueror’s right to reparations is trumped by the children’s right to inheritance; on his account, it is the right to subsistence that trumps the right to reparations when the two rights conflict. When Locke limits the conqueror’s right to reparations, he does so in order to accommodate the rights to subsistence of innocent children. He is concerned that such children will die if he presses the right to reparations too hard, not that they will inherit very little.

Do these reasonable limitations on the right of inheritance have any relevance to whether U.S. blacks have a right to inherit the reparations owed their slave ancestors? Here it is important to note these limitations do not abolish or cancel the right to inheritance. They do not imply, that is, that there is no right to inherit at all. They allow that there is such a right, and that it holds in normal circumstances, but that it fails to hold or is outweighed when allowing it to hold would make innocent people destitute, or create large inequalities that are likely to lead to exploitation and domination. In other words, we cannot set aside the inheritance argument just because it depends on the right of inheritance. We can set aside the inheritance argument aside only if implementing it would make innocent people destitute or create large inequalities that are likely to lead to their exploitation and domination. But would implementing the inheritance argument have these results? It would not. The slaves were horribly harmed by slavery, but paying or making reparations to them would not have required turning over a continent to them. It would have called for no horrendous uprooting of populations, or driven anyone into poverty, or created morally outlandish inequalities. The slaves would not suddenly have become the masters and the whites their subordinates. The nation could have made reparations and suffered mild discomfort at worst. As for the right of inheritance of their heirs, we must remember that it is not limited by the mere length of time between benefactor and heir. The right of inheritance is limited by the dangerous and morally repugnant inequalities that would result from honoring it. These could appear after one generation, or fail to appear after ten generations. We are certainly not referring here to a statute of limitations. It would be wrong for someone’s immediate heir to insist on his right to inherit his father’s goods if this would cause undue hardship to others, or put him in a position to oppress them. But it would be right for someone’s distant heir to insist on her right to inherit his goods if this could save her from hardship or oppression at the hands of her debtors. But is not this latter case exactly similar to that of U.S. blacks? Would they not save themselves from hardship and oppression at the hands of their debtors if they insisted on their right to inherit the reparations that were owed their slave ancestors and never paid?

Others have objected to arguments for reparations for “historic” injustices, specifically Europeans’ theft of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. from their original occupiers the Aborigines, Maori, and American Indians (Waldron 1992: 4–28). The basic objection is that the historic wrongs of the ancestors of the Europeans now in the territories have been “superseded” (Waldron 1992: 24). Possibly the objection can be raised against the inheritance argument for reparations to U.S. blacks.

The following example has been used to illustrate what is meant by an historic wrong being superseded. Suppose that there are plenty of water holes on the savanna and two groups P and Q each have a waterhole, but

motivated purely by greed, members of group Q descend on the water hole possessed by group P and insist on sharing that with them. (What’s more they do not allow reciprocity; they do not allow members of P to share any water hole that was legitimately in the possession of Q .) That is an injustice. But then circumstances change, and all the water holes of the territory dry up except the one that originally belonged to P . The members of group Q are already sharing that water hole on the basis of their earlier incursion. But now that circumstances have changed, they are entitled to share the water hole; so that their doing so no longer counts as an injustice. It is in fact part of what justice requires. The initial injustice of Q against P has been superseded by circumstances. (Waldron 1992: 25)

What is meant by the circumstances having changed so that the initial injustice “has been superseded?” The meaning seems to be that, although the members of Q acted unjustly when they first shared P ’s water hole, they do not act unjustly now when they share P ’s water hole; and this is because circumstances have changed. In the changed circumstances the members of P and Q are now joint owners of the waterhole. It might be asserted that this follows from one of the conditions Locke laid down as necessary for taking something as property, the Lockean proviso, as Nozick famously put it (Nozick 1974: 175; Locke 1689: Book II, 5, sec 27). According to the proviso, the water hole used to be P ’s waterhole when circumstances were such that it was permissible for P to make it his property. But circumstances have changed so that it is no longer permissible for P to make the waterhole his exclusive property. The present circumstances make the waterhole the joint property of P and Q .

This argument seems persuasive if we suppose that the only alternative to making the waterhole the joint property of P and Q is for P to prevent Q from using its water since in that case Q would die very painfully. But there are other alternatives. Members of P ( P s) can generously allow the members of Q ( Q s) to use the water; or they can sell the water to the members of Q ; or they can rent Q a piece of land next to the waterhole. These alternatives may be ruled out by Locke’s apparent opposition to arrangements that put some people in a position of extraordinary dependence on others. For example, he argued that a beggar has a “right” to a portion of a rich man’s surplus when she must have it in order to survive. If so the Q s must have rights to an adequate supply of the water in P ’s waterhole. Otherwise if the P s with ostensible generosity allowed Q s to drink they could also have demanded demeaning behavior from the Q s in exchange; or if they sold water to the Q s they could raise its price as much as they liked; and so on. But in any case, there are alternatives to the joint ownership of the waterhole by the P s and Q s that do not turn the Q s into P ’s dependents. We could, for example, divide the waterhole so that the Q s get an adequate supply of water and are not dependent on the P s.

In this scenario, the entire case for supersession would seem to rest on the Lockean proviso and its alleged prohibition of claiming unowned stuff as property when there is not enough and as good left over for others. We say “alleged prohibition” for it is not at all clear that Locke’s words amount to such a prohibition. However, the supersession thesis fails even if we allow the prohibition. To see this, let us agree that the P s and Q s are now joint owners of the waterhole and that the P s cannot demand that the Q s depart leaving them the waterhole’s sole owners. Our agreement does not imply that we also agree that the P s cannot demand reparations from the Q s for the damages that the Q s earlier wrongly caused them. That would be absurd because it implies that the P s and the Q s had always been joint owners of the waterhole, but by assumption the P s and Q s were not always joint owners of the waterhole. In particular, by assumption, the P s were once the sole owners of the waterhole when the Q s attacked them and stole their water. This foregoing sketch is meant to parallel the case of the Europeans and indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas. For convenience, let us consider the Europeans and the Maoris in New Zealand. We concede that these two people are now the joint owners of the land mass of New Zealand. The Maoris cannot demand that land mass back as reparation because they are no longer its sole owners. They used to be its sole owners, but circumstances have changed and now they are only its joint owners. No one can demand that anyone leave. But that concession does not make the injustice of the European conquest two hundred years ago disappear into thin air. New Zealand may not now belong exclusively to the Maori, but it once did, and when it did, the Europeans did then injure them unjustly. If those injuries persist in the Maoris’ descendants because the European conquerors and their descendants did not pay or make reparations to the original Maoris, their descendants have rights to reparations against the Europeans’ descendants for their injuries, even if they do not have rights that the Europeans’ descendants leave New Zealand to them. To put the point in a different way, the fact that restitution is no longer possible and morally mandatory does not imply that reparations is not still possible and morally mandatory. Restitution, the return of a stolen item to its rightful owner, is often a part of making reparations to the victim of the theft, but as we stressed earlier it is neither necessary nor sufficient for such reparations. It is not sufficient because if I steal your bicycle and then return it to you, though I have made restitution I have not made reparations since the damages you suffer as a result of my theft may be more that the loss of the bicycle; and restitution the return of your bicycle may not cancel, undo or erase the damages you suffered as a result of my theft. And restitution is not necessary for reparations because while the loss or destruction of a stolen item may make its restitution impossible, it does not make reparation for the loss of the item impossible or obligatory. If the bicycle I stole from you is lost restitution is impossible. But it does not follow that reparations is impossible. I can still make reparations to you by providing you with the money to buy another one. [ 4 ]

The distinction between restitution and reparations resolves another case that may weaken sympathies for reparations for historic injustices. The case involves the theft of a car that ends up years later the treasured possession of the thief’s daughter who has no idea that it was stolen (Waldron 1992, 14–15). In the meantime, the car’s original owner has eventually outgrown his attachment to it and gotten many other cars. The inference that we are invited to draw is that it would be wrong for him to compel the thief’s daughter to return the car to him, given that she has invested so much of her life in it and he has lost interest in it. Perhaps; but just because it would be wrong of him to demand restitution, it does not follow that it would be wrong of him to demand reparations; that his rights to reparations are somehow “superseded”. This is an entirely different question. The owner may act wrongly in insisting on restitution; maybe he should allow the thief daughter to keep the car. But it does not follow that he cannot demand reparations from the thief for the losses he suffered as a result of the theft of his car.

These results should make it obvious that the supersession argument cannot nullify claims for reparations for historic injustices. To consider the example of New Zealand, perhaps restitution of the land mass of New Zealand to the Maori is out of the question. Perhaps justice cannot demand that Europeans leave New Zealand to the Maori. But it does not follow that justice does not demand that the Europeans make reparations to the Maori for violating their rights and injuring them when New Zealand belonged to them. Theft injures the victim by depriving him of the thing that was stolen from him; but it also injures him by depriving him of the benefits that he was going to earn and enjoy because of his possession of that thing. For the reasons we have surveyed, he may lose his rights to restitution; the thing for example may be lost or destroyed. But it does not follow that he therefore also loses his rights to reparations. Arguments for those rights have to deal with the various objections to historic reparations reviewed in this entry and elsewhere, but they are not undone by the supersession argument.

Not much has been published on possible policies of reparations to U.S. blacks. But at least a few words concerning such matters are in order in case said reparations are morally justified and required. [ 5 ] A rights-based approach to reparations to U.S. blacks by the U.S. government might most plausibly construe such reparations both compensatorily and non-compensatorily. In so doing, reparations are a cluster of rights to such means of corrective justice imposing duties on the U.S. government to provide said reparations to U.S. blacks. The provision of such rights is not to be diminished due to the amount of that which is owed, though it would be counter-productive to settle on an amount or demand so much that the U.S. could not possibly pay it. The main point is to estimate a combined figure that captures the fact that the peculiar institution was widely and deeply supported by several U.S. industries and workforces, from U.S. financial institutions to ship builders, from U.S. lawmakers and courts to slave owners, and well beyond (DeWolf 2008). Thus it is not unreasonable to argue that there was and remains a collective liability of the U.S. to provide such reparations (Corlett 2010: 161–186; McGary 1999).

Compensatory reparations can be calculated with approximation by figuring on a moderate number of sub-Saharan Africans who were brought against their wills to the territory of the U.S. to serve as slaves. Then a moderate estimation can be made of average life expectancy of said slaves, and how many hours a day and per week, etc. said slaves worked without monetary compensation. Perhaps even more important are the human rights abuses of slavery itself, an amount that might be estimated in terms of punitive damages. There are also social, political and psychological effects of slavery, among others, damages to some extent lingering amongst several U.S. black communities throughout the U.S..

However, in order to respect the sovereignty of U.S. blacks as a people and their autonomy as individuals, no presumption should be made that would make the provision of reparations to them dependent on the reconciliation between said blacks and the U.S.. In order to effect this, a Committee on Black Reparations might be established only by vote of U.S. blacks, having a 3–4 year service for each member. There would be no shortage of highly qualified U.S. blacks to serve excellently on said committee: from educators, business persons, attorneys, medical experts, etc.. Said committee would alone decide what to do with the monetary reparations paid by the U.S. Treasury. An annual audit of the transactions between the two parties could be conducted by a party of the committee’s choice.

Since the amount of compensatory reparations would likely reach into the trillions of dollars, the U.S. Congress would be asked to pass into law a U.S. Black Reparations Tax which might amount to a 3% tax on every income made in the U.S., in perpetuity (In perpetuity because of the relatively low percentage of the tax). The taxes received by the committee would presumably be used for the education of U.S. blacks, medical costs, job training, retirement benefits, cash disbursements for rent, mortgage payments, etc..

But also owed to U.S. blacks are non-compensatory reparations. Among other things, the names and images of the confederacy have no place in official public spaces as if they represented the U.S., state or local government. This is because, among other things, the U.S. Civil War was (at least in the minds of many) supposed to symbolize the bloody and painful sacrifice of many soldiers and families for the sake of instituting a slaveless society. Because of this, U.S. history books must continue to be revised in order to provide more balanced and accurate stories of the truth, inclusive of all peoples. This includes the revelation of the ugliest of truths often shrouded in myths in the name of U.S. patriotism. But genuine patriotism has nothing to do with misleading or false information dressed in the guise of history. It must often recount the evils of the 1921Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of U.S. blacks by whites, the 1923 Rosewood, Florida massacre of many U.S. blacks by many U.S. whites, the murder of Emmet Till and the lynchings of thousands of other blacks, and the pervasive terrorism of U.S. blacks by the KKK. Continued recognition of such evils must replace self-serving glorified images and imaginings which persist to this very day in the minds of many U.S. whites that in one way or another promote white privilege. Such changes should be lawfully instituted, not because to fail to do so would stand as offensive (Corlett 2018), but rather because truth, justice and fairness demand it.

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This entry was originally composed by Bernard R. Boxill, and substantially revised by J. Angelo Corlett. The second author would like to thank the editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for the invitation.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Reparations, African Americans: Slavery, U.S.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reparations
Overview of Reparations
Slavery, U.S.
Tulsa Race Riot: Call for Reparations

Selected Books

Black Reparations: American Slavery & Its Vestiges by Victor Nickson, et al Call Number: Africana Library E441 .B53 2002
Reparations for Slavery: A Reader by Ronald P Salzberger; Mary Turck Call Number: Olin Library E185.89.R45 R475 2004
Reparations Yes!: The Legal and Political Reasons Why New Afrikans, Black People in the United States, Should Be Paid Now for the Enslavement of Our Ancestors and for War Against Us After Slavery by Chokwe Lumumba; Imari Abubakari Obadele; Nkechi Taifa Call Number: Africana Library E185.8 .L86x 1993 Publication Date: 1993
Slavery Reparations in Perspective by William Kweku Asare Call Number: Africana Library E185.89.R45 A83 2002
Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery by David Horowitz Call Number: Africana Library E185.8 .H83x 2002
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Next: Tulsa Race Riot: Call for Reparations >>
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Reparations for slavery and racial segregation in America: 7 papers to know

Reparations have been a topic of national discussion since the end of the Civil War. These seven studies can help inform the debate moving forward.

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The term ‘reparation’ has its origin in Latin, but reached the English language through Old French. There are a number of meanings or shades of meaning associated with this concept. Its line of development is through one of the meanings of Modern English ‘repair’: to restore to good condition, after damage or wear; to set right, or make amends for (loss, wrong, error). This has come from the Latin reparare via Old French reparer . The Late Latin noun reparatio , from the verb reparare , gives rise, via Old French réparation , to Modern English ‘reparation’: the act, or instance of making amends; compensation. – Kimani Nehusi , “ The Meaning of Reparation ,” presented at the 1993 Birmingham Preparatory Reparation Conference.

Uprisings across America since the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody have refocused national media attention on a range of structural inequalities that make Black men 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men; that have historically tanked the value of Black-owned homes; and that have left Black families with about one-tenth the wealth of white families on average, research shows.

Reparations have been part of the national discussion on structural racial inequality since the end of the Civil War. Last spring, several candidates on the Democratic campaign trail for the presidential nomination indicated support for reparations. Presumptive nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden supports studying reparations. President Donald Trump told The Hill last June that reparations were “a very unusual thing,” and that he doesn’t “see it happening.”

Reparations typically refer to federal financial compensation to descendants of U.S. slaves, to provide some measure of “repair” for slavery — and for economic and social segregation, which was legal until the civil rights acts of the 1960s. In a reported essay last week in the New York Times Magazine , Nikole Hannah-Jones delves into academic work detailing the persistent wealth gap between Black and white people in America, stemming from slavery and segregation. She concludes that “the country must finally take seriously what it owes,” to Black Americans.

Here, we feature seven more studies to know on the topic of reparations. These peer-reviewed papers typically address one of two questions: If reparations were to happen, what should the value of reparations be and for which atrocities? And, what has stalled reparation movements in the past?

Since the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865 — except for people convicted of a crime — there have been but a handful of reparations settlements for white violence against Black Americans. Descendants of the 1923 Rosewood racial massacre in Florida, for example, received reparations in 1994 in the form of free state college.

It’s unsettled as to what a federal reparations program might look like. Do reparations mean direct payments to descendants of slaves? Do they mean some billions or trillions of dollars toward government programs aimed at advancing Black wealth? For 30 years, the late Rep. John Conyers of Michigan tried to get Congress to pass a bill to study reparations. But federal legislation for reparations has never come close to happening, so the particulars of a national reparations program have never been hashed out. If federal reparations ever do come to pass, they “must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap,” writes Hannah-Jones, who in May won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for leading the New York Times Magazine’s “ The 1619 Project ,” which explored the legacy of slavery in America.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, by contrast, argues against cash payments in his 2014 Atlantic essay, “ The Impossibility of Reparations .” Frum writes, “The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communities are built.”

Americans are divided along racial lines as to whether there should be federal reparations for slavery and segregation. A 2019 Associated Press poll found 15% of white Americans support cash payments, compared with nearly three-quarters of Black Americans. Other recent polls report similar findings .

The studies featured here can help inform the conversation on reparations moving forward — specifically, on considering monetary amounts, why reparations movements have stalled and what a national reparations program might look like. We’ll keep covering what the research says about reparations. If you’re a scholar studying reparations, let us know about your work.

Keep reading to learn more.

From billions to quadrillions: How much for reparations?

Such costs can be found in sociopolitical and economic calculations for the uncompensated and stolen Black labor, the loss of property, the loss of homespace and heritage, forcible rape, lynching, the loss of opportunity, and continued systems and practices of racial capitalism and racial domination. These costs, then, also underscore a myriad of debts the United States owes and that a reparations framework is meant to collect. – Marcus Anthony Hunter , “ Seven Billion Reasons for Reparations .” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, June 2019.

In March 1865, one month before his assassination, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Savings Bank. The federal government created the bank to encourage ex-slaves to save money. White bank leaders traveled the country promoting Freedmen’s in Black communities, promising the bank was a safe place to save. By early 1874, Freedmen’s had 34 branches with $3.3 million in deposits from Black customers, or about $73 million in today’s dollars, according to Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Freedmen’s was also on the verge of failure. Trouble began in 1870, when Congress allowed the bank to start making mortgage and business loans. Most were given to white customers, “an important paradox,” Hunter writes. Half of Freedmen’s 34 branches had large deficits by 1872, due to bad loans that weren’t being repaid. The bank survived a run on deposits that year after rumor spread that money Black people had deposited was being used to finance political campaigns for white politicians. When white officials left the bank, they were replaced by Black employees, “inexperienced in the area of banking and unable to shoulder the burden of restructuring a complex and fragile financial institution,” Hunter writes.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a prominent and trusted Black leader, was put in charge in March 1874. But it was too late for the bank. Congress liquidated Freedmen’s in June. Many Black depositors never got their money back. A quarter century after the bank closed, Congress had repaid 62% of deposits — not depositors. Black people lost trust in banking institutions post-Freedmen’s, according to Hunter, especially banks run by white people.

“Despite professed good intentions, racism was still at play,” Hunter writes. “By lending the money of Black depositors to whites with little to no stake in the bank, the risks inherent in lending and loan repayment were not evenly distributed.” Hunter finds the $3.3 million in deposits at Freedmen’s end, as a share of gross domestic product at the time, comes to about $7.5 billion as a share of GDP today.

Hunter concludes that the fate of Freedmen’s represents but a single episode in American history where black people suffered real financial losses because of actions white people took. The $7.5 billion is money that can be “accounted for and put on the table,” he writes, suggesting that “such funds could be allocated in ways that would go a long way toward addressing issues of intergenerational wealth, access to and affordability of homeownership and higher education, and Black entrepreneurship.”

The decision whether to base reparations on the full amount of the debt, or only part of it, using what estimation method, and, crucially, at what interest rate, is not up to us as researchers, but up to negotiations between the parties involved, the federal government on one hand, and the African American descendant community on the other. – Thomas Craemer , Trevor Smith , Brianna Harrison , Trevon Logan , Wesley Bellamy and William Darity Jr. , “ Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved .” The Review of Black Political Economy , June 2020.

The authors describe several ways to calculate reparations for the 41 million Black people in America, “a rough estimate of current descendants of the enslaved in the United States.” They focus on the gap in net worth between black individuals and white individuals as a reparations yardstick. The gap is about $352,000 on average by their calculation of 2016 U.S. Census data, and “can be viewed as embodying all of the effects of past atrocities: colonial slavery, U.S. slavery, post–Civil War massacres, Jim Crow discrimination, New Deal discrimination, segregation during World War II, post-War discrimination, and post-Civil Rights discrimination.”

Their first reparation calculation is based on land, specifically the “ 40 acres and a mule ” derived from a January 1865 order Union General William Tecumseh Sherman developed in consultation with Black religious leaders from Savannah, Georgia. Some 40,000 former slaves did get land, about 400,000 acres in total, until President Andrew Johnson overturned Sherman’s order that fall. The land was returned to its original plantation owners. Based on a price of $10 per acre in 1865, the authors estimate the value of those 400,000 acres at about $3 trillion in today’s dollars. That comes to roughly $73,000 per descendent of the enslaved. The authors note that the Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres to white settlers, four times the amount promised to ex-slaves. If former slaves had been promised 160 acres, it would equate to about $291,000 per descendent today, failing to cover the wealth gap.

Price-based estimation is another way researchers have calculated reparations in other academic work. The authors note this type of estimation is biased toward the slave owner. It’s based on the value of slave labor — what slave owners gained — rather than what slaves lost. The authors prefer a wage-based estimation of slaves’ billable hours using historical data on what free laborers earned from 1776 to 1860. There were about 423,000 slaves in the U.S. in 1776, and 4 million by 1860.

The authors acknowledge that even if Black people had been free laborers, racism might have depressed their wages, but offer that “discrimination cannot be legitimately used to reduce present value reparations estimates because racial discrimination itself is a historical injustice worthy of compensation.”

They include all 24 hours of a slave’s day as billable in their analysis — double the 12 average daylight working hours. This is because time a slave spent not working wasn’t “free time” in the modern sense. “Nonworking hours were not negotiated between free agents, they were determined based on the owner’s self-interest alone and for the owner’s exclusive benefit,” the authors write.

At a 3% compounded interest rate, the authors’ tally for unpaid slave wages comes to $18.6 trillion — about $454,000 per descendent — outpacing the wealth gap even after subtracting the average per-person debt for all Americans of about $57,000. Compound interest means the authors add 3% to each year of wages never paid to the enslaved, then carry over the total each year. In 1776, for example, slaves worked about 3.7 million hours, according to the authors. At the prevailing wage of two cents an hour, that’s about $64 million unpaid. Adding 3% interest brings the total unpaid for 1776 to about $66 million. The next year, unpaid wages amounted to about $73 million. The authors add the $66 million from 1776 to the $73 million from 1777, then add 3% on top of that — and so on through 1860, the last year for which there were reliable estimates of the size of the slave population.

“It should be mentioned that an interest rate of only 3% is extremely conservative and fails to correct for inflation,” the authors write. At 6% interest, the authors find that “the numbers explode” — to $6.2 quadrillion, or about $151 million per descendent. One trillion has 12 zeroes; one quadrillion has 15.

3 analyses of why reparations efforts have stalled

Ask nearly anyone on the street to define genocide, and you will hear that it is an extermination of a group of people that involves the killing of large number of people. Certainly this would in fact be genocide, but the legal definition of genocide is much more general than that and, in fact, does not actually require that anyone die. Genocide denotes an attempt to prevent a group from exercising an ability to maintain a cultural identity rather than a necessary process of losing one’s biological existence. – Allan Cooper , “ From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse .” Journal of Black Studies , June 2012.

Reparations scholarship often calculates and frames reparations as wages unpaid, or as compensation for liberty taken. As a debt owed, in other words. Same goes for influential popular works — such as the 2001 book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by Randall Robinson , though the 2014 Atlantic essay “ The Case for Reparations ” by Ta-Nehisi Coates broadened the reparations debate beyond debt.

Allan Cooper, a political science professor at North Carolina Central University, offers that the debt framing has failed to hold water legally, with courts dismissing numerous lawsuits filed since 1915 seeking damages.

(University of Pennsylvania constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry details that seminal 1915 case in “ Taking the United States to Court: Callie House and the 1915 Cotton Tax Reparations Litigation ,” published in the Journal of African American History in 2018.)

Cooper explains, “U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the descendants of slaves have yet to demonstrate ‘standing’ (they have not demonstrated that the defendants personally injured them) and that these descendants have taken too long to file their claims.”

But there’s another framing that could be more legally persuasive, according to Cooper: slavery as genocide. The idea of American slavery as genocide is not new , but Cooper puts a fine point on it from a legal perspective, based on the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention . The convention codified genocide as an international crime following the genocide of Jewish people by Nazi Germany during World War II. The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including, “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Cooper poses the question of whether a party that committed genocide before the UN convention could be held liable for damages. He points to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which, in the early 2000s, dismissed a claim for $2 billion against the German government from the Herero people in Southern Africa, some 65,000 of whom Germany killed from 1904 to 1907. The court, however, didn’t specifically rule on Germany’s claim that it could not be prosecuted for an act committed before the act became criminal, according to Cooper.

The federal government has already determined, implicitly, that the Jim Crow era of segregation and violence against Black Americans — from roughly the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — was genocidal. The U.S. Senate didn’t ratify the U.N. Genocide Convention for nearly four decades because of objections from racist senators like Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. “These opponents repeatedly claimed that ratification would threaten Jim Crow laws and undermine states’ rights,” Cooper writes. The Senate ratified the convention in 1986, with reservations — namely that lynching, race riots and segregation did not fall under the Senate’s definition of genocide.

“Certainly opponents of the Genocide Convention would not have expended the time and labor to argue against ratification if they did not seriously believe that the Jim Crow policies of the United States constituted a case of genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention,” Cooper writes.

In addition to potential legal standing under international law, framing reparations as compensation for genocide during slavery and the Jim Crow era, rather than as a debt owed, “poses a much more powerful ethical argument,” Cooper writes. “Up until now, the fundamental justification for reparations has been economic: African Americans are owed a debt. Reducing slavery to a cost-benefit analysis connotes that the inherent indignity of being a slave is merely a matter of unfair compensation for labor performed. If this was all it was, then the entire working class of America could demand reparations for their lack of fair pay. But slavery was about much more than economic hardship; slavery related to an assault on the humanity and dignity of African Americans.”

Following the Civil War, Southern whites were in a position to initiate repair with those formerly enslaved. However, they failed to do so; the opportunity was squandered. The possibility for deepening the bond between fellow Americans went deeply awry. – Jeffrey Prager , “ Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations .” Political Psychology , June 2017.

UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Prager draws parallels between personal psychological development and white psychological resistance to reparations for Black Americans.

He writes that “reparation is an essential feature of individual development.” Specifically, the phase of psychological development in which a child grows up and becomes less egocentric and has a “need to make amends to the mother for his or her self-centeredness.” The development completes when the mother forgives the child, according to Prager. The psychoanalytical parallel he makes is that white people, broadly speaking, are like the child — except the child remains self-centered. Black society, therefore, has no opportunity to repair, or to forgive.

“Though they are in every other respect dominant, whites continue to possess an emotionally immature relationship to African Americans,” Prager writes. “In failing to acknowledge or act upon any reparative impulse, whites refuse to concede their omnipotent and self-centered conception of themselves or to accept an external reality where they do not occupy its voracious center.”

Movements that seek reparations against racial injustices must confront historic narratives of events and patterns of repression. These injustices are often legitimated through official narratives that discredit and vilify racial groups. – Chris Messer , Thomas Shriver and Krystal Beamon , “ Official Frames and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: The Struggle for Reparations .” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , December 2017.

The authors examine how narratives from the news media and government officials can thwart reparations campaigns. They analyzed 124 contemporaneous news articles and 42 government documents about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when a white mob destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood called Greenwood in Tulsa. They also looked at how victims framed the riot based on news reports from The Tulsa World starting in 1997, when Oklahoma established a commission to examine the riot. That creation of the commission revived local news coverage of the riot and the push for reparations.

Messer is an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University-Pueblo. Shriver is a sociology professor at North Carolina State University. Beamon is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington.

News reports published on May 31, 1921, claimed a Black man, Dick Rowland, assaulted a white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator the day prior. The commonly accepted story now is that Rowland slipped and grabbed Page’s hand. But, that spring evening, hundreds of white Tulsans gathered at the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Further news coverage and government accounts around the time of the Tulsa riot blamed the appearance of small groups of armed Black men at the courthouse for the white mob that subsequently looted, committed arson and murder, and dropped bombs from planes onto Greenwood.

“In the decades following the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, white history books either glossed over the event or attempted to further bolster the official framing of the riot,” the authors write. “Indeed, some history texts suggested that whites had essentially ‘saved’ the Greenwood district from further destruction, protecting its residents and paying for reconstruction of the neighborhood.”

That official framing shifted following scholarly analyses in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly following the 2001 report the Oklahoma government commissioned to detail the facts of the riot — and to capture the voices of victims. Despite these accounts, victims or descendants of victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre never received reparations.

“Our findings have particular relevance for reparations cases, where white elites attempt to defend and legitimate the historic repression in order to avoid culpability,” the authors conclude.

‘Baby bonds’ and direct payments: Reparations in practice

Rather than a race-neutral America, the ideal should be a race-fair America. For that to occur the transmission of racial economic advantage or disadvantage across generations would have to cease. – Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. , “ Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America ?” The Review of Black Political Economy , October 2010.

The authors address the Black-white wealth gap exacerbated by centuries of explicit and implicit oppression, and by the main way that American families acquire intergenerational wealth: inheritance.

“These intra-familial transfers, the primary source of wealth for most Americans with positive net worth, are transfers of blatant non-merit resources,” write Hamilton and Darity Jr. Hamilton is a public affairs professor at The Ohio State University and Darity Jr. is a public policy professor at Duke University. “Why do blacks have vastly less resources to transfer to the next generation?”

For starters, the authors point to the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, along with centuries of Black Americans being systematically barred from loans to buy land, as well as Black property destruction at the hands of white mobs, like in 1921 in Tulsa.

Hamilton and Darity Jr. note that “85% of black and Latino households have a net worth below the median white household,” meaning most, but not all, white households are wealthier than most Black and Latino households. They propose a “baby bond” program that would focus on growing wealth for children in low-income families, regardless of race or ethnicity.

The plan would center on an average $20,000 trust established for every child born into families whose net worth falls below the national median. The authors propose that the trust could go up to $60,000 for families in the lowest wealth quartile. The money would grow at about 2% per year in federally managed accounts, with kids gaining access to their trusts at age 18. Hamilton and Darity Jr. estimate an average yearly cost of about $60 billion. They acknowledge their math doesn’t take into account that baby bonds might incentivize families with low incomes to have more children, but neither does their analysis account for cost savings from federal programs that aim to help Americans with low income that might no longer be necessary.

It’s important to note that Hamilton and Darity Jr. wrote this paper when Barack Obama was president. Many academic researchers and media commentators at the time were talking about a “post-racial” America — an America in which race was no longer a predominant driver of economic and social inequality. As has recently been laid bare, following the killing of George Floyd and subsequent civil rights protest movement , the idea that America had entered a post-racial era was fiction .

Should each eligible African-American receive a check and a letter of apology from the government much like Japanese-Americans received for their internment during World War II? Should there be a trust fund from which eligible African-Americans could apply for business or homebuyer’s grants? Or should every eligible African-American be guaranteed tuition paid in full for college? – William Darity Jr. , Bidisha Lahiri and Dania Frank , “ Reparations for African-Americans as a Transfer Problem: A Cautionary Tale .” Review of Development Economics , April 2010.

The authors explore several hypothetical reparations schemes involving direct payments. Notably, they find a program that incentivizes Black people to spend reparation dollars on goods and services produced by non-Black people would, in fact, increase income for non-Black people while potentially decreasing Black income.

“Both of these results run counter to the goal of closing the racial income gap,” the authors write. Darity Jr. is the Duke public policy professor. Lahiri is an economist at Oklahoma State University and Frank is an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The underlying structural issue, which the authors point out throughout the paper, is that Black people are not proportionately represented as owners or major stakeholders of companies that produce goods and services. (More recent research shows Black-owned small businesses have been shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic at nearly double the rate of overall small business closures.) The takeaway is that any reparations program needs be designed with a holistic approach that considers not only payments themselves, but where that money is likely to be spent, if the goal is to close the income gap.

“We find that reparations payments that provide incentives for Blacks to use the payment toward purchases of goods and services produced by non-Blacks might expand the income gap,” the authors conclude. “Also a reparations payment in the absence of productive capacity owned by Blacks is found to have no final positive impact on black income.”

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Slavery's Descendants

Making amends: the history of reparations.

By DONNA BRYSON

Filed June 27, 2023, 10 a.m. GMT

The idea of paying reparations or making other amends for slavery and discrimination has a long history in the United States.

A freedwoman named Belinda Sutton, also known as Belinda Royall, asks the Massachusetts legislature for reparations and is granted a pension of 15 pounds, 12 shillings out of the estate of the man who had enslaved her.

Months before the U.S. Civil War ends, federal legislation calls for land to be leased or sold in 40-acre parcels to people who had been enslaved, reminiscent of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s field order authorizing the redistribution of land confiscated from or abandoned by Confederates to the newly emancipated. But white Southerners abandoned little land, and Congress didn’t provide funds to buy land for freedmen.

The 14th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866, is ratified by the states. It grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – including the formerly enslaved. It provides that they cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process, and that they are entitled to equal protection of the laws.

Henrietta Wood wins $2,500 for lost wages and loss of freedom in a lawsuit she had brought in Ohio against an Ohio deputy sheriff who had engineered a kidnapping that led to her enslavement. Wood had been born into slavery in Kentucky, freed by a slaveholder who took her to Ohio, then lured back to Kentucky and enslaved again in 1853.

At the urging of Nebraska businessman Walter Vaughan, a Democrat and the son of slaveholders, Republican U.S. Representative William J. Connell introduces a bill proposing the federal government provide pensions to those formerly enslaved. Although the bill fails, Vaughan keeps publicizing an idea that he sees primarily as a way to inject cash into the South’s struggling economy.

U.S. Representative Jeremiah D. Botkin, a Kansas Democrat, introduces a bill to provide individuals who were formerly enslaved 40 acres of land and families 160 acres. The proposal, which also would have provided cash payments, fails to pass.

Callie House, a formerly enslaved person inspired by a pamphlet produced by Nebraska businessman Walter Vaughan, works with attorney Cornelius Jones to sue the U.S. Treasury Department, arguing the federal government had benefited financially via taxes from the sale of cotton produced by the enslaved. The suit estimates the federal government had collected $68 million in taxes that should be returned to the formerly enslaved. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals dismisses the suit, saying the government cannot be sued without its permission.

In a speech in Boston, Malcolm X declares the United States must “compensate us for the labor stolen from us,” calling for land.

The term “affirmative action” is used in an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy instructing federal contractors to ensure that applicants are treated equally. While some point to affirmative action as a way to address the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, others note it does little for Black Americans who are unable to benefit from the concept in higher education and jobs.

The 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party includes: “We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for enslaved labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities.”

The Republic of New Africa, a Black nationalist group, calls for $400 billion in reparations for slavery.

James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee stands at the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York to demand that “white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism” pay $500 million in reparations to be spent on a land bank for Black farmers, publishing houses and TV networks to provide jobs and a voice for Black Americans, and other projects.

Mayor Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, U.S. Representative Charles C. Diggs. Jr. of Michigan, and poet and playwright Amiri Baraka are among the organizers of a National Black Political Convention in Gary. More than 2,000 voting delegates adopt a final declaration that includes a call for a majority-Black commission to determine how to calculate and distribute reparations “in terms of land, capital and cash.”

Yale law professor Boris Bittker, working with editor Toni Morrison, publishes “The Case for Black Reparations.”

The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations, known as N’COBRA, is founded.

Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and an African-American, first introduces House Resolution 40 – the figure refers to “40 acres and a mule” – proposing a federal commission to study reparations for slavery and its legacy. Conyers introduces H.R. 40 at every congressional session until his retirement in 2017, after which Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who is Black, continues to introduce the bill.

A conference in Nigeria sponsored by an Organization of African Unity (OAU) reparations committee concludes the impact of slavery and the slave trade damaged lives “of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare” and economies worldwide. The final declaration urges the OAU – precursor to the African Union – to call for reparations that could take such forms as capital transfers and debt cancellation.

Florida legislators authorize payments of $150,000 for each of the nine survivors of a 1923 attack by white people that killed at least six people and destroyed the Black community of Rosewood; a $500,000 pool of funds for their descendants; and individual $4,000 scholarships for the youngest generation of descendants of the victims.

Randall Robinson, who had gained prominence as an anti-apartheid campaigner and a co-founder of the TransAfrica Forum think tank, publishes “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.” He argues that “the appeal here is not for affirmative action, but, rather, for just compensation as an entitlement for the many years of heinous U.S. government-empowered wrongs and the stolen labor of our forebears.”

Conservative author David Horowitz places advertisements in U.S. college newspapers detailing “ten reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea – and racist too.” Among his points, he argues that the claim that all African-Americans suffer from the economic consequences of slavery and discrimination is “unsubstantiated” and that reparations have already been paid in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences in jobs and education.

A faculty, student and administrator committee appointed by Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons releases a report detailing ties to slavery of several Brown founders and benefactors. The university later takes such steps as offering free tuition to graduate students in the field of education who pledge to serve in public schools in Providence and surrounding areas, and creating a $10 million permanent endowment to support education in Providence.

State lawmakers in Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia formally apologize for slavery and, in the case of North Carolina, for Jim Crow . Virginia was the first U.S. state to make such an apology.

State lawmakers in New Jersey and Florida formally apologize for slavery.

Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates publishes “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic.

The president of Georgetown University creates a working group on the ties to slavery of the Catholic university, whose future had been secured by the sale in 1838 of 272 men, women and children who had worked on a Jesuit plantation. After the working group is formed, Jesuits vowed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the people the Catholic religious order owned and to promote racial reconciliation.

Descendants of African American sharecroppers murdered in 1919 by a white mob in Elaine, Arkansas, gather in Elaine to commemorate the massacre and call for reparations, including the return of land that passed into white hands after the killings.

The Denver Black Reparations Council gives its first grant to TeaLee’s Tea House and Bookstore, a Black-owned business, helping the owner stay in business after her husband died. The council is funded by Reparations Circle Denver, which fundraises among white people.

The city council of Evanston, Illinois, votes 8-1 to begin distributing $400,000 to eligible Black residents through $25,000 grants for home repairs, down payments or mortgage payments in reparation for the lasting damage from decades of segregation and discriminatory practices.

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signs the Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program. It requires that five universities that profited from enslaved labor provide scholarships to the descendants of the enslaved.

An Oklahoma judge rules the three known living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white mob murdered scores of Black Tulsans and razed much of a Black neighborhood, can proceed with a lawsuit seeking reparations. The suit seeks such remedies as a 99-year tax holiday for Tulsa residents who are descendants of victims of the massacre in the neighborhood of Greenwood. The judge also rules that six descendants of victims cannot seek reparations.

The deed to beachfront property in the city of Manhattan Beach, California, that had been taken in 1924 from Willa and Charles Bruce, an African-American couple, is returned to their heirs. What had been a Black resort in then-segregated Los Angeles County was taken by Manhattan Beach officials, ostensibly to build a park. Activists and politicians said the real motivation was racism. A state law in 2021 approved returning the land to the Bruces’ heirs.

Church leaders in Forsyth County, Georgia, after consultation with Black community members, establish a scholarship fund open to descendants of those Black families violently driven out of the county in 1912 after six Black men were accused in the assault of a white woman.

Harvard University announces it is setting aside $100 million for an endowment fund and other measures to close the educational, social and economic gaps that are legacies of slavery and racism.

Boston creates a Reparations Task Force to develop proposals to provide reparations to Black residents to make amends for slavery and racial discrimination.

Final recommendations are approved by California’s governor-appointed Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The recommendations include suggested formulas to determine cash reparations and a call for state lawmakers, who will make the final decision on whether reparations should be made and if so what that would entail, to issue a formal apology for the state’s role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans.

U.S. Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, introduces House Resolution 414, which says that the United States “has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.” It says economists have calculated that reparations to close the racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans would be, at a minimum, $14 trillion.

A REUTERS SERIES

Slavery’s Descendants

America’s Family Secret

INTERACTIVE

Explore The Ties To Slavery

“The Slaves Built That”

“All We Are is Memory”

American Dreams

The Crown, the Cabinet and the UK’s Legacy of Slavery

Heirs of Power

The Speaker’s Forebears

Racial Wealth Gap A history of inequity

Reparations Where some of slavery’s descendants stand

Making Amends A history of reparations

Methodology How we researched the genealogies

Resources Webinars for researching your roots

By Tom Bergin, Makini Brice, Nicholas P. Brown, Donna Bryson, Lawrence Delevingne, Brad Heath, Andrea Januta, Gui Qing Koh and Tom Lasseter

Contributed: Grant Smith and Maurice Tamman

Art direction: Catherine Tai

Design: John Emerson

Edited by Blake Morrison

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Pro and Con: Reparations for Slavery

Picking cotton on a Georgia plantation, 1858. Illustration published in Ballou's Pictorial, v. 14, 1858, p. 49. African Americans; Black Americans; cotton pickers; slavery; slaves; enslavement; Georgia

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, discussion questions, and ways to take action on the issue of whether the U.S. federal government should pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, go to ProCon.org .

Reparations are payments (monetary and otherwise) given to a group that has suffered harm. For example, Japanese-Americans who were interned in the United States during World War II have received reparations.

Arguments for reparations for slavery date to at least Jan. 12, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Union General William T. Sherman met with 20 African American ministers in Savannah, Georgia. Stanton and Sherman asked 12 questions, including: “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.” Appointed spokesperson, Baptist minister, and former slave Garrison Frazier replied , “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”

On Jan. 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 that authorized 400,000 acres of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida to be divided into forty-acre plots and given to newly freed slaves for their exclusive use. The land had been confiscated by the Union from white slaveholders during the Civil War. Because Sherman later gave orders for the Army to lend mules to the freedmen, the phrase “ forty acres and a mule ” became popular.

However, shortly after Vice President Andrew Johnson became president following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on Apr. 14, 1865, he worked to rescind the order and revert the land back to the white landowners. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had confiscated 850,000 acres of former Confederates’ land. By mid-1867, all but 75,000 acres had been returned to the Confederate owners .

Other efforts and arguments have been made to institute or deny reparations to descendants of slaves since the 1860s, and the issue remains divisive and hotly debated. An Oct. 2019 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found 29% of Americans overall approved of reparations. When separated by race, the poll showed 74% of black Americans, 44% of Hispanics, and 15% of white Americans were in favor of reparations.

President Obama outlined the political difficulty of reparations on his podcast with Bruce Springsteen, “Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.” He said, “So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes. There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves. What I saw during my presidency was the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action… all that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program struck me as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counterproductive.”

Slavery led to giant disparities in wealth that should be addressed with reparations.
Slavery left African American communities at the mercy of the “slave health deficit,” which should be addressed with reparations.
There is already precedent for the paying of reparations to the descendants of slaves and to other groups by the US federal government, US state and local governments, and international organizations.
No one currently living is responsible for righting the wrongs committed by long dead slave owners.
The idea of reparations is demeaning to African Americans and would further divide the country along race lines.
Reparations would be too expensive and difficult to implement.

This article was published on January 20, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source. Go to ProCon.org to learn more.

Abolition And Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice, And Accountability

Patrisse Cullors
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The historical context of abolition is minimally understood, either in today’s social movements or in U.S. society more broadly. For our political strategies and struggles against racism, patriarchy, and capitalism to be effective, we must deeply ground ourselves in an abolitionist vision and praxis. 1 The combination of theory and practice takes consistent and committed work to upend the systems that make prisons, policing, and domestic and international warfare possible. These phenomena spell displacement, despair, diasporas, 2 trauma, and death for our families and communities in the United States and globally. In this Essay, I will reference different movements to frame my theoretical understanding of abolition, its history, and its potential political power. We organizers and freedom fighters believe that an abolitionist framework and strategy is necessary to challenge the conditions faced by Black communities in this country, and that only through an abolitionist struggle will we repair our communities and undermine the systems of oppression we know have facilitated devastation, from the transatlantic slave trade through the prison industrial complex. I will shed light on cases where social justice workers have come up against and learned from moments and movements filled with opportunities where an abolitionist praxis might have emerged. Some of these opportunities were taken, and some were missed. In this narrative, I intend to provide organizers, scholars, and communities with a history of abolition, as well as the tools and the principles for how to assess, define, and incorporate an abolitionist praxis in all aspects of our work and lives.

I. Abolition in Historical Context

The United States, the world’s largest jailer, 3 is also the world’s greatest perpetrator of war and the most extensive purveyor of human rights atrocities at home and abroad, laying claim to over 800 military bases around the world. 4 It is no surprise that tear gas was sprayed both on Black women and children demanding justice in the wake of the fatal officer shooting of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 5 and on the streets of Buenaventura, Colombia, contaminating the lungs of Afro-Colombians fighting for reparations and for an end to U.S.-backed, state-sanctioned violence. 6 Military training, equipment, and strategies used by militarized police forces in the United States have been found for decades in countries around the world. 7 Therefore, whatever political change we advocate for, it must address and settle this dilemma of global U.S. state violence, injustice, and devastation. We define abolition as a praxis that roots itself in the following principles: people’s power; love, healing, and transformative justice; Black liberation; internationalism; anti-imperialism; dismantling structures; and practice, practice, practice. Our work is guided by political movement traditions against slavery and racism dating back to the African and Indigenous Maroons 8 of the Americas who dared to imagine their lives without shackles like those of their contemporary brethren currently incarcerated.

We draw upon the theoretical work of many before us. Professor Angela Y. Davis — philosopher, Marxist, and former Black Panther whose work on prisons, abolition, and Black struggle has proven relevant over time — has informed our movements and communities for decades. Her political theories and reflections on anticapitalist movements around the world have sought not only to transform U.S. society by challenging white supremacy in U.S. laws, institutions, and relationships, but also to act as a catalyst toward building a broader antiracist and antiwar movement internationally. 9 Another significant theorist is Frantz Fanon, a psychologist and political theorist from Martinique whose work on colonial violence in Algeria and across the Third World makes timely connections necessary to understanding the current global context for Black individuals on the African continent and in our multiple diasporas. 10 And finally, the poet and theorist on interlocking identities Audre Lorde embodies this abolitionist praxis in her moving testimonies and observations through a Black, queer, feminist lens.

II. Reparations: Abolition in Action

Abolition calls on us not only to destabilize, deconstruct, and demolish oppressive systems, institutions, and practices, but also to repair histories of harm across the board. Our task is not only to abolish prisons, policing, and militarization, which are wielded in the name of “public safety” and “national security.” We must also demand reparations and incorporate reparative justice into our vision for society and community building in the twenty-first century. Reparations campaigns encompass a wide array of demands. Most commonly, reparations in our contemporary movements are justified by the historical pains and damage caused by European settler colonialism and are proposed in the form of demands for financial restitution, land redistribution, political self-determination, culturally relevant education programs, language recuperation, and the right to return (or repatriation). 11

Reparations have a long history in the United States and in other nations for both Black and Indigenous peoples. 12 Caribbean and Latin American nations have launched a political and grassroots campaign for reparations. 13 The organization Caribbean Community (CARICOM) presently leads a multi-state initiative against European powers. 14 The organization was formed after Haiti, the first Black republic of the Western Hemisphere, launched a reparations campaign against France for the equivalent of over twenty-two billion dollars in 2004, the year of Haiti’s bicentennial. 15

Reparations in our U.S.-based movements may take on a variety of forms, including alignment with reparations struggles in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. In addition, reparations should include restoring a balance from within our communities and carrying our autonomous healing and reparatory work through the arts, culture, language, and emotional and mental health services. Reparations must also include pressure on state accountability as well as community-driven and -centered responses.

The political and grassroots movements most demonized by the U.S. state, and most pressured by the U.S. apparatus within and outside its fabricated borders, are promising testaments to the possibilities of an abolitionist future. In our social justice work, we are often confronted with moments that test our emotional, political, and personal bounds. The aforementioned framework and histories bring our analysis back to the basics and the everyday praxis in our homes, with our families, in our communities, and with our organizations. As cofounder of Black Lives Matter and long-time organizer against U.S. state-sanctioned violence, I am reminding folks in a series of personal vignettes what abolition is and which principles we should reference in our own abolitionist work.

My abolitionist journey embodies the following twelve principles: (1) have courageous conversations; (2) commit to response versus reaction; (3) experiment: nothing is fixed; (4) say yes to one’s imagination; (5) forgive actively versus passively; (6) allow oneself to feel; (7) commit to not harming or abusing others; (8) practice accountability for harm caused; (9) embrace non-reformist reforms; (10) build community; (11) value interpersonal relationships; (12) fight the U.S. state and do not make it stronger. I ask that you sit with these vignettes, reflect on your own experiences, and begin to sketch your own abolitionist praxes and testimonies. 16

III. What We’re Up Against: The Lack of Transformative Justice Alternatives

From 2005 to 2006, I worked as a high school youth counselor. Students visited my office to talk about any number of things: teachers, homework, and family issues, among other topics. They confided in me, and our conversations took on deep issues daily.

One day, a student, Marisol, shared with me that her teacher, Mr. Franklin, was flirting with one of her friends. Mr. Franklin was a former teacher and mentor of mine; I was overcome with emotion upon learning it was him. I looked up to him, and most of all, I had trusted him over the years. When Marisol spoke with me, I reminded her that I was a mandatory reporter. 17 We discussed the implications of my reporting and how it would affect all of us. As required, I reported the situation to the Department of Children and Family Services and the school district.

Upon filing Mr. Franklin’s case, we found that this was not the first time this type of abuse had occurred during his tenure. Many of us were devastated to learn of other instances of child abuse on campus. I faced complicated feelings, as the abolitionist practice I believed in did not find itself reflected in the consequences for either Mr. Franklin or the young student. I reached out to my community and facilitated healing circles with the student. We held space for collective reflection and breathing, and we reminded ourselves of everyone’s humanity. I reachedout to Mr. Franklin as well upon disclosing my identity as the reporter. However, he did not respond to my attempts to communicate with him. I experienced bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder and, at that time, felt unequipped to ask for the support I needed. I cried. I felt betrayed. I was confused. I talked and processed with as many people in my community as would listen.

When I look back at this episode, I remember the anger I felt in my young adult life at the first institutional response being punitive and defaulting to criminalization. There was nothing restorative in place for anyone. The system punished and left more disaster in its wake. This instance furthered my commitment to abolition because my experience showed me how little the state and its services were truly reparatory in nature. At twenty-two years old, I tried. But Marisol’s friend needed more. I needed more. Even Mr. Franklin needed more.

Abolition is taking a stand against sexual violence and abuse. Abolition seeks out restorative practices for all, even when that implies working with the perpetrator of said violence. Abolition finds new ways to operate within a society that considers its members disposable. Abolition means being there for our youth, especially young women of color. Abolition is education in practice.

Two years before that experience, my brother was released from prison. While incarcerated, he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and was released in the midst of his first manic episode. 18 The authorities did not provide my family with the information necessary to understand his mental health condition. By the second day after his release, it was clear to us that my brother wasn’t well. No one in my family — not my sister, mother, father, stepfather, nor I — was prepared for the level of chaos awaiting us. On the third day, my brother was visibly deteriorating. He hadn’t slept. He was hallucinating. He was slowly losing clarity about his surroundings — and we were terrified.

My mother and I tried to figure out what was happening. We contacted people in our community and reached out to my brother’s probation officer. She had no idea that he had a history of mental illness. When she came to visit, his condition alarmed her, but she had no insight or actionable advice on what we should do. I reached out to my former high school teachers, who advised me to get my brother to a hospital. Finally, we called the Psychiatric Emergency Team (PET), and when the ambulance arrived, the paramedics instructed us to call the police. They told us that the PET did not pick up people recently released from prison.

Out of desperation, I called 911. I spoke with the dispatch desk of the Los Angeles Police Department and provided a detailed description of my brother’s condition, sharing with the police that he had just been released from prison. I assumed they would express sympathy for my brother and our family. Afterward, I stood outside my apartment so I could explain the situation in person and ask them questions. When they arrived, I asked, “What will you do to de-escalate the situation if my brother becomes afraid of you? How will you get my brother to the hospital? What are your protocols for people with mental illness? Can I follow you to the hospital?”

The officers were scared out of their wits as I described my brother — a dark-skinned Black man, 6’2” tall, and nearly 300 pounds. One officer replied, “I’ll tase him if he escalates.” I responded with shock and outrage. But the police were our only option at that moment, and I knew our family needed to act. I escorted the officers into the apartment. The moment they stepped into the house, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My brother instantly dropped to his knees, hands in the air, and pleaded with the officers for his life. I ran over to my brother, held him, told him that he was safe, and asked the officers to leave.

By the fourth day, my brother didn’t recognize any of us. My mother woke up that morning overcome by violent tears I had never before witnessed. My stepfather decided he would get my brother help and, to our great surprise, my brother trusted him and went to the hospital.

My brother should have never been imprisoned. He should have received the medical support he needed to lead a healthy life. My family should have been informed. We should have received proper services and resources: caseworkers, therapists, and family counseling. The police should not have been the primary option for our family. There should have been first responders trained in restorative justice, healing, and antiracist practices. My brother and our family were left out on our own in one of our most challenging moments.

Abolition authentically serves and protects our loved ones. Abolition fights to ensure that all families have access to adequate and quality health services. Abolition means not having the police as first responders to mental and emotional health crises. Abolition advocates against imprisonment and policing.

Felipe, the brother of one of my closest friends, was a coyote: he was part of an underground business bringing undocumented people into the United States at the border near San Diego. 19 One evening during his late-night transports, Border Patrol started to tail his car. Felipe had four people in his car, including a pregnant woman. Border Patrol’s pursuit resulted in a high-speed chase. As a result, Felipe crashed his minivan into a semi-trailer truck. He awoke in a hospital with his hands cuffed to the bed. Everyone else in the van died in the crash. Felipe’s sister, Daniela, immediately called me when the news reached her and her family. Felipe would be charged with a crime that, if he were convicted, carried a life sentence. On the San Diego local news he was criminalized, repeatedly called a murderer. Felipe had just turned eighteen years old and was to be tried as an adult.

Daniela and I gathered our community. We raised funds for an attorney. We fought for Felipe’s life. We confronted hard questions: How do you move your community to fight for someone like Felipe, who was painted as a monster in the media? What could we say in response to questions about the harm coyotes have caused, or the fact that doctors found drugs in Felipe’s system? We didn’t have the answers. But we knew to our very cores that life in an iron cage would do no one any good. So we campaigned. We asked people we knew for money for Felipe’s case. We pushed folks to see and remind themselves of Felipe’s humanity. We facilitated hard conversations. We held each other. We also did work around the harm the accident caused the other families who lost their loved ones. We prayed for those families. Felipe cried. He apologized to those families.

The state failed Felipe and his community. The state failed all of those families. Felipe needed access to a recovery program for his drug use. Felipe needed stable employment with a living wage. Felipe’s family needed support when they immigrated to the United States, forced out of their homeland because of the United States’ role inciting wars across Central America, and in El Salvador specifically, in the 1970s and 1980s. 20 To understand what happened to Felipe and those families that night, we must draw the preceding connections. We must also ask: Why are people leaving their homelands to come to the United States? What violence have U.S. foreign policy, U.S. transnational corporations, and U.S. militarization perpetrated around the world?

In the end, we hired a lawyer and Felipe’s sentence was reduced to twenty-eight years with a date to return home. For us, that represented a victory. Felipe would not spend his entire life in prison. His family went home to grapple with their new reality: a son, a brother, in prison for nearly three decades. Birthdays, anniversaries, family gatherings, and other remarkable life moments separated by barbed wire, iron bars, and security guards. No process, no support; just gavels and cages.

Abolition means no borders. Abolition means no Border Patrol. Abolition means no Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Abolition means an end to U.S. wars at home and abroad. Abolition centers families, communities, and healing. Abolition asks the hard questions. Abolition looks for solutions.

IV. Personal Relationships and Cries for Transformative Culture

At twenty-three years old, my best friend Star became an avid drug user and sex worker. We grew up together and had known each other since we were twelve years old. Immediately, I responded with deep criticism. I thought my words, reminding Star of her power and how she could do “more” with her life, would benefit her. Instead, I pathologized her. I judged her. Eventually, my pedestal pushed her away.

Star stopped talking to me. Now, I understand why. She felt scrutinized. Over the years, I had absorbed all the myths about drug users, addicts, and sex workers. I thought they needed to be saved. Despite all my best intentions, I failed my best friend. I did not apply my abolitionist practice. I let down this Black woman, my best friend. For this, I am deeply sorry.

If she told me now, I would behave differently. Today, I would hold space for her decisions and find resources for her. I would be more graceful, loving, kind, and gentle, and a better listener. I would not let puritanism overcome me and condemn her worth as a person.

Abolition does not tell people how to live their lives. Abolition is not about righteousness. Abolition does not put ourselves above our people and those we love.

I spent ten years in a toxic relationship with a trans man. They were kind and charming, but they were also a rageaholic. They were possessive. They wanted all of my time. They were incredibly controlling. One night, they went into a fit of rage and tried to fight someone else. I used my body as a barrier. We went home in silence.

Their rage continued. For a long time I never told anyone. No one in my close circle of friends knew how much my partner at the time was a rageaholic. I started walking on eggshells. I stopped bringing things up. I shrank. I avoided their constant irritability. I realized that I had no capacity for this relationship. I wanted out. Needed out.

Without my friends’ support, I developed an exit from this relationship. I had enabled my partner and their devastating default to rage. When I left the relationship, it created a wave of friction in our community. Our friends lent me support but left my former partner with little to nothing. My former partner became isolated. I came to realize that they had relied on me for everything. They didn’t have a strong circle of friends or a support system. The few friends they had, our mutual friends, took sides.

We need a culture that does not epitomize, isolate, and center romantic relationships. We need to cultivate a society that encourages community and fosters love for our communities.

Abolition means community. Abolition does not isolate individuals. Abolition invites people in. Abolition repairs the friction caused by necessary separation. Abolition acknowledges enabling and provides tools to prevent this behavior. Abolition does not choose sides.

V. Successful Transformative Practice in Personal Relationships

I helped raise my nephew. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t spank him. When other family members tried to hit my nephew, he’d come running to me. When my nephew turned eleven years old, his parents lost all parental rights and my mother became his legal guardian. This forced my family to develop new strategies for child raising, development, and accountability. We had new conversations with my nephew. We asked him to voice his needs and communicate when he was upset. Instead of lashing out with force, my nephew used his voice, and we responded with appropriate actions.

I remember moments in my childhood where there were no conversations, just a belt and a deep sting of humiliation. My nephew experienced a different type of environment. I witnessed firsthand the impact of a nonspanking home. My nephew developed into a more thoughtful, communicative, and sensitive person. He felt empowered to name his feelings. He did not exhibit the same type of fear I witnessed in so many other Black children.

Raising my nephew wasn’t easy. I do not want to sugarcoat or misrepresent the labor that went into this practice. So many times we all took time-outs from him. And so many times my mother called me while at her wits’ end. But we didn’t hit him, and we learned to collectively build better practices.

Abolition is about respecting children, particularly and especially Black children, who are disciplined at school most frequently. 21 Abolition is teaching our children about how to hold space for their emotions instead of bottling them up for fear of being punished. Abolition is teaching our children accountability. Abolition is reminding our children that they are free.

This one is hard. A few years ago, I started seeing someone, Jordan. One weekend they came over and we became sexually intimate. This person crossed my boundaries. I felt uncomfortable, weird, and vulnerable while it happened. But, I couldn’t name it. I didn’t stop it while it was happening. I set boundaries and said “no.” I repeated that two-letter word. This other person did not respect my “no.”

After that weekend, they went home. Once they left, I slowly came to realize what happened and that things weren’t right. I called friends and processed with them what took place. Eventually, I asked one of my friends to accompany me as I confronted the person whom I had shared intimate space with — who had harmed me. Both the person in question and my friend were masculine of center. I thought this would make holding them accountable easier to do. They knew each other, and my friend had experience in transformative justice facilitation and support. I confided in my friend and detailed exactly what I needed, what I wanted:

1. Tell Jordan that I was harmed.

2. Tell Jordan that I wanted space from them.

3. Help Jordan secure help and realize where they caused harm.

After the meeting, Jordan became defensive. Again, they refused to respect my boundaries. And they began to spiral. They left me constant voicemails, text messages, and letters. I asked my friend to remind Jordan that I needed space. They stopped sending letters and making calls. I had room to feel, to sit with my grief, and to come to terms with what happened to me.

The following year, I contacted Jordan. I asked if they were open to meeting with me. Jordan agreed. We processed what happened over dinner. It was challenging, heart-wrenching, and awkward. But most of all, our meeting was healing. Incredibly healing.

What made this experience so hard was that the harm and healing took place within the Black queer community. This incident forced me to practice what I preach by embracing accountability and abolition fully. It pushed me to clarify my needs, give myself permission to take the space and time I needed, and process healing as an individual and as a member of a community. I am grateful to my friend who lent their support, and who from that initial moment and throughout that year provided me with the tools I needed to repair the damage.

Abolition means setting, communicating, and respecting boundaries. Abolition means reinforcing those boundaries when they are not heard. Abolition means transformative justice. Abolition allows one time to heal. Abolition seeks to repair the damage done to a person or a people. Abolition holds space for the person or people who have perpetrated violence, harm, and damage. Abolition makes the impossible possible.

I have sat in, facilitated, and participated in many healing circles with people I’ve harmed and who have harmed me. Defensiveness, anger, self-righteousness, self-realization, serenity, and other emotions have come over me and through me in those moments. I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to apologize and learn from my mistakes. I am appreciative of the times I have forgiven and moved beyond the harm, toward transformation.

I am forever indebted to the community of friends, family, and loved ones I have created over the years to hold one another and call ourselves into our own collective humanity. I value this community, the people that I call my team.

Abolition must be a cultural intervention. It must produce a new way of being even in the most challenging and difficult moments. We have not collectively practiced abolition so it’s hard for us to understand its significance. But, if we implement a new practice that is centered in care and dignity, we might find a practice that challenges our instinct to “cancel” each other. Abolition is about how we treat each other. It is about how we show up in relationships. Abolition is about how we respond to harm caused and how we respond when we cause harm. It is differentiating between large-scale systems that have been built to perpetuate our harm, and individual harm caused against one another. I don’t believe abolition is about bullying, but I do believe abolition is about standing up for yourself. We need to be committed to building a culture that is rooted in care, dignity, and accountability. Let’s never forget the consequences of a draconian and antiquated system.

* Cofounder, Black Lives Matter; Adjunct Professor, Prescott College; M.F.A. Candidate, University of Southern California.

^ Paulo Freire , Pedagogy of the Oppressed 51 (Myra Bergman Ramos trans., Continuum 30th Anniversary ed. 2005) (1970) (“Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”).

^ The African diaspora is a term that refers to the dispersal of African peoples to form a distinct, transnational community. It is most often used to refer to Africans and their descendants living outside the continent, but diasporas have formed within the continent as well. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness 15 (1993).

^ See Inst. for Criminal Policy Research , Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total , http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All [ https://perma.cc/7ADJ-G4LD ].

^ Alice Slater, The U.S. Has Military Bases in 80 Countries. All of Them Must Close ., The Nation (Jan. 24, 2018), https://www.thenation.com/article/the-us-has-military-bases-in-172-countries-all-of-them-must-close/ [ https://perma.cc/G6CK-Y45N ].

^ Justin Carissimo, Michael Brown’s Death Inspires New State Laws Across 24 States , The Independent (Aug. 3, 2015, 5:16 PM), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-browns-death-inspires-40-new-state-laws-across-24-states-10435927.html [ https://perma.cc/LJ4L-HN3H ].

^ See Black Alliance for Peace, Victory for the Black Struggle in Buenaventura, Colombia , Black Agenda Rep . (June 14, 2017), <a href="https://blackagendareport.com/victory_buenaventura_colombia_strike ">https://blackagendareport.com/victory_buenaventura_colombia_strike [ https://perma.cc/W7Q5-H28D ]; Jonathan Watts, Battle for the Mother Land: Indigenous People of Colombia Fighting for Their Lands , The Guardian (Oct. 28, 2017, 7:05 PM), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/28/nasa-colombia-cauca-valley-battle-mother-land [ https://perma.cc/S2DP-FXJY ].

^ Solidarity with Honduras , Sch. of the Ams. Watch , https://www.soaw.org/advocacy/solidarity-with-honduras/ [ https://perma.cc/X99N-6F6L ].

^ See generally Quincy Saul et al ., Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies (2018).

^ See Angela Davis, Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves , 3 Black Scholar , Nov.–Dec. 1981, at 2 (1971).

^ See generally Frantz Fanon , The Wretched of the Earth (Constance Farrington trans., Grove Press, First Evergreen ed. 1966) (1961).

^ See, e.g. , Reparations , Movement for Black Lives , https://policy.m4bl.org/reparations/ [ https://perma.cc/G6KU-GKC5 ].

^ See, e.g. , H.R. 40, 115th Cong. (2017) (affirming the relationship between the history of the formation of the United States and the “fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity” inherent in the institution of slavery).

^ Jeanette Charles, Opinion, Belize: Africans, Asians and Indigenous Peoples Demand Reparations , TeleSUR (Oct. 27, 2015), hhtps://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Belize-Africans-Asians-and-Indigenous-Peoples-Demand-Reparations-20170206-0003.html [ https://perma.cc/GFE2-QWQY ].

^ About Us , CARICOM Reparations Commission , http://caricomreparations.org/about-us/ [ https://perma.cc/WZ3C-YRZR ].

^ Westenley Alcenat, The Case for Haitian Reparations , Jacobin (Jan. 14, 2017), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/ [ https://perma.cc/V2XZ-ZW5S ].

^ All names in the following stories have been changed.

^ A mandatory reporter is a person who, because of his or her profession, is legally required to report any suspicion of child abuse or neglect to the relevant authorities. Child Welfare Info. Gateway, Mandatory Reporters of Child Abuse and Neglect 1–2 (2016), https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/manda.pdf [ https://perma.cc/7NEH-8CP2 ].

^ Schizoaffective disorder is, like schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder. It includes psychotic elements and significant mood symptoms. See Schizoaffective Disorder , Nat’l Alliance on Mental Illness , https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-conditions/schizoaffective-disorder [ https://perma.cc/48DS-RWSZ ].

^ See generally David Spener , Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border (2009).

^ See, e.g. , Cole Kazdin, The Violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by the U.S ., Vice (June 28, 2018, 12:00 AM), https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvnyzq/central-america-atrocities-caused-immigration-crisis [ https://perma.cc/5SDY-RQGA ].

^ See U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, K-12 Education: Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities 14 fig.2 (2018), https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/690828.pdf [ https://perma.cc/TC5M-6C23 ].

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The Case Against Reparations for Slavery

For true racial justice, let's promote the rule of law, deregulate the labor market, and embrace the charter school movement.

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic , Ta-Nehisi Coates has created a minor sensation with his impassioned article “ The Case for Reparations .” Coates pulls no punches. Notwithstanding his earlier doubts on the topic, his current position is crystal clear: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” From the point of view of a libertarian who has written against black reparations in the past, I shall assess the strengths and weaknesses of his position before turning to his proposed system of reparations.

The Sins of the Past

Coates writes with an urgency that carries his reader. He is at his best when he describes the various outrages of the American past in ways that are immediately accessible to all readers, regardless of race, sex, age, class, or national origin. Ironically, much of his narrative assumes a libertarian premise, even though Coates’s politics are anything but. The central libertarian principle is that every individual has rights against the rest of the world, to whom he or she owes correlative duties. Most vividly, the fundamental obligations are these: refrain from the use or threat of force; refrain from the use of false words to achieve private advantage; and keep your promises to others, just as you expect them to keep their promises to you.

The first and most powerful corollary to these bedrock assumptions is that no individual should ever be made into the slave of another. That position was well understood in ancient Rome, which developed extensive rules governing the institution of slavery. These rules were all creatures of the positive law, i.e. rules handed down by the sovereign. But at the same time, the Romans well understood that this body of positive law was in hopeless conflict with the natural law by which all men and women were free persons with the full capacity to make the decisions to govern their own lives. Thus Justinian’s Institutes states categorically: “Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, by which one man is made the property of another, contrary to natural right.” No one should ever sugarcoat slavery in America by arguing that it was justified by the moral code of its time. The truth is that slavery always rested on an assertion of naked sovereign power against those persons who, upon capture, were not capable of resisting its demands.

Coates spends an enormous amount of time detailing the brutality of slavery. He then covers the inhumane conditions under Jim Crow that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Sometimes he goes too far. It was not “Mississippi” that killed Emmett Till in 1955; it was a small band of unidentified hooligans whose despicable actions show why the control of violence is always the first task of any decent state. Nor was it just the illicit use of force that defined Jim Crow; it was the systematic disregard of elementary contractual rights that reinforced this vicious form of racial subjugation.

Coates recounts the plight of one Ruth Wells, who had worked to pay off her contract to purchase a home “only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge.” That deliberate breach of contract is in flat violation of libertarian norms. Coates’s ability to pile instance upon instance leaves the shell-shocked reader gasping for breath, because it is a vivid reminder of just how bad things were. One does not have to believe in reparations to recall with horror the sins of the past.

The Folly of Reparations

Considering the evidence Coates presence,a simple question arises: What should be done in response to the many wrongs of the distant and not so distant past? It is here that Coates falters. He is right that slave owners before the Civil War and the champions of Jim Crow afterwards exploited the black persons who lived under these regimes. Coates observes: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all the productive capacity of the United States put together.” The tempting conclusion is that African Americans today should recoup the wealth that has, Coates argues, worked its way down to the current generation of Americans.

Sadly, however, Coates fails to note that those resources were largely consumed by the miscreants who extracted them from the backs of slaves. At most a small sliver of wealth was passed down by inheritance for a generation or two. But none of it was shared gratuitously with the rest of the nation. Both slavery and Jim Crow hurt the rest of the population by preventing them from doing business with black workers who held productive jobs. As a general matter, virtually all the wealth that exists in the United States today has been created by the ingenuity of a dizzying array of inventors, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and countless others. No fund of wealth survives the demise of slavery and Jim Crow.

Coates also suffers from acute tunnel vision. He ignores the contributions of people of all races who fought fiercely against the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. The civil rights movement of the middle of the last century could not have prevailed if white citizens had not supported it. Indeed, many people of all races gave civil rights their passionate all, much like the abolitionists of the century before. Nor does he pay much attention to the extensive affirmative action programs, both public and private, that have gained traction in the post–Civil Rights period.

What Is the Remedy?

Coates is most evasive when discussing a proposed system of reparations. He notes quite properly that “broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” These are indeed fair questions, and yet at no point does he attempt to answer them. He endorses John Conyers proposal to form a Congressional committee to seek out “appropriate remedies” for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation, but offers few clues about its mission.

Nor are there easy analogies at hand. One possibility is to try to design some system based on the model of reparations for the internment program of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. But there, the payments were made to specific persons who were direct victims of wrong by the government. No program that seeks to remedy the wrongs of the past 350 years could hope to duplicate that level of precision.

Nor is the analysis of black reparations informed, as Coates suggests, by comparison to the decision of the German government to pay reparations to Israel in 1952 for the unspeakable sins of the Holocaust. Those payments of course could do nothing for the millions of individuals who lost their lives, but they did help the newly-founded Israel to gain strength in the first decade of its life. But the differences between these two cases overwhelm the similarities. Death by lynching in the South deserves emphatic condemnation. But let’s keep the numbers in perspective. We know that “nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.” The Holocaust took nearly 1,700 times as many lives in a four-year period. For that wrong, the payment to a new state was a sensible if incomplete remedy. But to whom should the payments be made here?

Rather than speaking of reparations, we should consider the many constructive steps that could, and should, be taken right now as part of our ongoing social commitments to black Americans. It is striking that Coates makes no mention of the charter school movement, which is working overtime to give less fortunate children of all races opportunities that would be otherwise denied to them. Nor does he ask how to remove the barriers to entry that progressive legislation has placed in the path of minority workers, including such statutes as the antidiscrimination laws and minimum wage laws that Coates presumably supports. These laws make it more difficult for African Americans to get jobs in today’s labor market. Deregulation, by contrast, knocks down barriers to entry instead of erecting them in the name of greater racial or economic justice. Coates should embrace the libertarian principles that explain the injustices of racism to forge a new set of forward-looking policies.

Instead of considering these prescriptions, Coates doubles-down on policies with a track-record of failure: What we need, he says, is “a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” This misguided solution, which resonates with the Obama administration, ignores the economic decline of African Americans and other disadvantaged persons since the president took office. That situation can only be reversed if writers like Coates grasp the intimate connection between the wrongs that they skillfully expose and the remedies that they inartfully promote.

Killings, beatings, rapes, and double-dealing are all wrongs within a libertarian framework. Enforcing the rule of law, voluntary help, and the removal of barriers to entry to the marketplace are libertarian remedies for such wrongs. Once our policymakers and public intellectuals realize this fact, we will come one step closer to undoing the sins of the American past. Confessions of collective guilt and national apologies just won’t cut it.

View the discussion thread.

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California lawmakers pass landmark bills to atone for racism, but hold off on fund to take action

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, right, talks to members of Coalition for a Just and Equitable California about two reparations bills in the rotunda on the last day of the legislative year Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Tran Nguyen)

Members of Coalition for a Just and Equitable California protest and demand lawmakers to take up a vote on two reparations bill in the rotunda on the last day of the legislative year Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Tran Nguyen)

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers this week passed some of the nation’s most ambitious legislation aimed at atoning for a legacy of racist policies that drove disparities for Black people, from housing to education to health.

None of the bills would provide widespread direct payments to African Americans. The state Legislature instead approved proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government, and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people.

But lawmakers left out two bills that would have created a fund and an agency to carry out the measures, considered key components of the efforts to take action. California Legislative Black Caucus Chair Assemblymember Lori Wilson said Saturday that the Black Caucus pulled the bills, adding the proposals need more work.

“We knew from the very beginning that it was an uphill battle. ... And we also knew from the very beginning that it would be a multiyear effort,” Wilson told reporters.

Sen. Steven Bradford, who authored the measures, said the bills didn’t move forward out of fear Gov. Gavin Newsom would veto them.

“We’re at the finish line, and we, as the Black Caucus, owe it to the descendants of chattel slavery, to Black Californians and Black Americans, to move this legislation forward,” Bradford said, urging his colleague to reconsider Saturday afternoon.

The Democratic governor hasn’t weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation . However the budget did not specify what proposals the money would be used for, and his administration has signaled its opposition to some of them. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to sign the bills that passed into law.

Democratic Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is Black, called his bill to issue a formal apology for discrimination “a labor of love.” His uncle was part of a group of African American students who in the 1950s were escorted by federal troops past an angry white mob into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. The students became known as the “ Little Rock Nine .”

“I think my grandmother, my grandfather, would be extremely proud for what we are going to do today,” Jones-Sawyer said ahead of the vote on the legislation that was passed. “Because that is why they struggled in 1957, so that I’d be able to — and we’d be able to — move forward our people.”

Newsom approved a law in 2020 creating a first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations proposals. New York state and Illinois have since followed suit with similar legislation. The California group released a final report last year with more than 100 recommendations for lawmakers.

Newsom signed a law last month requiring school districts that receive state funding for a career education program to collect data on the performance of participating students by race and gender. The legislation, part of a reparations package backed by the California Legislative Black Caucus, aims to help address gaps in student outcomes.

Returning seized property

The state Senate overwhelmingly approved the bill on the return of land or compensation to families whose property was taken unfairly through racially discriminatory means using eminent domain.

The topic garnered renewed attention in California when Los Angeles-area officials returned a beachfront property in 2022 to a Black couple decades after it was seized from their ancestors.

The Newsom administration’s Department of Finance opposes the bill. The agency says the cost to implement it is unknown but could “range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to low millions of dollars annually, depending on the workload required to accept, review, and investigate applications.”

It’s not immediately clear how the initiative would be enacted even if Newsom signs it into law, after lawmakers dropped the measure to create an agency to implement it. That proposal would have formed a genealogy office to help Black Californians research their family lineage and verify their eligibility for any reparations that become law.

Formal apology

California would accept responsibility and formally apologize for its role in perpetuating segregation, economic disparities and discrimination against Black Americans under another bill the Legislature approved.

The legislation requires the secretary of state to send a final copy of the apology to the state archives, where it could be viewed by the public.

The apology would say that the state “affirms its role in protecting the descendants of enslaved people and all Black Californians as well as their civil, political, and sociocultural rights.”

California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and fund

The two failed proposals would have created an agency to implement reparations programs if they are passed in California.

It could have cost the state between $3 million and $5 million annually to run the reparations agency, according to the California Government Operations Agency.

Another proposal would have established a fund for reparations programs that become law in California. The money would have been used to address state policies that have harmed Californians descended from enslaved Black people or free Black people living in the U.S. before the end of the 19th century.

Associated Press writer Trân Nguyễn contributed to this report.

Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna

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California lawmakers pass landmark bills to atone for racism, but hold off on fund to take action

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, right, talks to members of Coalition for...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California lawmakers this week passed some of the nation’s most ambitious legislation aimed at atoning for a legacy of racist policies that drove disparities for Black people, from housing to education to health.

“We knew from the very beginning that it was an uphill battle. ... And we also knew from the very beginning that it would be a multiyear effort,” Wilson told reporters.

Sen. Steven Bradford, who authored the measures, said the bills didn't move forward out of fear Gov. Gavin Newsom would veto them.

Get the latest breaking news as it happens.

By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy .

The Democratic governor hasn’t weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. However the budget did not specify what proposals the money would be used for, and his administration has signaled its opposition to some of them. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to sign the bills that passed into law.

Members of Coalition for a Just and Equitable California protest...

“I think my grandmother, my grandfather, would be extremely proud for what we are going to do today,” Jones-Sawyer said ahead of the vote on the legislation that was passed. “Because that is why they struggled in 1957, so that I'd be able to — and we'd be able to — move forward our people.”

Returning seized property

The state Senate overwhelmingly approved the bill on the return of land or compensation to families whose property was taken unfairly through racially discriminatory means using eminent domain.

The topic garnered renewed attention in California when Los Angeles-area officials returned a beachfront property in 2022 to a Black couple decades after it was seized from their ancestors.

The Newsom administration's Department of Finance opposes the bill. The agency says the cost to implement it is unknown but could “range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to low millions of dollars annually, depending on the workload required to accept, review, and investigate applications.”

It's not immediately clear how the initiative would be enacted even if Newsom signs it into law, after lawmakers dropped the measure to create an agency to implement it. That proposal would have formed a genealogy office to help Black Californians research their family lineage and verify their eligibility for any reparations that become law.

Formal apology

The legislation requires the secretary of state to send a final copy of the apology to the state archives, where it could be viewed by the public.

The apology would say that the state “affirms its role in protecting the descendants of enslaved people and all Black Californians as well as their civil, political, and sociocultural rights.”

California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and fund

The two failed proposals would have created an agency to implement reparations programs if they are passed in California.

It could have cost the state between $3 million and $5 million annually to run the reparations agency, according to the California Government Operations Agency.

Associated Press writer Trân Nguyễn contributed to this report.

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Mark Andrews: Smoking ban makes dystopian fiction a reality, and why it means we will eventually end up paying reparations for slavery

'The Tobacco Products and Allied Substances (Restriction) Act of 1997 made smoking in any place outside the home a criminal offence punishable by up to six months' imprisonment'.

The above is a quote from the 1994 novel Drop the Dead Donkey 2000, where the writers of the popular television comedy looked forward to a dystopian future at the dawn of the Millennium, where commonsense and moderation had been overwhelmed by a zeal for voguish obsessions.

Now it emerges the Government is planning to make the spoof Tobacco Act a reality, by extending the existing smoking ban to cover outside public spaces as well.

It took a bit longer than the book suggested, but we got there in the end.

My burning question is which page of the 2024 Labour manifesto did this appear on? I think I may have one missing, because I can't find the stuff about scrapping the winter fuel allowance or paying the train drivers £73,000 a year either.

Still, not to worry. We can all rest secure in the knowledge that the Prime Minister unambiguously promised that taxes won't go up for working people.

Drop the Dead Donkey may have foresaw the ban on smoking in public – and indeed Richard Branson owning a high-street bank – but it never envisaged a time when cigarettes could only be sold in plain packaging, and had to be surreptitiously stashed in a secret cabinet. Or that laws that would eventually deem people in their 40s and 50s too young to buy them.

Not only that, but some radio phone-in callers were this week urging the Prime Minister to go further, even banning smoking in the home. We live in strange times.

The obsession with banning people from smoking confirms my theory that if blinkered 'activists' repeat a ludicrous idea often enough and for long enough, it eventually becomes mainstream simply through familiarity.

Sometime about 1990, one of the Midland councils, I think it was Solihull, came up with something called 'traffic calming', which involved putting chicanes and other obstacles into the path of cars to slow them down. At the time it sounded like an April Fool, and was rightly ridiculed on the Ed Doolan show. But 30-odd years later, this junk is everywhere.

The same principle applies to the more extreme elements of the 'climate justice' lobby and the 'gender' zealots.

And it's why I'm certain that, sooner or later, British taxpayers will end up paying 'reparations' for the slave trade, despite no living person having any meaningful connection to it.

The problem is that ordinary folk aren't so obsessive or dogged about any of this stuff to resist. The 'activists' always grind us down in the end.

Not that I hold any brief for smoking. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life, and struggle to understand why anybody would spend thousands of pounds a year to inhale foul-smelling smoke knowing there is a 50 per cent chance it will kill them.

But then again, I've no idea why anybody would buy a James Blunt album or watch Love Island, but have no desire to stop them from doing so.

Yes, passive smoking is anti-social. But not half as bad as the lungful of cannabis smoke I inhaled in the middle of Bridgnorth on Monday. Maybe the Government's attention would be better turned to enforcing the existing laws about smoking, rather than bringing in more?

I was going to say don't hold your breath. But, of course, that's increasingly what we are having to do.

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IMAGES

My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave
Essay on Reparations For Slavery
RBG Reparations Series: Essays on Topics of Slavery
Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and
...An essay on slavery,
The Case for Reparations Essay

COMMENTS

Why we need reparations for Black Americans
Additionally, reparations should come in the form of wealth-building opportunities that address racial disparities in education, housing, and business ownership. In 1860, over $3 billion was the ...
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Case for Reparations. Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our ...
The Case for Black Reparations
This collection of essays takes an economic approach to the issue of reparations by addressing the need to collectively redistribute wealth in response to the history of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination in the United States. The essays take a variety of perspectives, but focus on proposals, justifications, and the possible ...
From the Magazine: 'It Is Time for Reparations'
Reparations are a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal ...
Introduction: On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism
By Anna Kirstine Schirrer Emergent Conversation 10 A special series of essays, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism This PoLAR Online series, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism, engages anthropological and socio-legal scholars to understand the challenges that new reparations movements simultaneously pose and confront. It seeks to contribute to an emergent research program that…
Black Americans' views of reparations for slavery
Age, education, income and party are key points of difference in Black adults' views on the likelihood of reparations. Black adults ages 65 and older (72%) are the most likely to say reparations would not be paid in their lifetime, compared with 67% of those ages 50 to 64, 59% of those 30 to 49 and 56% under 30.
Why Reparations For Slavery Are Long Overdue
While reparations obviously won't solve racism in America, they are still a necessary step. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued almost 10 years ago in the pivotal essay "The Case for Reparations ...
Views of reparations for slavery in US vary widely by race and
Views of reparations for slavery vary widely by race and ethnicity, especially between Black and White Americans. Around three-quarters of Black adults (77%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, while 18% of White Americans say the same. There are also notable differences by partisan affiliation.
Reparations
A few days later, Harvard University Law Professor Charles Ogletree, chair of a recently established Reparations Coordinating Committee, published an opinion essay in the New York Times announcing that Brown, Yale, and Harvard were all "probable targets" of a lawsuit to be filed by his organization later that year. 127.
Where Reparations Stand in the U.S.
Black Americans have made a renewed case for reparations that would redress slavery, post-Civil War landowning restrictions for the newly freed, Jim Crow laws, redlining, discriminatory lending ...
Reparations for slavery in the United States
Reparations for Slavery: a Reader - a collection of essays on the topic of reparations for slavery. Reparations, R.I.P., City Journal, Autumn 2008 Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act Archived October 22, 2008, at the Wayback Machine - A bill introduced by Congressman John Conyers , Jr. every year since 1989 ...
Reparations: Where slavery's descendants stand
26%. support reparations. Polling methodology. A House resolution introduced in May in favor of the idea cites estimates from "respected economists" that reparations to eliminate the racial ...
Slavery reparations: How would it work?
A 2020 poll from The Washington Post and ABC News found that 63% of Americans don't think the US should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. Unsurprisingly there's a racial divide to ...
America, It Is Time to Talk About Reparations
It is time to renew the public discussion about reparations to descendants of Africans who were enslaved as our country was forming and growing rich. First as colonies and then as a nation, America has existed longer with slavery (1619-1865: 246 years) than without it (1865-2019: 154 years). And the reality of the institution of enslaving ...
Black Reparations
Black Reparations. First published Tue Dec 14, 2010; substantive revision Thu Jan 13, 2022. States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations of North America are demanding the return of their ...
Reparations, African Americans: Slavery, U.S.
Alongside the essays are 17 original literary works that bring to life key moments in African-American history over the past 400 years, ... The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman's fight for justice--and reparations. Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff ...
Reparations for slavery and racial segregation in America: 7 papers to know
Americans are divided along racial lines as to whether there should be federal reparations for slavery and segregation. A 2019 Associated Press poll found 15% of white Americans support cash payments, compared with nearly three-quarters of Black Americans. Other recent polls report similar findings.
Reparations have been an issue even before the U.S. abolished slavery
1783. A freedwoman named Belinda Sutton, also known as Belinda Royall, asks the Massachusetts legislature for reparations and is granted a pension of 15 pounds, 12 shillings out of the estate of ...
Pro and Con: Reparations for Slavery
Pro and Con: Reparations for Slavery. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (LC-USZ62-76385) To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, discussion questions, and ways to take action on the issue of whether the U.S. federal government should pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, go to ProCon.org.
Slavery Reparations Essay
Although the topic of slavery reparations being paid to African Americans has been a thoroughly debated topic, it is still today one that strikes unease and avoidance in many people. This essay will analyze and examine the legality, morality, and rationality behind slavery reparations, opposition of reparations, as well as support of reparations.
Abolition And Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative
The historical context of abolition is minimally understood, either in today's social movements or in U.S. society more broadly. For our political strategies and struggles against racism, patriarchy, and capitalism to be effective, we must deeply ground ourselves in an abolitionist vision and praxis. 1 The combination of theory and practice takes consistent and committed work to upend the ...
The Case Against Reparations for Slavery
In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has created a minor sensation with his impassioned article "The Case for Reparations."Coates pulls no punches. Notwithstanding his earlier doubts on the topic, his current position is crystal clear: "Two hundred fifty years of slavery.
California slavery reparations bills unraveled over Gavin ...
California slavery reparations bills unraveled over Gavin Newsom amendments The governor's office cited cost pressures during a year in which the state had to trim billions from its budget ...
California lawmakers pass bills to atone for racism, but hold off on
The Democratic governor hasn't weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation.However the budget did not specify what proposals the money would be used for, and his administration has signaled its opposition to some of them.
Exploring Reparations for Slavery: Unjust Enrichment Argument
1 Markee Trosclair Jr Instructor Kelley PHIL 2020 28 October 2023 Paper #2 The question of reparations for slavery has sparked discussion and disagreement. The argument for unjust enrichment suggests that those who have directly or indirectly benefited from slavery bear a responsibility to compensate the descendants of those who were enslaved. My goal is to explain the slavery reparations ...
California lawmakers pass ambitious bills to atone for legacy ...
The reparations bills now head to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to sign them into law. The Democratic governor hasn't weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed ...
Mark Andrews: Smoking ban makes dystopian fiction a reality, and why it
The obsession with banning people from smoking confirms my theory that if blinkered 'activists' repeat a ludicrous idea often enough and for long enough, it eventually becomes mainstream simply ...

Why we need reparations for Black Americans

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History of reparations in the United States

Missed policy opportunities to atone for slavery with reparations

Reparations for slavery and anti-Black policies

Who should receive reparations?

The Case for Reparations

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”

Explore Redlining in Chicago

Video: The Contract Buyers League

II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”

Interactive Census Map

III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”

IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”

V. The Quiet Plunder

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”

VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

IX. Toward A New Country

X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”

About the Author

The Case for Black Reparations

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Introduction: On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

Emergent Conversation 10

Contemporary Calls for Reparations

“Clean up the Colonial Mess”

Contributions

Works Cited

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Regions & Countries

Black and White Americans are far apart in their views of reparations for slavery

Some racial, ethnic and partisan differences over who bears responsibility for reparations, what form they should take

Low expectations for the likelihood of reparations

Black voters support Harris over Trump and Kennedy by a wide margin

Research Topics

Christina H. Paxson

Context and Impact

The Modern Reparations Debate and Brown University

Reparations in Historical Perspective

Reparations Arguments in the Eighteenth Century

Freedom Dues and the Problem of Gradual Abolition

After Slavery: Free People of Color in Rhode Island

Black Rhode Islanders and the Quest for Education

Abolishing Southern Slavery, 1862–1865

Reconstruction and the Reparations Question

Forty Acres and a Mule

Black life in the Era of Jim Crow

Lynch Law and the 2005 U.S. Senate Apology

Education and the Meaning of Black Freedom

African Americans and Higher Education: The Case of Brown University

Reparations Demands in the Age of Jim Crow

Race and the Making of the Welfare State

Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Revival of the Reparations Question

The Black Manifesto

The 1988 Civil Liberties Act

The Japanese American Case as a Precedent for Slavery Reparations

Seeking Reparations through Litigation

Municipal Disclosure Ordinances

Disclosures by Private Institutions

Racial Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

Where Reparations Stand in the U.S.

What are reparations?

America, It Is Time to Talk About Reparations

Learn More About the Issues on This Page

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Bibliography

Black Reparations

1. History of U.S. Reparations to Blacks

Acknowledgments

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Reparations, African Americans: Slavery, U.S.

Selected Books

Reparations for slavery and racial segregation in America: 7 papers to know

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