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.