100 Facts On Reparations For Native Black Americans

The call for reparations isn’t just because of slavery, but also for years of abuse suffered by Black people at the hands of the U.S. government.

Reparations will be used to right not only the wrongs of slavery but also Jim Crow, massive FBI and CIA targeting of Black leaders and organizations, mass incarceration, and systemic corporate and government-sanctioned discrimination.

Talk of reparations for the descendants of enslaved men and women has been ongoing in the 150 years since slavery officially ended, but talking about it openly on political platforms marks a change for the Democrats.

In 2019, that discussion became a full-blown political debate among 2020 presidential candidates, politicians and activists over what form an apology and restitution should take.

Who said what on reparations? Who hasn’t said enough?

Here are 100 facts on reparations for native Black Americans.

1. Why reparations?

Why do respirations advocates feel descendants of slaves should be paid in some form? Mainly because, they say, America was built on free slave labor and Black people still experience systematic racism to this day that never allowed for a level playing field.

“Since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were taken to Jamestown, Virginia, the oppression of Black people by whites has been embedded in America’s economic, political, educational and other institutions.

For nearly 250 years, slavery was legal in America — that’s about 60 percent of U.S. history since the beginning of colonial times. 

“Counting the nearly century-long Jim Crow segregation of African Americans, officially sanctioned racial oppression encompassed more than 80 percent of U.S. history to date,” USA Today reported. All this time, the U.S. benefited from slave labor and from the oppression of Black people. The labor by enslaved Black workers between 1776 and the official end of slavery is valued at an estimated $5.9-to-$14.2 trillion in today’s dollars, according to political scientist Thomas Craemer.

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2. What reparations could cost

The market price of the average slave was roughly equal to the price of a house. Using relative earnings, a single slave worth $400 in 1850 would be worth $195,000 today, according to the ADOS website. “While the sum owed in reparations for the entirety of anti-Black discrimination in the United States is undetermined, the amount of the claim just evaluating slavery in isolation — without the era of Jim Crow that followed — is in the trillions.”

Prof. Sandy Darity Jr. — an economist and premiere scholar in the area of American reparations — and Prof. Dania Frank illustrated that the gains in wealth to white southerners from ownership of Blacks back in 1859 was $3.2 million. In today’s dollars, the value of that debt is estimated to be somewhere between $5 to $10 trillion dollars, depending upon the interest rate used for compounding purposes. Using an interest rate of 5 percent, that’s a total of $8.4 trillion in today’s money just in lost wages, ADOS noted.

3. Barack Obama on reparations

Barack Obama has never been too keen on reparations. In a 2016 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates for Atlantic magazine, he explained why.

Asked by Coates about the wealth gap and reparations, Obama replied:  “Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the Black community as a whole, and Black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps.

“It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right.

“You can look at examples like postwar Germany, where reparations were paid to Holocaust victims and families, but…they lost the war. Small population, finite amount of money that it was going to cost. Not multiple generations but people, in some cases, who are still alive, who can point to, “That was my house. Those were my paintings. Those were my mother’s family jewels.”

If you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a Black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help the Black majority, but it hasn’t come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

Obama added: “So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a Black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year.”

4. 1st Congressional hearing in 12 Years on HR 40 Commission: Juneteenth 2019

The hearing focused in part on reparations bill H.R. 40, which seeks to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on African Americans alive today.

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates, actor/activist Danny Glover and former presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker were among those who testified at the first congressional hearing in more than 10 years on reparations by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Coates quoted Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky who told reporters that he opposes reparations. Coates talked about systemic crimes against Black people in the senator’s lifetime and said that people impacted would “love a word with the majority leader.”

5. The wealth gap and reparations

Many reparations advocates say reparations would help close the growing wealth gap between Black and white Americans. 

In 2016, the median white household had $171,000 in wealth — almost 10 times more than the median Black household’s wealth of $17,600. The median racial wealth gap of more than $150,000 may understate the extent of the disparity between Black and white households, the Center For American Progress reported.

Reparation advocates tie this gap to the lingering effects of slavery, despite what others claim.

“The assumption that those debts are owed by and to people now deceased ignores all the money, property and other wealth white Americans alive today inherited from their forebears, including slave owners and many others responsible for depriving Blacks of economic and educational opportunities through discrimination,” according to the Chicago Reporter.

Reparations advocates say the benefits white people have are traceable, from the continuing discrimination suffered by African Americans whose labor was underpaid or stolen for most of U.S. history. 

The wealth gap has developed for a number of reasons, and the roots go back to slavery. 

“Today’s wealth gap between white and Black Americans is substantially the result of government-supported housing and employment discrimination. The median net worth of Black families is less than 15 percent of that of white families, according to the Federal Reserve,” The Chicago Reporter reported.

6. Malcolm X on reparations

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam called for reparations a long time before the current crop of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

In 1963, Malcolm X spoke at Michigan State University, presenting the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammed’s call for reparations.

First, he called for Black Americans to be able to go back to Africa. “Number one, what Mr. Muhammad says is this, that every effort on the part of the government up till now to solve this problem by bringing about a just, equitable situation between whites and Blacks mixed up together here in this house has failed. Has failed absolutely. So he says that since you can’t give the Negro justice in your house, let us leave this house and go back home.”

But because a mass relocation to Africa was not possible, the Nation had another proposal for the U.S. government. “Give us part of this country and let us live in that part,” Malcolm X said. “He says that in this section that will be set aside for Black people, that the government should give us everything we need to start our own civilization. They should give us everything we need to exist for the next twenty-five years. And when you stop and consider the – you shouldn’t be shocked, you give Latin America $20 billion and they never fought for this country. They never worked for this country. You send billions of dollars to Poland and to Hungary, they’re Communist countries, they never contributed anything here.”

Besides land, Muhammad felt that back wages for slave labor were due to the descendants of slaves. 

Malcolm X explained: “This is what you should realize. The greatest contribution to this country was that which was contributed by the Black man. If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of Black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you’ll see how this country got so rich so fast.”

7. Dr. Sandy Darity: Reparations, not from guilt but from national responsibility

Prof. William “Sandy” Darity, an economist and researcher at Duke University, said that reparations isn’t a way to appease guilt. It’s a responsibility. Darity, one of the voices spearheading the reparations movement, testified at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the long-standing Reparations bill H.R. 40 in June. “For too long the nation has refused to take steps to solve an unethical predicament of its own making—the problem of the unequal status of black and white Americans,” he said during his testimony. “A policy of reparations is a set of compensatory policies for grievous injustice.”

There are people who are inclined to feel like personal guilt is at play here, Darity said. “But since the culpable party is the federal government, it’s not a matter of guilt or individual responsibility, but it is a matter of national responsibility.”

8. 40 Acres & A Mule

Black Americans are still waiting for their “forty acres and a mule” promised after the Civil War. Special Field Orders No. 15 was proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on Jan. 16, 1865. Under the orders, the government was to allot family units, including freed people, a plot of land no larger than 40 acres.

9. Reparations seek to solve for trauma that continues to harm African Americans but is invisible to others

The horrors and effects of U.S. slavery are so deep, it’s hard to compensate for, said Stuart E. Eizenstat, a negotiator who successfully represented the U.S. in compensation negotiations for German holocaust survivors.  

“Part of what makes slavery reparations impractical is also what makes slavery’s legacy so insidious and difficult to combat,” Eizenstat said in a Politico article. “We’re not talking about a single, horrific, recent event. Slavery began before the founding of the country and continued for centuries. It ended more than a century ago. But its trauma has persisted for generations, continuing to harm African Americans even as it has become less visible to other Americans.”

10. The debt owed by corporate America

In his 2000 bestseller, “The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks,” attorney and activist Randall Robinson laid out why America owes the descendants of slaves reparations. Corporations must also pay, Robinson said. Several activists have moved forward on this goal. 

Some slave owners borrowed money to pay for their slaves. Some of the loans were provided by Brown Brothers Harriman, today one of the oldest and largest private banking firms in the U.S. Some slave ships crossing the Atlantic were financed by a bank called Providence Bank, which grew and merged its way into a larger corporation that today is called Fleet Boston, ABC News reported. In 2000, JPMorgan Chase admitted that between 1831 and 1865, two of its predecessor banks loaned money to slaveholders and accepted 13,000 slaves as collateral. After some borrowers defaulted, the banks became owners of about 1,250 people. The bank apologized in 2005 and created a $5 million scholarship fund for Black youth, Medium reported.

11. Slaveowners got reparations

When President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill emancipating enslaved people on April 16, 1862, he also put into effect the District of Columbia Emancipation Act that promised to pay the union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

“That’s right, slaveowners got reparations. Enslaved African Americans got nothing for their generations of stolen bodies, snatched children and expropriated labor other than their mere release from legal bondage,” New York Times reported. 

Lincoln hoped to preserve his shaky alliance with slaveholders. The payments to the union outraged abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison said, “If compensation is to be given at all, it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”

Moderate antislavery advocates like Lincoln disagreed. They believed that “any manumission plan had to placate property rights that were buttressed by the Fifth Amendment, which required ‘just compensation’ for government seizure of private assets.”

The board analyzed more than 1,000 slaveholders’ petitions to claim more than 3,000 enslaved people, and a majority of the petitioners received the full amount allowed. The largest was $18,000 for 69 slaves.

12. Reparations defined

Just how are reparations defined? According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, reparations are:

• The act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury.
• Something done or given as amends or satisfaction.

The payment of damages, indemnification specifically, compensation in money or materials payable by a defeated nation for damages to or expenditures sustained by another nation as a result of hostilities with the defeated nation.

16. Reparations For Japanese Americans

Reparations have been paid to various groups throughout the years. Japanese Americans who were interned in concentration camps during World War II got reparations in the form of checks for $20,000 accompanied by a letter of apology. They were the first reparations in the U.S. issued under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, a historic law that offered monetary redress to over 80,000 people, History.com reported. 

17. Native American Compensation

Reparations have been issued to Native Americans in the form of “belated payments for unjustly seized land.” President Harry S. Truman signed a bill providing for the establishment in 1946 of the Indian Claims Commission.

The claims commission was designed to hear historic grievances and compensate tribes for lost territories. It commissioned extensive historical research and ended up awarding about $1.3 billion to 176 tribes and bands. The money was largely given to groups, which then distributed the money among their members. For some tribes whose members didn’t live on a reservation, the money was distributed per capita, according to historians Michael Lieder and Jake Page. For those who did live on reservations, the money was often earmarked for tribal projects, History.com reported.

The funds averaged about $1,000 per person of Native American ancestry. Most of the funds were put in trust accounts held by the U.S. government, which was accused of mismanaging the trust. 

In 2009, a formal apology to Native Americans finally came. The U.S. apologized for what it characterized as the “many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States,” History.com reported.

18. Reparations for Black Americans are unpopular among white Americans

Polling often shows that reparations for Black Americans are unpopular in the U.S. Almost 75 percent of African Americans support reparations for slavery, but just 15 percent of white Americans do, according to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

19. ADOS starts annual conference, helps popularize reparations in mainstream

Four hundred years after the first African slaves touched American soil, more than 2,000 people from around the U.S. traveled to Louisville, Kentucky on Oct. 4 and 5, 2019 for the inaugural ADOS Conference.

Founded by political analyst Yvette Carnell and attorney Antonio Moore, ADOS bills itself as a reparations movement with a Black Agenda called a New Deal for Black America.

In addition to monetary reparations for slavery, ADOS priorities include reinstituting protections of The Voting Rights Act, prison reform, and increased support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Paul Sowers attended the ADOS conference and wrote about it in his blog. Here, he describes the mood at the conference:

“I honestly don’t think—unless you were actually there in that room … that you can really understand just how deeply connected ADOS are with one another, or really get your head around the sense of harmony and union that so totally pervades this movement of a people in lockstep toward justice and restitution. In fact, the only word I think I heard more than ‘justice’ that weekend, was ‘family.’”

Paul Sowers

20. The ADOS Movement

The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) describes itself as the true reparations movement. It was founded by Yvette Carnell, a former Capitol Hill political staffer-turned-social-media-blogger and host of the “Breaking Brown” political show, and Antonio Moore, a former Los Angeles district attorney and Emmy-nominated film producer.

ADOS lists a number of reparation demands.

ADOS was formed to reclaim and restore the national character of African-American identity, and the group experience of being enslaved in the U.S.A., according to ADOS website. The organization uses YouTube and Twitter to promote reparations. Supporters see reparations as a way to address the wealth gaps that persist to this day from slavery and systemic discrimination against African Americans. ADOS sees a debt owed to African Americans after 400 years of slavery in the U.S. and the damages that it did to African Americans. ADOS is credited with creating a national dialogue that has entered into the mainstream media.

21. How reparations are possible

Reparations are going to cost a lot of money but the U.S. is a wealthy country and can afford to pay for its misdeeds, Julia Craven wrote in Huffington Post. Craven created #RunThatBack, a series about Black pop culture with Taryn Finley. She says it’s time to pay restitution.

For perspective, consider that in fiscal year 2014, the U.S. government spent $3.5 trillion, which is just 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product of about $17.5 trillion, Craven wrote. “We could just divvy it up among eligible Black Americans, but reparations advocates propose a more institution-based approach.”

Reparations advocate William Darity, for example, suggests that financial payouts be divided between individual recipients and a variety of endowments set up to develop the economic strength of the Black community.

“One could think of Black America as being a community that could benefit from development investments,” Darity said. “So you could have a trust fund that was set up to finance higher education, (another) to create greater opportunities for opening one’s own business, and so forth.”

22. Minister Louis Farrakhan on reparations

The leader of the Nation of Islam has long pushed for reparations. In a recent piece in The Final Call he declared, “America, you owe us something. We don’t want you to dole it out in welfare checks. If you give us what you owe us, we’ll take it from there.”

Farrakhan quoted the East German government apologizing to the Jews for the holocaust.

“’We ask the Jews of the world to forgive us,’ the East German parliament said in a formal statement. ‘We ask the people of Israel to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility of official East German policy toward Israel, and for the persecution and the degradation of Jewish citizens, also after 1945, in our country.'”

Farrakhan returned to the U.S. government. “Now, let’s add up what they owe us. Do you have your computers? Let’s start in Africa. According to the late, great scholar W.E.B. DuBois, a conservative estimate of Black lives lost in the Middle Passage was from 50 to 100 million Black lives. We don’t need to minimize the Jewish Holocaust. Six million lives is a lot of lives, but are you telling me that six million white lives are more valuable than 100 million Black lives? You can’t be saying that. For the Bible says ‘a life for a life.’”

23. The U.N. on Reparations

In 2016, a United Nations panel said the U.S. owes reparations to African-Americans. A report by a United Nations-affiliated group called the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that “compensation is necessary to combat the disadvantages caused by 245 years of legally allowing the sale of people based on the color of their skin,” PBS reported.

The U.N. group pointed out that the U.S. has yet to confront its legacy of “racial terrorism.”

The report suggested reparations in a variety of forms, including educational opportunities, psychological rehabilitation, debt cancellation, and formal apologies.

“Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” the report said.

24. Trump on reparations

President Donald Trump hasn’t said much on the issue of reparations but in a 2019 interview with, The Hill  he said he thinks the concept of the federal government giving reparations to the descendants of slaves is “unusual” and “interesting” but he doesn’t “see it happening.” 

“I think it’s a very unusual thing,” Trump told when asked about the idea of trying to rectify the enduring effects of slavery’s legacy. “It’s been a very interesting debate. I don’t see it happening, no.”

25. Dianne Feinstein On Reparations

Democratic lawmakers acknowledge that slavery was the original sin of the country’s history, but some just want reparations to go away, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has an estimated net worth of $58.5 million.

Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she understands why author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates and other thought leaders are calling for reparations but warned the issue is divisive.

“I understand why. I also understand the wound that it opens and the trials and tribulations it’s going to bring about. Some things are just better left alone and I think that’s one of those things,” Feinstein said, according to The Hill.

“This is a major blemish on American democracy that has lasted for over 100 years now,” Feinstein said. “It’s not going to change and we have to learn from it and I think we have.”

26. Tom Steyer on reparations

Billionaire presidential candidate Tom Steyer is not worried about the price tag for paying reparations to American Blacks descended from slaves. IN an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, Steyer said we must study reparations. “I think it has to happen … There is no way that we can do reparations without talking about truth first. We have to do a national commission talking about what happened over that last 400 years.”

During an October campaign stop in South Carolina, Steyer said:  

“I’m for reparations. Let’s talk about what that really means because in the United States we’ve never really been willing to face the truth, as God says, not just of the hundreds of years of enslavement, we’ve never been willing to face the truth about the hundred years of Jim Crow and so there’s a history here that has been a denial of the truth for literally 400 years.”

27. Settling with Native Hawaiians

Native Hawaiians almost died out. When Europeans first came to the islands, there were at least 690,000 Native Hawaiians, by 1920, there were an estimated 22,600 left.

Beginning in 1893, Native Hawaiians’ extensive landholdings were taken by the federal government in the wake of its overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. The loss of lands had actually begun earlier: As white people flocked to Hawaii in the late 19th century, they bought up huge swaths of land and established plantations. Low-paid workers also flocked to the island and Native Hawaiians were squeezed into crowded cities, dying of diseases for which they had no immunity, History.com reported.

The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 established a land trust for Native Hawaiians and allowed people of one-half Hawaiian ancestry by blood to lease homesteads from the federal government for 99 years at a time for a total of $1, History.com reported.

28. Tuskegee experiment reparations

In 1973, the U.S. began to look at reparations for the victims of the  Tuskegee Experiments, in which 600 Black men were left untreated for syphilis without their knowledge as part of a medical experiment.

The men were awarded $10 million by the federal government which promised to provide healthcare and burial services for the men. Eventually, the states ended up awarding healthcare and other services to the men’s spouses and descendants, too, History.com reported.

An apology didn’t come, however, until 1997 from President Clinton described the victims as “hundreds of men betrayed.” Cities and states, rather than the federal government, led the way in financial compensation for most other cases of brutality. Take Florida, where lawmakers passed a bill that paid $2.1 million in reparations to survivors of the Rosewood Massacre, a 1923 incident in which a majority-black Florida town was destroyed by racist mobs. Or Chicago, which created a $5.5 million reparations fund for survivors of police brutality aimed at black men during the 1970s and 1980s.

29. In the name of politics

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, most major Democratic presidential contenders are talking about — or trying to dodge the question of — whether the U.S. government should consider paying reparations to the descendants of African Americans who were enslaved and suffered from large-scale racial discrimination.

30. Presidential candidates Warren, Biden, Sanders on reparations

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former candidate Julián Castro came out publicly in support of the creation of a commission to analyze the impact of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination against Black Americans that continues to this day. The commission would then provide recommendations on how to compensate Back Americans for those injustices. 

Former Vice President Joe Biden has continued to skirt the issue. When asked at one debate about slavery and reparations, he responded by going off on a tangent about how Black parents should raise their kids, Business Insider reported. Bernie Sanders somewhat reversed his previous statements against reparations, saying in April that he’d sign a bill to research reparations for descendants of slaves if elected president, Business Insider reported.

31. H.R. 40 

Re-introduced to Congress on Jan. 3, 2019, the H.R. 40 bill calls for a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans. The act would examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the U.S. from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies. 

“Among other requirements, the commission shall identify (1) the role of federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, (2) forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and (3) lingering negative effects of slavery on living African-Americans and society,” according to Congress.gov.

The bill has been debated for years and has yet to be passed. 

The bill is laden with symbolism, being named after the unfulfilled 154-year-old federal promise of 40 acres and a mule to recently freedmen and women, Vox reported.

“Lawmakers have been reckoning with this question to some degree for two decades. Members of the House have introduced the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act in every Congress since 1989, albeit without much support,” the Chicago Reporter reported.

H.R. 40 was first introduced by Representatives John Conyers (who died in 2019) and was put forth every Congress since 1989. After Conyers’ retirement, Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee continued to introduce the bill in Congress.

32. The H.R. 40 Hearing

In June 2019, a historic Congressional hearing on reparations finally happened. Among the panel speakers were Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), retired NFL player Burgess Owens, Quilette columnist Coleman Hughes, writer and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, actor and activist Danny Glover, and economist Julianne Malveaux, Episcopal bishop  Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton for the diocese of Maryland, and Katrina Browne, a white filmmaker whose ancestors brought more than 12,000 African slaves to the U.S.

The hearing, conducted by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, held historical and symbolic significance. The last congressional discussion of reparations was in 2007, a year before the election of the country’s first Black president. The most recent hearing was held on Juneteenth, a day commemorating when slaves in Galveston, Texas, were finally notified of their emancipation. There wasn’t enough room for the people who arrived to witness the hearing, according to the New York Times. The overflow stood a short distance away from the U.S. Capitol, a federal symbol built by the enslaved.

HR 40 was discussed and debated.

“White America must recognize that justice for Black people cannot be achieved without radical change to the structure of our society,” said Glover, who spoke of meeting his great-grandmother Mary Brown, a woman born into slavery. Reparations “is a moral, democratic, and economic imperative,” he said.

Malveaux pointed out that the current wealth gap between Black and white households is almost as wide as it was in 1910. “When Zip code determines what kind of school that you go to, when Zip code determines what kind of food you eat — these are the vestiges of enslavement that a lot of people don’t want to deal with,” she said.

There were speakers who opposed reparations, such as Coleman Hughes, a Columbia undergraduate and Quillette columnist who said, “Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims. So the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent.”

Retired NFL player Burgess Owens agreed with Hughes, arguing that reparations would be an insulting diminishment of the work done by African Americans since slavery.

33. The ADOS Solution

ADOS says it wants to see reparations in a variety of measures, including reinstituting voting protections, offering a healthcare credit, forgiving student loan debt, and securing 15 percent of Small Business Administration loans for descendants of slaves.

34. Who should get reparations, according to ADOS

U.S. slavery reparations should only be given to Native Black Americans, according to ADOS. “America only owes reparations to slave descendants, not to Black people whose families freely immigrated to America,” the ADOS website explains.“This statement draws a line between people of sub-Saharan African descent who can trace their lineage to slave plantations in the United States, and other peoples of African lineage,” The Samuel Dubois Cook Center For Social Equity reported.

35. The National Baptist Convention and ADOS

The 3.5 million-member-strong National Baptist Convention of America (NBCA) announced its support of the ADOS movement for reparations for Black Americans. NBCA President Samuel Tolbert Jr., retweeted a post from Simmons College President and NBCA member Kevin Crosby: “The 3.5 Million member National Baptist Convention Of America, International under the leadership of @ssamtolbert is strongly getting behind @BreakingBrown and @tonetalks and the ADOS movement! Pastors and churches in our Convention are being exposed to ados! #adoschurchcode.”

The news was met with mixed reactions. Some users welcomed NBCA’s involvement, some were skeptical. Others urged the NBCA to do more research on ADOS before throwing its support behind ADOS.

36. Acknowledgment, redress, and closure

Any reparations program should be based on acknowledgment, redress, and closure, Darity says. Acknowledgment is a combination of an apology and the recognition on the part of the culpable party that they’ve benefitted from this process of exploitation. Redress is the actual form that restitution might take. Darity has argued that any program of reparations must include direct payments to eligible recipients. Closure is an agreement by both parties—the culpable party and the victimized party—that the debt has been paid.

“I want to be clear that closure in that sense does not mean forgetting,” Darity said. “An important dimension of reparations programs must address issues concerning the memory of the events that led to the reparations commitment.”

37. Repairing the harm: the mental impact of reparations

Reparations are about more than money. If the U.S. government does go pay reparations it will have a mental impact on society, particularly the descendants of slaves. 

In August 2001, the American Psychological Association sent a delegation to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Other Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa. 

There was a special section on “Reparations: Repairing the Psychological Harm?” The result was a paper consisting of eight essays– each authored or co-authored by a psychologist who has previously engaged in research related to the psychological effects of oppression and colonialism. Among the essays is one by Raymond Winbush, a leader of the African Descendants caucus at the conference. 

“What is viewed as history by some is viewed as a continuing contemporaneous experience by others,” Winbush wrote, according to a report by the American Psychological Association. The essays “movingly confront us with the deepness and pervasiveness of the wounds and grief of disrupted lives and cultures associated with imperialism, colonialism, enslavement, and oppression. The essays also emphasize the unanimity of the need for reparations (repairing the harm) among various oppressed/colonized people, as well as the differing concepts of the appropriate nature/character of reparations and their actual or potential significance.”

The essays all point to the fact that reparations “fundamentally is not about money – it is about justice. Reparations is closely linked to issues of mental health status, psychological well-being and behavior; reparations is both a political/economic and psychological/cultural issue,” according to the American Psychological Association.

38. What is N’COBRA?

The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) is a coalition organized for the sole purpose of obtaining reparations for African descendants in the U.S.

Launched in 1987, the founders include the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization, and the Republic of New Afrika under the N’COBRA umbrella. Individuals and organizational affiliates are also members. There are N’COBRA chapters throughout the U. S. and in Ghana and London.

N’COBRA seeks reparations from two groups: governments and corporations. There are individuals, families, and religious institutions that directly benefited from slavery in the U.S. Acting in good faith, they would contribute to a reparations fund for use in assisting in the reparations process. However, N’COBRA chooses to focus on government and corporations because of their particular role in the horrific tragedies of chattel slavery and the continuing vestiges of slavery we live with today, according to the N’COBRA website. 

39. Apologies

An official apology would have to be part of reparations, most advocates agree. “So many governments, institutions and private businesses in the U.S. are implicated in slavery and post-1865 injustices that it would be impossible for them all to apologize at once. But a good start would be an apology for slavery by the president of the United States, joined by the governors of every state that ever permitted enslavement,” wrote Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University, according to an article for The Conversation. 

Many white and other Americans may oppose reparations to African-Americans on the grounds that neither they nor their ancestors had anything to do with the many ways African-Americans were and are oppressed, Howard-Hassmann said.

“But as citizens — whether of the U.S. or, in my case, Canada — we have a responsibility to make amends to fellow citizens who have been harmed by the past or present policies of our governments. Acknowledgment is a first step forward. Apologies, memorials and financial reparations continue the process,” she continued.

40. The first institution to offer reparations

Several colleges and educational institutions have recently admitted that they benefited from slave labor and some have created reparations programs.

The Episcopal Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., not only acknowledged that it relied on slave labor in the 19th century, but is also starting a $1.7 million reparations fund.

Slaves helped build the campus and continued to use enslaved labor after its creation, the school said. It also admits to participating in segregation after the emancipation of slaves.

The fund will be used to help any descendants of slaves who worked there. The endowment will also be used to support Black clergy in the Episcopal Church, promote justice and inclusion, and support the needs of local African-American congregations connected to the seminary, The Associated Press reported.

The seminary will create a task force to determine descendants and how funds should be allocated.

With the establishment of the fund, the Virginia Theological Seminary could “become the first institution in the country to offer reparations to descendants of enslaved persons,” Fox 5 DC reported.

41. Colleges, universities and reparations

Other colleges are moving toward reparations.

Georgetown University announced funding commitments to benefit descendants of the enslaved people who were sold or who worked to benefit the institutions, AP reported.

At Georgetown, undergraduates voted in April 2019 for a nonbinding referendum to pay a $27.20-per-semester “Reconciliation Contribution.” These funds would be directed at projects in underprivileged communities that are home to descendants of 272 slaves who were sold in 1838 sold to partially pay off the school’s debts.

Georgetown President John DeGioia overrode the students in favor of a university-led initiative with the goal of raising about $400,000 from donors, rather than students, to support projects such as health clinics and schools, AP reported.

Reparations discussions are also going on at the University of Alabama and the University of Chicago. Yale University removed the names of slavery supporters from buildings, while Brown University erected a slavery memorial sculpture. A memorial to enslaved laborers is under construction at the University of Virginia. 

The Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey created a $27.6-million endowment after a historical audit showed that some founders used slave labor.

Nearly 56 universities have joined a consortium led by the University of Virginia called Universities Studying Slavery. The is to explore their ties to slavery and share research and strategies.

42. Who’s for, who’s against reparations

As talk of reparations continues to grow, so do the poll number of Black people who are for them. Almost 75 percent of Black respondents in an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll said they believe the U.S. government should pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black people. Just 15 percent of white participants supported the idea, CNN reported. The poll was conducted in September 2019 and included nearly 1,300 black, white and Hispanic Americans.

43. What opponents say

Many argue that reparations won’t work, or that slave reparations aren’t necessary. One of the main arguments against reparations is that white people today shouldn’t pay for what their ancestors did. “There are no Black slaves living today. Slavery ended more than 160 years ago at the cost of several hundred thousand lives lost in the Civil War. It is unfair to ask American taxpayers, many of them from families that came to the United States after slavery ended, to pay for the wrongs of slavery,” Constitutional Rights Foundation reported.

Another argument against reparations is that there have already been government programs to help Black Americans. “Federal and state governments have already spent billions of dollars on social programs such as welfare, subsidized housing, health care, employment development, affirmative action, and education. These programs have benefited African Americans,” Constitutional Rights Foundation says. 

A third argument involves the costs of reparations. They’d be too expensive, depriving the country of the opportunity to fix the Social Security and Medicare systems or to meet other budget needs that benefit all Americans.

Finally, some argue that reparations are a distraction — that the problems plaguing the Black community have nothing to do with racism and the legacy of slavery, but a lack of fortitudinous by African Americans. “The problems faced by African Americans today are not the ‘legacy of slavery’ or even racism. Many blacks have succeeded very well in American society. The problems of poor African Americans are caused by social ills within the inner city, such as the breakdown of families, high crime rates, and dependence on welfare,” according to Constitutional Rights Foundation.

44. Reparations on a state level

While the federal government has been slow to address reparations, a few states have taken action on various acts of racism, not particularly slave labor.

In 2013, North Carolina became the first state to pass a law intended to compensate the surviving victims among the 7,600 people who were sterilized under a decades-long eugenics program. The victims were largely poor, disabled or African-American. State lawmakers set up a $10 million fund to compensate them, The New York Times reported. There were some conflicts over who was eligible as a state commission and state courts denied claims from relatives of victims who had died.

In Chicago, mostly Black men who survived brutal treatment by a Chicago police commander and his “midnight crew” of detectives were awarded a financial settlement as part of a $5.5 million reparations measure enacted by the city in 2015. Chicago agreed to compensate 57 victims — nearly all African-American men — who said the police had beaten, shocked, suffocated, and psychologically tortured them as a means to obtain confessions.

In 1994, Florida became the first state to pass a reparations law acknowledging a need to confront an eruption of racist violence that government officials failed to stop, The Times reported.

The act was a Florida massacre in 1923 during which a racist mob massacred Black residents in Rosewood, Fla., and burned the community to the ground.

The law set aside $2 million for survivors of the 1923 massacre, which began with an allegation that a Black man had assaulted a white woman. A white mob that included Ku Klux Klan members swarmed into the largely black hamlet of Rosewood and killed at least six Black residents, and perhaps many more. Churches and houses were burned, and the residents were displaced. They never returned.

45. Are reparations impossible?

The argument for reparations is based on the fact that slavery was fundamentally wrong and it must be made right, no matter how long ago the wrong was committed. Easier said than done.

“Slavery is a profound historical wrong—one whose brutal legacy permeates American life today. People of color continue to suffer endemic discrimination in employment, housing and new forms of voter suppression,” wrote Stuart E. Eizenstat, who held Senate-confirmed positions in the Clinton administration and served as special representative of the president and secretary of state on Holocaust-era issues (1993-2001).  “As a result, by every socioeconomic measure—health, education, income, wealth, homeownership and employment levels—they remain far behind white Americans. We must do more to acknowledge, confront and end institutional racial discrimination.”

Eizenstat negotiated more than $17 billion in reparations for Holocaust survivors. Paying descendants of the wronged can be more than complicated, he said. 

“What I learned … is that reparations are complicated, contentious and messy, and work best when the crime was recent and the direct victims are still alive,” said Eizenstat. He was chief negotiator for the U.S. government, across several presidential administrations, and for the Jewish Claims Conference, a group representing Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations with the postwar-German government. “Based on my experience, I believe that trying to repay descendants of slaves could end up causing more problems than reparations would seek to solve and that there are better ways to end racial disparities,” Eizenstat wrote.

“To be clear, I am not saying that the horrors of slavery are greater or less than the horrors of the Holocaust,” Eizenstat added. “But the fact that slavery is so much farther in the past makes the logistics of reparations next-to-impossible. Even though some supporters of slavery reparations point to Holocaust reparations as a model, they are actually quite different.”

Eizenstat argued that the horrors and effects of slavery are so deep, it would be hard to compensate for. 

“Part of what makes slavery reparations impractical is also what makes slavery’s legacy so insidious and difficult to combat,” he said. “We’re not talking about a single, horrific, recent event. Slavery began before the founding of the country and continued for centuries. It ended more than a century ago. But its trauma has persisted for generations, continuing to harm African Americans even as it has become less visible to other Americans.”

46. More than one form of reparations

Those, who, like Eizenstat, believe financial reparations would be nearly impossible due to passage of time and the depth of racism in the U.S., say there is more than one form of reparations. Many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are in favor of reducing income and wealth inequality by making targeted and thoughtful investments to lift up both low-income communities and communities of color.

That should include strengthening our national safety net, Eizenstat wrote in Politico. The government should also set aside additional federal funding for historically Black colleges and Black entrepreneurs. It should commit to stricter enforcement of discriminatory lending practices and strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act to empower itself to protect African Americans against multiple voter suppression efforts.

47. Symbolic act

Reparations would be more symbolic than anything else, according to Eizenstat. “A large part of the argument for reparations is the symbolic importance of an admission of wrongdoing. Public apologies can be powerful tools for reconciliation,” he wrote in a Politic column.

The Japanese American reparations legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan included a national apology. Bill Clinton formally apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for experiments on Black men with syphilis at the Tuskegee Institute. Nine states, including former confederate states Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, have formally apologized for slavery. The U.S. House and Senate passed bipartisan resolutions of apology in 2008 and 2009 but failed to reconcile the two versions and send them to the president. “No U.S. president has ever formally apologized for slavery. It is time for another effort,” Eizenstat wrote in Politico.

He suggests the U.S. form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled on South Africa — a mandate from President Nelson Mandela that included neither financial compensation for apartheid nor punitive measures against white perpetrators. Instead, its purpose, Mandela said, was “to help reconcile and build our nation” — to heal and not to divide. 

“We need a similar commission in the U.S. to examine slavery and racial discrimination to expose hidden truths, past and present, not for divisive individual or group compensation,” Eizenstat wrote.

He concluded: “It’s time for the country to get serious about making up for that mistake—and for the decades of mistakes and discrimination that followed. But we should pick a way forward that avoids sending the country into a divisive, complicated, contentious process that could bog down our politics for decades.”

48. Who built America?

Slave labor helped build America, there is no denying this fact. Enslaved Black folks did all the hard work building this country, including the White House in 1792, the U.S. Capitol in 1793, George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, Virginia Plantation in 1758, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Virginia Plantation in 1772, and New York’s Wall Street in 1652 — used as a slave auction site from 1711-1762, attorney Michael Coard, host of “Radio Courtroom” on WURD96.1 FM, wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune.

49. Blood money?

Black people really don’t need or want cash reparations, according to attorney Michael Coard.  

“Cash as reparations is blood money and insufficient blood money at that, regardless of the amount,” Coard wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune:

“I certainly hope you don’t think our ancestors who were dragged kicking, screaming, and fighting onto that Portuguese slave ship docked on the shores of Angola in 1619 said to their devilish pale-faced captors, ‘I willingly give my permission to you to kidnap, shackle, enslave, dehumanize, buy, sell, rape, sodomize, whip, torture, amputate, and lynch me and my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth for 400 years and I also willingly give my permission to you to strip me and my generational offspring of our land, language, religion, and culture during those 400 years. You can do all of that, as long as you give some of those descendants some cash in 2019.’ I don’t think so.”

50. The NAACP stance

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) supports the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (H.R. 40 and Senate Bill S.1083).“I encourage Americans to read or watch the testimony from today and to make a commitment to educating ourselves about reparations. The formation of a Commission will aid in helping Americans discuss this important issue based on facts rather than fear and misinformation,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel at LD, during the Juneteenth congressional hearings in 2019.

51. Ben & Jerry on H.R. 40 

The ice cream giant came out in support of the H.R. 40 bill in 2019, issuing a statement and urging Americans to start talking about reparations.

“Four hundred years ago, the first enslaved Africans were brought to North America in Jamestown, Virginia. As all of us acknowledge and observe this anniversary, we, as a company, believe it’s important to take a decisive stand in support of reparations. That is why we back H.R. 40, a bill before Congress that would create a commission to study the effects of slavery and discrimination from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies,” the statement read.

It continued, “We recognize that acknowledging the structural racism that is deeply woven into the fabric of our society is difficult. It can be uncomfortable or even shaming. But H.R. 40 gives us a chance to be honest about our history, and hopeful for our future.”

The statement addressed the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and systemic racism.

“From Wall Street to the White House, enslaved people built America, making us one of the richest countries on earth. While America’s wealth has grown exponentially since 1619, the bill for all that unpaid labor has been ignored. Ancestral enslavement and the resulting institutional racism have had a devastating effect on African American life—politically, economically, and socially. Today we have an opportunity as a nation to do something about it. A process of honest reflection and frank acknowledgment of the wrongs perpetrated and wounds left unhealed, can unify our nation and bring our people together, so that together we continue our long and unending journey towards a more perfect union.”

52. Minister Louis Farrakhan on the value of Black lives

According to Minister Louis Farrakhan, Black lives matter and they have value. He gave a speech that was posted in Final Call (Vol 1. No. 4 ) about the Black lives lost not only in slavery and the Middle Passage but in subsequent wars: the Revolutionary War when Blacks fought to free America from England, the War of 1812, the Civil War (400,000 Black people fought on the side of the North and the South), the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.

“We left our fathers on Normandy Beach, in Palermo, in Rome, in Naples, in Sicily. We left our bodies on the streets of Paris, in Belgium. Add it up. We joined the war,” Farrakhan said. “They used us in Hawaii, in Bataan, in Corregidor, in the Solomon Islands, in Iwo Jima. We lost our lives fighting for America. And after the war was over, America rebuilt Germany.

“Now the West German economy is the strongest in all Europe. We rebuilt Japan. Now the Japanese are world leaders, but Black people who helped you win the war, they are homeless in Atlanta, homeless in Chicago, homeless in Detroit, homeless in Boston, in the streets looking for a job, looking for a handout. We helped you to win, but you offered us nothing.

“I say, add it up. Add it up. Add it up!” he wrote.

Farrakhan went on to talk about America’s destruction of Black leaders, and what that cost Black Americans.

“What is the life of Martin Luther King worth? What is the life of Malcolm X worth? What is the life of our leaders worth? What is the life of Louis Farrakhan worth?” he asked.

53. Ben Carson on reparations

When questioned about reparations during an interview on CBS This Morning, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said, “What I would say about reparations is, you know, show me a mechanism that works. You know, I did my DNA analysis. OK. I’m 77 percent sub-Saharan African, 20 percent European, 3 percent Asian. So how do you proportion that out to everybody?”

CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan pressed Carson, asking, “If you can prove you’re a descendant of a slave, though, do you think it’s worth having a conversation?” 

The former neurosurgeon answered, “Yeah, but what percentage of money do you get? What percentage of reparation? No one is ever going to be able to work that out…Proportionately, you’re not going to be able to figure it out. And where do you stop it? It’s unworkable. So, I would much rather concentrate on how do we provide the opportunities for people to get into a better economic situation now.”

54. Trevor Noah weighs in on reparations

In June 2019, an audience member attending a taping of “The Daily Show” asked if white people who “have been disenfranchised recently” should also deserve compensation.

Host Trevor Noah, who is South African, addressed the reparations debate telling the unidentified guest it was important “to understand what the word ‘reparations’ means first…It’s about repairing something that you have broken. You are paying for something that you are supposed to pay for.”

He added: “I’m not saying that there aren’t people living in America today who are suffering and who are going through pain and strife because of what’s happening when it comes to, you know, machines taking jobs, factories becoming industrialized, etc. But reparations is a specific conversation about a specific time in America, and that is Black people were slaves, you know what I mean?”

He concluded: “I think it’s safe to say that Black Americans have a conversation that they need to be having with the United States. It doesn’t involve me, it doesn’t involve white people. It’s like, ‘Yo, American government, meet the Black people.’ That’s it. Have that conversation.”

55. Millennials on reparations

A 2016 poll found that more than half of millennials questioned say they are willing to at least consider the idea of paying reparations to the descendants of slaves.

The Exclusive Point Taken-Marist Poll was done in conjunction with the PBS debate series “Point Taken.”

Among generation Xers — Americans between the ages of 35-50 — 73 percent were against reparations. With millennials, a majority — 51 percent — say that reparations should be paid or they are unsure of whether reparations should be paid. Forty percent of millennials are in favor of reparations and 11 percent are unsure, compared with the 49 percent of the millennials questioned who said reparations should not be paid to slave descendants, AP reported.

“Maybe
there’s yet a different moment for this conversation given the
increasing ascendency of millennials in society and culture,” said
Carlos Watson, who hosts “Point Taken.”

56. Reparations for Africa?

Should America also pay reparations to Africa?

At a 2017 U.N. discussion in the Gambia entitled “The Banjul International Colloquium on Slavery, Slave Trade & Colonialism,” the issue was debated.

Some of the speakers included Prof. Leonard Jefferies, a former African-American Professor of Black Studies City University of New York; his wife, Rosalind Jefferies, an African-American art historian; Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, daughter of the legendary Frantz Fanon; and Dr. Lang Fafa Dampha of the African Academy of Languages, African Union Commission in Bamako Mali.

“Dr. Lang Fafa Dampha presented a paper citing reparations as a vital component to Africa’s healing economically and otherwise,” Africa Blogging reported.  

“Reparation claim for slavery and colonialism is not a new issue, because the African peoples both on the continent and in the Diaspora as well as other social groups in the Americas have a long history of demanding compensation for the wrongs inflicted on them, particularly in terms of slavery. For example, in the United States, the Black Panthers in the 1960s recalled the promise of ‘Forty Acres and a Mule,’” he said.

Mierille Fanon argued for reparations to be paid to Africa. “Through reparation, the most important thing is to oblige the former colonizers from Trans-Atlantic trade slave, from enslavement and colonization to colonialism to repair the situation which saw humanity be broken because of the development of capitalism in its most brutal aspects, which confirms today by the seizure of all the liberal capitalist machine on the state apparatus and is expressed by an endless war conducted against the people so that the system continues on and on while garnering even more profits,” Fanon said.

57. Reparation studies in schools

As part of a special series, the New York Times asked high school students to weigh in through creative writing on whether the U.S. owes reparations to the descendants of slaves.

“Most students agreed that at the very least an apology should be made for the horrors and legacy of slavery. However, they were divided on whether it is simply too late to pay reparations and, if not too late, how to appropriately compensate people,” the Times reported. 

58. What high school students think of reparations and studying them

Student Jayden Vance of J.R. Masterman, summed up: “Possible reparations could be money and statues, but I think appropriate reparations would be free services. Many African Americans are struggling and live in poverty because their families could not recover from slavery. I believe that free healthcare/medical care and free higher education because it would be very beneficial. It would provide African Americans with free doctors visits and medication and free college and university could provide poor children with opportunities to get a good job to support their families. They could become doctors, and lawyers, and presidents. There is nothing the United States could appropriately do to make up for this, but they can make an effort.”

Student Jillian Steeves of Danvers, MA, wrote: “Slavery did not just affect those alive during that era; its effects have created a cycle of oppression that still impacts the ancestors of slaves today. Our society favors those who are wealthy and well-educated, two qualities which are passed from parent to child. Money and class distinction are for the most part hereditary, and it is extremely hard to succeed in school without the help of an educated parent. This means that the children of slaves were at a significant disadvantage compared to wealthy white children. This continues all the way down the line to the modern era. Not only do Black people face far more economic and academic obstacles, but also this phenomenon contributes to the overall perception of Black people.”

She added: “The United States owes an apology to the descendants of slaves for creating a cycle of racial oppression which, to this day, still affects black communities. It is not enough for nice words, though. The only way to truly make up for past actions, and to bridge the gap created by racism, is for the government to offer financial compensation, academic support, and other social services to victims of racism.”

Another student, Jacob Jarrett of Hoggard High School in Wilmington, NC, said: “I’m Black, and it is undeniable that the effects of racism, enslavement, and centuries of oppression have a negative impact on the lives of black people to this very day. I know that the inability of Black people to hold high paying jobs, receive a proper education, or hold any political positions of substance has prevented the growth of the Black community as a whole. With that being said, reparations do not need to be paid.”

He suggested: “Rather than throwing money at your problems, why not invest in us? Invest in Black business. Invest in Black communities. Invest in Black education. Action needs to be taken. Not to repay us for ruining our people and our culture, but to remedy the lasting effects of the sins of white Americans throughout history.

Ryan Boaz of Hoggard High School in Wilmington, N.C., opposed reparations. “While I fully believe slavery in America is reprehensible and is a dark part of our history, I do not believe the government today is responsible for the actions taken over 250 years. Ultimately, I should not be responsible for the actions of my ancestors…If we start giving out reparations, I see a multitude of problems arising. For example, what will the burden of proof be, or will there need to be any? How will we determine how much money someone is owed? Where will this money come from? Oh, you say the government. So, what you really mean is the American people, because that’s where the government gets their money. So every single American who pays taxes is responsible for the actions of their forefathers, the actions that their own ancestors might not have even been a part of. I see reparations as an excuse to get a free handout and to take a shortcut around hard work.”

59. Still waiting

So why are Native Black Americans still waiting for reparations when other groups including Japanese Americans and Native Americans, have already received their reparations? 

Professor Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, discussed this in an article for The Conversation.

According to Howard-Hassmann, there are a number of conditions making it harder for reparations to be issued for Blacks. She noted that it is much easier to obtain reparations under the following conditions: “The number of victims is relatively small. The victims are easily identifiable. Many of the direct victims are still alive. The injustice took place during a relatively short time period. The perpetrator is known. The injustice is easily identifiable. The amount of reparations asked for is not so large that the public will find it unreasonable.”

This was the case for the Japanese-American victims of internment. There were about 120,000 people and the injustice took place between 1942, when the Japanese were first interned, and 1945, when the war ended.

The U.S. government was the perpetrator and the amount issued was relatively low — $20,000 for each of 80,000 living survivors. It totaled about $1.6 billion.

“Compared to Japanese-Americans, enslaved African-Americans and their descendants endured much more severe injustices. Enslavement violated all norms of personal safety; owners were permitted to beat and torture enslaved people, and in some cases even to murder them. The violations offend all our contemporary norms of racial equality,” she wrote.

Also, the injustices didn’t stop with slavery.

“Slavery was abolished in 1865, but many injustices were perpetrated during the post-1865 Jim Crow period and beyond. These included continued violations of bodily safety, such as lynchings and police shootings. Segregation and discrimination violated the principle of equality. And even when African-Americans earn the same incomes as their white contemporaries, they own much less wealth because they do not inherit from generations of property owners,” Howard-Hassmann wrote.

60. Can Canada and South Africa teach the U.S. about reparations?

The U.S. failure to understand, acknowledge and resolve the continuing catastrophe of slavery is holding the country back, said Canadian history and global human rights professor Bonny Ibhawoha, director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. 

The author of “Human Rights in Africa,” Ibhawoha urged the U.S. to look to Canada, which created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document the history and impact of the country’s residential school system on indigenous children and their families.

For more than 100 years, Canada tried to resolve its ‘”Indian problem” by separating children from their parents and forcing them into schools where they were often undernourished, physically and sexually abused by teachers and forbidden to use their own languages, Ibhawoha wrote in The Conversation. 

Canada’s commission released its findings in 2015 and it followed up with calls to action to aid reconciliation, covering child welfare, education, health, language and culture, justice and equity for Indigenous peoples in the legal system. 

The U.S. needs broad public recognition that the country’s original wealth was derived unjustly through slavery, Ibhawoha said. Without acknowledging that deliberate post-emancipation efforts perpetuated the social and economic gulf between white and Black America, there can be no justice or healing, he said.

Ibhawoha suggested that America could look to South Africa and how its Truth and Reconciliation Commission addressed its long history of apartheid and legal institutionalized racism. The commission gave victims of apartheid an opportunity to publicly address their oppressors and gave the oppressors a way to apologize. 

“The process included heartbreaking televised testimony by victims whose families had been shattered by violence and brutalized by their own government. By bringing the issues into the open, the process allowed South Africa to come face to face with decades of apartheid atrocities and their devastating impact,” Ibhawoha said. 

U.S. politicians and other leaders can choose to begin the difficult conversations now, or kick the can down the road again to the next generation, Ibhawoha said.

61. Reparations tax scam

For years it was rumored that the U.S. was going to forgive the federal taxes owed by Black Americans as a form of reparations. It’s a scam.

“The ‘Slave Reparations Act’ (also called the Slavery Reparation Tax Credit, Black Tax Credit or Black Inheritance Tax Refund) is a tax fraud related to the concept of reparations for slavery. It claims that African Americans are entitled to a $5,000 slavery reparation tax credit, per Wikipedia. The scam claims that African Americans born in the U.S. between 1911 and 1926 can receive $5,000 or increased social security payout.

The goal of the scam is to get the victim to send all of their information to the scammer. In April 2002, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) received more than 100,000 attempts to claim reparation tax credits and paid out more than $30 million in erroneous refunds. The IRS continued to report false tax credit scams and claims in 2003 and 2004.

62. Request for reparations

In 2016 a Seattle-based artist created Reparations.me, a website for people of color to request and receive specific reparations on a small, individual scale from white people.

“I think people are asking themselves: How can I be just a little bit better?” site creator Natasha Marin told The Washington Post. “It’s encouraging to see people remember that it feels good to be helpful.”

While there hasn’t been activity on the site since 2017, Reparations.me was launched to let people of color request money for specific services or items, and for White people to fund those requests, as well offer their own services or items. “Reparations.me enacts reparations on a small, individualized scale as the country reckons with the concept of structural reparations. The Movement for Black Lives’ new policy platform includes reparations to African Americans for slavery and historical oppression as one of its core demands,” Colorlines reported.

63. The Swiss might do it

Swiss historian Hans Fässler and dozens of Swiss public figures created a committee that makes the case for slavery reparations in the context of Switzerland. They claim that Switzerland participated in and profited from the system of trans-Atlantic slavery, and they demand reparations for its descendants.  

Supporters of the Swiss Committee on Slavery Reparations believe that reparations must be negotiated through dialogue between those who benefited from the transatlantic slave trade and the descendants of the victims, SwissInfo.ch reported.

“The centuries-old human crime of slavery within the framework of the exploitation of the American colonies by Europe demands recognition as well as non-material and material reparation,” the group argues. “This also applies to Switzerland, which as a social, economic, ideological and cultural area participated in and profited from this system from the 16th to the 19th century.”

Swiss trading companies, banks, city-states, family businesses, mercenary contractors, and private individuals profited from the slave trade. “For example, between 1719 and 1734, the city-state of Bern, as well as two banking houses ‘Malacrida’ and ‘Samuel Muller’, held shares in the speculative South Sea Company which kept slave deposits on Barbados and shipped some 20,000 slaves from Africa to the New World,” SwissInfo.ch reported.

64. Deadria Farmer-Paellmann’s corporation reparations battle

Lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann spearheaded a case in 2000 against corporations that profited off of slavery. She and others made a list of U.S. companies they say profited from the crime of slavery.

“I made a call to Aetna Inc. and I asked them for copies of slave policies,” she told ABC News in 2006. “They were very happy to send a couple of policies. Not only did they send the policies, though. They sent copies of circulars that other companies used to advertise their slave policies. And when I got the package, I just cried, you know. I was just really very moved by the whole thing — that a major corporation that we know and use today played a role in this practice.”

She added: “The slave policies actually financed the enslavement of Africans. So, an individual who might be uncertain about investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purchasing of humans might get the go-ahead from Aetna. You know: ‘Go ahead, buy that person. If they die, we’ve got you covered. You can buy another one.’”

65. Deval Patrick had a reparations and Black economic agenda

Before dropping out of the 2020 race for president, one of the last things former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick did as a candidate was to support developing a plan for the federal government to provide reparations to living descendants of slaves. He discussed his economic platform for Black Americans.

“As a first step toward reparations, Patrick supports HR 40, the House bill to form a commission to study the issue. But aides said he’s prepared to go beyond supporting a commission and offer explicit support for federal reparations,” Axios reported.

His plan called for investing more in HBCUs and public schools and providing universal pre-K.  He promised to stimulate economic growth for Black communities including creating business incubators in minority communities, investing in workforce training programs, and targeting historically underserved communities.

His plan addressed hate crimes, gun violence, and mass incarceration, restoring trust between Black communities and law enforcement,; and combating voter suppression, including restoring voting rights for parolees.

“Many Americans do not understand the history of official government policy that produced the consequences that continue to challenge Black Americans and Black communities,” Patrick said. “Understanding and, in some ways, atoning for that history is an essential part of America’s unfinished business. This is a conversation that we still need to have. A commission may help facilitate it. But the president needs to engage it.”

66. San Francisco elected official wants reparations plan for African-American residents

Shamann Walton, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (Dist. 10) wants to create a plan to provide reparations to African Americans in the city.

Walton is not alone. Other African-American officials want the same, including San Francisco Unified School Board member Stevon Cook, former District 10 Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, and City College Trustee Shanell Williams.

“Reparations can be defined as providing what is owed to the descendants of slaves who were trafficked to and enslaved here in the United States,” Walton said. “The injustices and racism during the time of slavery still resonate in some of the policies and systems that exist today.”

He said that “we’ve been having a conversation about reparations for far too long in this city.”

Walton said he will soon introduce legislation to establish a working group that will draft a reparations plan. It could take six months to develop.

One example of reparations would be the basic income trial program that Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs launched in 2019 to provide some low-income residents with $500 a month. Another possibility would be grants, not loans, to African-American business owners, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

Financial reparations are in order but that’s just a piece of what needs to be done, Walton said. “There are things that we need to do that are going to change some of the systems that are in place that continue to keep Black folks in poverty.”

67. Bloomberg proposes multibillion-dollar Black American economic initiative

Presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York City, unveiled sweeping plans to address the economic legacy of generations of discrimination against Black Americans. He made the announcement during a speech at the site of historic race riots in Tulsa, Okla., on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.

He proposed $70 billion in investment in the country’s 100 most disadvantaged neighborhoods and a goal of creating 1 million new black homeowners and 100,000 new Black-owned businesses, The New York Daily News reported.

“The exploitation worked exactly as it was designed to — slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, segregation and redlining,” Bloomberg said at the Vernon Chapel AME Church. “For hundreds of years, America systematically stole Black lives, Black freedom, and Black labor.”

68. Reparations and religion

In May 1969, civil rights activist James Forman used the pulpit at New York’s Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches and synagogues for the mistreatment of African Americans.

Forman’s Black Manifesto sought $500 million (later increased to $3 billion) for programs designed to ensure Black self-determination. It never attracted support from the broader U.S. religious community.

“I saw them withering and unable to step forward and say ‘Let’s be the church,’” said Rev. Gayraud Wilmore, a Black Presbyterian leader in New York City in 1969, now 98. “I saw no bold action taken on our side to go along with the bold action Forman was taking.”

Now, finally, religious leaders are addressing the issue of reparations.

69. ADOS is endorsing candidates who are pro-reparations

The reparations movement #ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) is promoting candidates, meeting with local politicians and hunting down elected officials, getting them on video with a new style of political engagement. ADOS has also been meeting with organizations to evangelize their new thesis on Black politics, including working with religious organizations such as the 3.5 million-member National Baptist Convention of America.

70. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay ‘The Case for Reparations’ brought reparations to the level of serious policy proposal

Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a landmark essay, “The Case for Reparations” in 2014 in the Atlantic, that is credited with forcing Americans to look in the mirror and think about slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining in ways that many had never done before. The essay helped bring the topic of reparations to the level of serious policy proposal in a a congressional hearing, where Coates testified on June 19, 2019. Despite this, Coates said he doesn’t see his role as one of an activist.

71. The once-leading 2020 Democrat candidate avoided answering questions on reparations

In the December 2019 Democrat candidate’s debate, former Vice President Joe Biden ignored a question about whether he would support reparations for descendants of slavery. When a moderator asked Biden if he supported reparations, Biden said he was happy for the chance to speak on it, then went off on a tangent that instead praised the hard work of immigrants. The same thing happened in the September debate. Asked what responsibility Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery, Biden rambled then argued that schools need more money, teachers and parents need more help, and that poor parents need to change how they raise their children.

72. Some U.S. universities are trying to right the wrongs of slavery

While partisan politicians verbally squabble over the idea of reparations, institutions of higher learning have been taking action to try and provide some repair for their role in slavery. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, published a report in 2006 about its founders’ connection to slavery and created a center to research slavery and injustice. Brown also has a memorial to slaves and a Slavery & Legacy walking tour. Other universities have followed their lead including Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, which unveiled a $28 million plan to “repent for its ties to slavery;” the Virginia Theological Seminary, which started a $1.7 million reparations fund and Georgetown University, which apologized to descendants of slaves it once owned who were sold to cover debts. Georgetown students voted to create a reparations fund and pledged to raise $400,000 a year for it.

73. Evanston, Illinois, plans to use cannabis revenue to create a reparations fund

Cannabis became legal in Illinois on Jan. 1, 2020 for recreational use. The city of Evanston plans to use the tax revenue to create a reparations fund that addresses historic discrimination against African-American residents. The city’s Black population has been in decline, falling from 22.5 percent in 2000 to 16.9 percent in 2017. The goal is to compensate for redlining and other government and private- sector activities that discriminated against Black people. No other city in the U.S. has created a reparations fund of this kind, and it could become a model for other cities.

74. Reparations aren’t mentioned in Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Working Agenda For Black America’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has been calling for a full-blown national conversation about reparations since early in her campaign, but the R-word is missing from her agenda. Acknowledging that there may be important things missing, Warren describes her “Working Agenda For Black America” as “a work in progress”. Warren has said she supports Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s legislation for the passage of H.R. 40. that seeks to establish a commission to study the impacts of slavery and recommend compensation to begin “atonement.”

75. Talk of reparations for slavery has moved to state capitols

In Pennsylvania, State Rep. Chris Rabb announced plans to introduce major legislation that would award reparations to African-American state residents. Lawmakers in California, New York, Texas, and Vermont have also introduced legislation proposing compensation to the descendants of slaves.

Black lawmakers in New Jersey are trying to pass their own version of H.R. 40. In November, the state’s Legislative Black Caucus introduced a bill to establish a reparations task force to “conduct research and develop proposals to address the generational harms caused by New Jersey’s role in the institution of slavery.” New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to abolish slavery, and Black state representatives believe the state should work to “repair … irreparable harms” caused by slavery.

76. 3.5 million-member National Baptist Convention support #ADOS and Reparations

National Baptist Convention of America (NBCA) President Samuel Tolbert Jr. tweeted support for #ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) in November: “NBCA is looking forward to the partnership with ADOS. A change is coming in America and the black church (NBCA) will be involved through ADOS.”

77. Antigua and Barbuda wants Harvard University to pay reparations

More than 200 years ago, a wealthy Antiguan slave owner helped found Harvard Law School with proceeds from his plantation. Antigua and Barbuda wants Harvard to pay reparations to finance its own public university. Antiguan slaveowner Isaac Royall Jr. donated the money used to create the first endowed law professorship in 1815, according to The Harvard Crimson. The law school held the slave owner’s family’s crest as its symbol until 2016 after Black students protested. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Alphonso Browne said Harvard President Lawrence Bascow has been unresponsive to the request for reparations. “He has failed to address the issue of reparations in a meaningful way,” Browne said, according to the Miami Herald. “If they fail to engage meaningfully, we will be forced to pursue all legal remedies available to us to ensure … justice.”

78. Reparations ‘are about compassion, decency in a viable democratic society’

Lawyer, author, and activist Randall Robinson has long fought for slavery reparations for African Americans. He wrote: “When I talk about reparations, I am not merely talking about restitution to the contemporary victims of American slavery for slavery and the century of the de jure discrimination that followed it. I am talking about the repair of our general society. I am talking about the resuscitation of compassion. I am talking about the essential notions of decency in a viable democratic society.” Robinson was president of the TransAfrica Forum and author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.”

79. OJ Simpson Lawyer Johnny Cochran dreamed of suing for reparations

Before he died in 2005, the late Johnny Cochran was part of a group of civil rights and class-action lawyers who wanted to sue the US. for reparations for American Blacks descended from slaves. Their Reparations Assessment Group included Harvard law Prof. Charles J. Ogletree; Cochran; Alexander J. Pires Jr., who won a $1 billion discrimination settlement for Black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Richard Scruggs, who won the $368.5 billion settlement for states against tobacco companies; Dennis C. Sweet III, who won a $400 million settlement in the “phen-fen” diet drug case; and Willie E. Gary, who won a $500 million judgment against the Loewen Group Inc., the world’s largest funeral home firm. Randall Robinson was also involved with the group. Formed in 2000, the Reparations Assessment Group the group gained momentum and its members began to map out how the court-ordered funds would be spent, LA Times reported.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, broke their momentum. U.S. newspapers and wire services ran nearly 2,600 stories including the words “slavery” and “reparations” in the year leading up to 9/11. From 9/11 until 2008, the yearly average was less than 1,000, according to LexisNexis.

80. The largest slaveholding states have yet to apologize for slavery

Nine of the 18 states with slave populations before the Civil War have issued official apologies. But the largest slaveholding states have yet to apologize. It’s essential that Congress officially apologizes for slavery before the U.S. can think about reparations, say lawyers and political consultants Mark Medish and Daniel Lucich.

States that have officially apologized for slavery include Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Alabama, New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee and Connecticut.

No-apology states include Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas.

81. Former slave Henrietta Wood sued for reparations and won

In 1853, Henrietta Wood was a free Black woman working as a domestic servant in Cincinnati when she was kidnapped by a white man named Zebulon Ward and sold as a slave. Taken to Mississippi and then to Texas, she remained a slave through the Civil War.

Wood eventually returned to Cincinnati, and in 1870 sued Ward for $20,000 in damages and lost wages. In 1878, an all-white jury ordered Ward to pay her $2,500, possibly the largest amount ever awarded by a U.S. court for slavery restitution. That $2,500 in 1870 has the equivalent purchasing power in 2020 of close to $50,000, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.

The money Woods got was a lot less than she wanted, but it enabled her son to buy a house in Chicago and attend law school there. “Those assets and his long career as a lawyer made a material difference for him and his descendants,” New York Times reported.

82. Barack Obama ‘did not even want to be in the same sentence, in the same room with reparations’

Economist Julianne Malveaux recalls interviewing Barack Obama in 2004 when he was still State Sen. Obama. An author, social and political commentator, and businesswoman, Malveaux served for five years as the 15th president of Bennett College for Women.

Malveaux described her Obama interview to economist Boyce Watkins during an interview on the Black Financial Channel. “I was wearing my journalist’s hat,” Malveaux said. “(Obama) was a hot ticket. I’ll never forget it. When I asked about reparations he totally went off. He jumped off the chair. He said, ‘Turn off the microphone, we’re not recording this’. He did not even want to be in the same sentence, in the same room with reparations. Nope to the nope to the nope. Next thing the handler is gathering up their stuff and I’m like, ‘Dude can we at least close the interview up so I can say bye?’ So we did.”

83. Malcolm X called for reparations in 1963

While speaking at Michigan State University, Malcolm X called for reparations in the form of back wages and a section of the U.S. to be set aside for Black people. Later, in his book “By Any Means Necessary,” published posthumously, he talked more about reparations:

“If you are the son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father’s estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength…is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay…We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat…. All that money…is what gives the present generation of American Whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out…like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn’t here to pay. My father isn’t here to collect. But I’m here to collect and you’re here to pay.”

Malcolm X was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.

84. John Conyers led a multi-decade fight for reparations

Until he retired in 2017, the late Rep. John Conyers was the longest-serving African-American member of Congress. The former U.S. Representative for Michigan (1965 to 2017), was the first to introduce a bill calling for the study of slavery reparations for African Americans. In 1989 he introduced H.R. 40. When Conyers resigned from Congress, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, took up lead sponsorship of the bill. Conyers worked nearly 30 years pushing for reparations. He died in 2019.

85. The Nation Of Islam’s position on reparations

The Nation of Islam feels that not only does America owe Blacks reparations but Europe does too. In 2004, Minister Louis Farrakhan made a case for reparations for slavery during a speech broadcast worldwide from Chicago at Norfolk State University.

During his speech, Farrakhan insisted that White people today must talk about reparations even though the crimes against Black people were done generations ago. “Are you, the present generation of whites, any better than your fathers?” he asked. “You didn’t do it, but the responsibility to correct it is on your shoulders.”

86. A timeline of reparations

Writer, scholar, and activist Dr. Conrad Worrill, co-author of “Chronology of the Reparations Movement of African Americans” with Ray Winbush, recently presented a chronology timeline of reparations for African Americans. You can read more here.

87. Cost of reparations: Marketwatch calculated $1 million per African-American household

Marketwatch looked at the values of successive generations of U.S. slaves — the total values in 1800, 1830 and 1860 — and applied Treasury bond interest rates to the money over the decades since to come up with a reparations bill of $16 trillion.

That’s about 75 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and slightly more than the total U.S. personal disposable income for a year. It comes out to around $1 million per African-American household, according to Marketwatch.

88. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s great-great-grandfathers owned 14 slaves. He’s opposed to reparations

In his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game,” Sen. Mitch McConnell wrote about descending from “a long line of hardworking and often colorful McConnells.” He failed to mention his slave-owning kin. It turns out that two of McConnell’s great-great-grandfathers — James McConnell and Richard Daley — owned at least 14 slaves in Limestone County, Alabama. Most of their slaves were female, according to investigative reporting by NBC News.

89. Slaveowners got reparations after emancipation. Enslaved African-Americans got nothing

White Americans opposed to paying reparations to descendants of slaves may not know that white slaveowners received reparations after their slaves were freed. President Abraham Lincoln paid white Union loyalists up to $300 for every enslaved person freed, Prof. Tera Hunter wrote. The reparations were made through the District of Columbia Emancipation Act.

The largest individual payout was $18,000 for 69 slaves. That’s the equivalent of about $557,800 in 2020. Slaveowners petitioned state, local and colonial governments for compensation when their “property” was lost or stolen.

90. Mitch McConnell thinks Barack Obama was a form of reparations

Veteran politician Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said America paid for its “original sin” of slavery by electing President Barack Obama.

McConnell told reporters he was against compensating Black people for slavery. “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” McConnell said on the eve of the Juneteenth congressional hearing on H.R. 40. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing landmark Civil Rights legislation, we’ve elected an African-American president.

“I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it,” McConnell told reporters.

91. Florida Sen. Daryl Jones was one of the only state senators ever to secure reparations for African Americans

Former Florida Sen. Daryl Jones was one of the only state senators ever to secure reparations for African Americans. In 1994, Sen. Jones helped get Senate approval for $2.1 million in reparations for survivors of the 1923 Rosewood massacre. The homes, churches and stores were burned in Rosewood by whites looking for a Black man who had allegedly assaulted a married white woman. At least six Black people and two whites were killed.

The claim against the state was based on a lack of action by government officials to protect Rosewood residents’ lives and property. “Our system of justice failed the citizens of Rosewood,” said Jones, a Democrat from Miami who served from 1992 to 2002. “This is your chance to right an atrocious wrong.”

Jones’ son, Derek Jones, built a business to advance the quality of life for people who have been traditionally excluded from economic participation. His company, UnitedCoin, is a Securities And Exchange-registered company and cryptocurrency.

92. Not exactly reparations: Dr. William ‘Sandy’ Darity’s Baby Bonds

Economists and wealth inequality experts Dr. William “Sandy” Darity and Darrick Hamilton have argued for baby bonds as a race-neutral way to close the racial wealth gap between Black and white people in the U.S. Baby bonds are not really bonds. They’re a trust fund or endowment endowed to every newborn infant, regardless of race. The bonds grow on the basis of the wealth of the child’s family.

The idea is for children to access the money when they turn 18. Beneficiaries will know the money is coming and they’ll have a stake in the system. It will be a downpayment on an apartment or it will subsidize their college fund or start up a business. It will also create a financial basis for giving them financial literacy courses because they would be sure that they would have something to manage.

Here’s Darity proposal for paying for Baby Bonds: “If we estimate that there’s about 4 million new infants born in a given year and each child gets $20,000, that’s $80 billion per year. Since there’s a gestation period of 20 years before you have to make the first payouts, you could set up a trust fund to fund the trust. The annual expense is $80 billion – not much of an expense in terms of the U.S. budget.”

In 2019, the U.S. spent $4.45 trillion.

93. Sen. Cory Booker introduced a baby bonds bill

One-time presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed a baby bonds bill that would grant every newborn American child $1,000 at birth. That money would grow with the child, based on the family’s income, and could be used at age 18 to launch young adults on the road to economic success.

William “Sandy” Darity of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Darrick Hamilton of The New School in New York City published a 2010 paper in The Review of Black Political Economy, where they proposed “a bold progressive child development account-type program that could go a long way toward eliminating the racial wealth gap.”

94. The ACLU supports reparations, says slavery polluted the country

In May 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union formally announced its support of reparations for African Americans for the practices and vestiges of slavery.

The ACLU and National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) partnered to host a forum on reparations on Nov. 2, 2019 in Charleston, South Carolina. The goal was to further the passage of H.R. 40.

“Our country was built on the polluted bedrock of slavery. We will not be at our strongest until that pollution is fully understood and cleaned, and our system of democracy repaired,” said ACLU deputy legal director Jeffery Robinson. “The type of detailed study proposed in H.R. 40 has never been done, and it remains the only mechanism to fully achieve a fair and just solution on the issue of reparations.”

95. Episcopal Seminary that used slave labor starts $1.7M reparations fund to support Black clergy

Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria not only acknowledged that it relied on slave labor in the 19th century but started a $1.7 million reparations fund. The fund will be used to help descendants of slaves who worked there, to support Black clergy in the Episcopal Church, and support the needs of local African-American congregations connected to the seminary.

96. Marianne Williamson was declared the winner of the July 2019 Democratic debate based on her view of reparations

New Age motivational speaker Marianne Williamson surprised viewers at the July 2019 candidates’ debate and exceeded expectations for her unconventional approach on reparations. Few politicians had discussed the issue in detail. Williamson, who has since dropped out of the race, was questioned on her $500 billion price tag for reparations:

“Well, first of all, it’s not $500 billion in financial assistance, it’s $200-to-$500 billion payment of a debt that is owed,” Williamson said. “That is what reparations is. We need deep truth-telling. We don’t need another commission to look at evidence … It is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal. All that a country is, is a collection of people. People heal when there’s some deep truth-telling. We need to recognize, when it comes to the economic gap between Blacks and whites in America, it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has had to do with the fact that there was 250 years of slavery followed by another hundred years of domestic terrorism.”

97. America’s last slave ship could offer a case for reparations

When the remains of the Clotilda — last slave ship to bring Africans to the U.S. — were discovered in Mobile, Alabama in March 2019, the discovery gave hope to the cause of reparations for African Americans.

Alabama steamship owner Timothy Meaher financed the Clotilda and emerged out of the Civil War a wealthy man, AP reported. His descendants own land worth millions of dollars and still belong to high-income Mobile society. Meaher’s slaves, on the other hand, emerged from the Civil War with their freedom, but little more. Their occupations on census forms were listed as laborers, farmers and housewives with nothing of value. Many of the slaves’ descendants have working-class jobs today.

“Now, the history of Meaher and the slave ship Clotilda may offer one of the more clear-cut cases for slavery reparations, with identifiable perpetrators and victims,” AP reported.

98. N’COBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America

Founded on Sept. 26, 1987, N’COBRA — a Swahili term meaning disaster — was started to broaden the base of support for the long-standing reparations movement. The organization engages in direct action to obtain reparations. It organized a highway slowdown on the Washington Metro Area Beltway in the early ’90s. Demonstrations in front of federal buildings gave rise to Reparations Awareness Day on Feb. 25. During an annual demonstration on April 4, people were asked to boycott school or work and engage in reparations education. On Black Friday, started in August 2003, people of African descent are encouraged to patronize only Black businesses on Fridays. Black businesses are asked to support reparations and principles of cooperative economics.

99. Bernie Sanders was applauded by the NAACP when he explained why he’s against reparations

Speaking at an NAACP convention, Sen. Bernie Sanders said he felt there was a better way to deal with the trauma caused by slavery than reparations.

“Here’s my fear about reparations, and I understand the issue, and I’m on board the legislation that will study the issue,” he said. “Here’s my fear: The Congress gives the African American community a $20,000 check, and says, ‘Thank you, that took care of slavery, we don’t have to worry about anything more.’ I think that’s wrong, I want to build, rebuild the distressed communities in America,” Sanders said.

The crowd erupted in applause. Sanders added that supports Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s H.R. 40 Bill to study reparations.

100. 30 Years ago, Rev. Jesse Jackson made reparations for slavery the core of his presidential campaign

Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, the second Black candidate to do so after Shirley Chisholm in the 1970s. Jackson called for reparations. The Democrats considered him a nuisance and worried that his policy proposals were too left-leaning, the Atlantic reported. He ran again in 1988.

Jackson talked about how reparations become an issue in his presidential campaign.

“We are the foundation of American society—not the bottom, the foundation,” Jackson said in a June, 2019 interview with Adam Harris at The Atlantic. “When the Declaration of Independence came, we had been enslaved for 157 years. We made cotton king. We are due a different kind of recognition … We were enslaved while building the strongest economy in the world … The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away. It’s buried right now, but as each generation becomes much more serious, it will be grappled with.” 

101. Columbia Prof. John McWhorter says reparations have already happened and it didn’t work

The idea that reparations have already happened is one that John McWhorter has been defending for 20 years. A Columbia University linguistics professor and author or editor of 20 books, McWhorter is distrustful that reparations can work. Reparations have already happened in the form of the Great Society domestic policy initiatives, McWhorter said.

President Lyndon B. Johnson designed the Great Society programs in 1964 and 1965 to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. “What happened in Bedford Stuyvesant during the Great Society, you look at all the programs and how much money was put in — those were reparations,” McWhorter said. And they didn’t work, he added during an interview with Harvard philosophy professor and activist Dr. Cornell West and CNN commentator Don Lemon. McWhorter predicted that “new reparations” won’t be effective either. However, McWhorter tweeted that he doesn’t think reparations are a bad idea. “I think we’ve already had since the 1960s, and still have, them. They were just never titled ‘reparations.'”

102. Reparations are a ‘collective debt that will have to be paid’

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that he has traveled the country studying the things that divide Americans — urban/rural, red/blue, rich/poor. But the racial divide is different, he said. It “doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience.”

The reparations discussion has made people talk about the reasons behind the call for reparations. “One way to capture it is to say that the other divides are born out of separation and inequality, but the racial divide is born out of sin,” Brooks wrote. “We don’t talk about sin much in the public square anymore. But I don’t think one can grasp the full amplitude of racial injustice without invoking the darkest impulses of human nature.”

Slavery didn’t just affect Black people, it affected the entire society, especially morally, Brooks said. “Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.”