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Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

It’s not often that an article comes along that changes the world, but that’s exactly what happened with Ta-Nehisi Coates, five years ago, when he wrote “ The Case for Reparations ,” in The Atlantic . Reparations have been discussed since the end of the Civil War—in fact, there is a bill about reparations that’s been sitting in Congress for thirty years—but now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination are a subject of major discussion among the Democratic Presidential candidates. In a conversation recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick spoke with Coates, who this month published “ Conduction ,” a story in The New Yorker’s Fiction Issue. Subjects of the conversation included what forms reparations might take, which Democratic candidates seem most serious about the topic, and how the issue looks in 2019, a political moment very different from when “The Case for Reparations” was written.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Ta-Nehisi, for those who may not have read the article five years ago, what, exactly, is the case that you make for reparations—which is a word that’s been around for a long, long time?

The case I make for reparations is, virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. I think what has often been missing—this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014—that behind all of that oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued well into the period of, I would make the argument, around the time of the Fair Housing Act.

So what year is that?

That’s 1968. There are a lot of people who—

But you’re not saying that, between 1968 and 2019, everything is hunky-dory.

I’m not saying everything was hunky-dory at all! But if you were speaking to the most intellectually honest dubious person—because, you have to remember, what I’m battling is this idea that it ended in 1865.

With emancipation and the end of the war?

With the emancipation, yes, yes, yes. And the case I’m trying to make is, within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.

A lot of your article was about Chicago housing policy. It was a very technical analysis of housing policy. When people talked to me about the article—and I could tell they hadn’t read it—“So, Ta-Nehisi’s making a case for”—no, no, no, I said. First and foremost, it’s a dissection of a particular policy that’s emblematic of so many other policies.

Right, right. So, out of all of those policies of theft, I had to pick one. And that was really my goal. And the one I picked was housing, was our housing policy. Again, we have this notion that housing as it exists today sort of sprung up from black people coming north, maybe not finding the jobs that they wanted, and thus forming, you know, some sort of pathological culture, and white people, just being concerned citizens, fled to the suburbs. But beneath that was policy! The reason why black people were confined to those neighborhoods in the first place, and white people had access to neighborhoods further away, was because of political decisions. The government underwrote that, through F.H.A. loans, through the G.I. Bill. And that, in turn, caused the devaluing of black neighborhoods, and an inability to access credit, to even improve neighborhoods.

Now, your article starts with someone who lived through these racist policies, a man named Clyde Ross. Tell us the story of Clyde Ross. How did he react to the article?

So, Mr. Ross was living on the West Side of Chicago.

He started out in Mississippi.

Started out in Mississippi, in the nineteen-twenties, born in Mississippi under Jim Crow. His family lost their land, had their land basically stolen from them, had his horse stolen from him. He goes off, fights in World War II, comes back, like a lot of people, says, “I can’t live in Clarksdale[, Mississippi]—I just can’t be here. I’m gonna kill somebody or I’m gonna get killed.” Comes up to Chicago. In Chicago, all of the social conventions of Jim Crow are gone. You don’t have to move off the street because somebody white is walking by, doesn’t have to take his hat off or look down or anything like that, you know. Gets a job at Campbell’s Soup Company, and he wants the, you know, the last emblem of the American Dream—he wants homeownership. Couldn’t go to the bank and get a loan like everybody else.

And he was making a decent wage.

Read the author’s short story in the 2019 Fiction Issue.

Making a decent wage—enough that he could save some money, enough for a down payment. And obviously he has no knowledge—none of us really did, at that point—of what was actually happening, of why this was. No concept of federal policy, really. And so what he ends up with is basically a contract lender, which is a private lender who says, Hey, you give me the down payment, and you own the house. But what they actually did was they kept the deed for the house. And you had to pay off the house in its entirety in order to get the deed. Although you were effectively a renter, you had all of the lack of privilege that a renter has, and yet all the responsibilities that a buyer has. So, if something goes wrong in the house, you have to pay for that. And so these fees would just pile up on these people, and they would lose their houses, and you don’t get your down payment back. Clyde Ross is one of the few people who was able to actually keep his home.

There’s such a moving moment in the piece where he’s sitting with you and he admits, “We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” and felt that his ignorance had extended to his understanding of life in America, in Chicago, which had seemed, to use the phrase of the Great Migration, the Promised Land.

Right, right. And he felt like a sucker. And he felt stupid, just as anybody would. And I don’t think he knew, on the level, the extent to which the con actually went. And then living in a community of people—and this was somebody getting a piece—but living in a community of people who were being ripped off. And they couldn’t talk about it to each other because they wanted to maintain this sort of façade, or this front, that they owned their homes, not that somebody else actually held the deed. And so for a long time there was a great period of silence about it.

Did Mr. Ross react to your piece?

Yeah, he did.

What did he say?

He said reparations will never happen.

So, in the aftermath of the piece—piece comes out, fifteen thousand words in The Atlantic , tremendous interest in it. You said this about the piece, I think it was in the Washington Post . You said, “When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing.” What did you mean?

Well, I mean, it was a Dave Chappelle joke , you know? And what the joke was was, if black people got reparations, all the silly, dumb things that they would actually do.

You know, buy cars, buy rims, fancy clothes, as though other people don’t do those things. And once I started researching not just the fact of plunder but actually the history of the reparations fight, which literally goes back to the American Revolution—George Washington, when he dies, in his will, he leaves things to those who were enslaved. It wasn’t a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something you might actually owe them something. It really only became foreign after the Civil War and emancipation. And so this was quite a dignified idea, and actually an idea there was quite a bit of literature on. And the notion that it was somehow funnier, I thought, really, really diminished what was a serious, trenchant, and deeply, deeply perceptive idea.

If you visited Israel between the fifties and a certain time, you would see Mercedes-Benz taxis all over the country, and you’d wonder. This is not a particularly rich country, at least not yet. This was reparations—this was part of the reparations payment from Germany to Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Second World War. What do reparations look like now?

Right, because they gave them vouchers to buy German goods, right.

What’s being asked for? The rewriting of textbooks, the public discussion—what? In terms of policy, how do you look at it?

So first you need the actual crime documented. You need the official imprimatur of the state: they say this actually happened. I just think that’s a crucial, crucial first step. And the second reason you have a commission is to figure out how we pay it back. I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts—again, why you need a study. This is not ‘I checked black on my census, therefore’—I’ll give you an example of this. For instance, we have what I would almost call a pilot, less significant reparations program right now, actually running in Chicago. Jon Burge, who ran this terrible unit of police officers that tortured black people and sent a lot of innocent black people to jail over the course of I think twenty or so years. And then, once he was found out, in Chicago there was a reparations plan put together with victims, [who] were actually given reparations. But, in addition to that, crucial to that, they changed how they taught history. You had to actually teach Jon Burge. You had to actually teach people about what happened. So it wasn’t just the money. There was some sort of—I hesitate to say educational, but I guess that’s the word we’d use—the educational element to it. And I just think you can’t win this argument by trying to hide the ball. Not in the long term. And so I think both of those things are crucial.

As of this moment, in 2019, there are more than twenty Democratic Presidential candidates running. Eight of them have said they’ll support a bill to at least create a commission to study reparations. What do you make of that? Is it symbolic, or is it lip service, or is it just a way to secure the black vote? Or is it something much more serious than all that?

Uh, it’s probably in some measure all four of those things. It certainly is symbolic. Supporting a commission is not reparations in and of itself. It’s certainly lip service, from at least some of the candidates. I’m actually less sure about [this], in terms of the black vote—it may ultimately be true that this is something that folks rally around, but that’s never been my sense.

Are there candidates that you take more seriously than others when they talk about reparations?

Yeah, I think Elizabeth Warren is probably serious.

In what way?

I think she means it. I mean—I guess it will break a little news—after “The Case for Reparations” came out, she just asked me to come and talk one on one with her about it.

This is five years ago, when your piece came out in The Atlantic ?

Yeah, maybe it was a little later than that, but it was about the time. It was well before she declared anything about running for President.

And what was your conversation with Elizabeth Warren like?

She had read it. She was deeply serious, and she had questions. And it wasn’t, like, Will you do X, Y, and Z for me? It wasn’t, like, I’m trying to demonstrate I’m serious. I have not heard from her since, either, by the way.

Have you talked to any candidates about it?

You published your article five years ago. Barack Obama was President. We are now in a different time and place. How would you place the reparations discussion in this moment?

Yeah, I think people have stopped laughing, and that is really, really important. Does it mean reparations tomorrow? No, it doesn’t. Does it mean end of the fight? No, it doesn’t. But it’s a step, and I think that’s significant.

Now, what would you like to see the outcome of a conversation, or the American equivalent of a South African study into American history, be?

A policy for repair. I think what you need to do is you need to figure out what the exact axes of white supremacy are, and have been, and find out a policy to repair each of those. In other words, this is not just a mass payment. So take the area that I researched. The time I wrote the article—less every day—the time I wrote the article, there were living victims, and are living victims, who had been denied—

Who were on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago.

Yeah! All over this country. People who had been deprived, who had been discriminated against. Set up a claims office. Look at the census tracts. Are those people actually still living there? You know, maybe you can design some sort of investment through resources. Maybe you can have something at the individual level, maybe you can have something at the neighborhood level, and then you would go down the line. You would look at education. You would look at our criminal-justice policy. You would go down the line and address these specifically and directly.

Is your job to just break the glass on a subject, the way you did with reparations, or is it your job to then follow through the way a scholar would for years thereafter?

That’s a great question.

Do you feel your work here is done, and now I’m moving on to the next thing, as you have with any number of subjects? Or do you have to sustain it? Is that on you?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I would like to be able to move on. But I recognize that’s not entirely up to me.

No. Not at all. I just feel like, if you write an article on reparations that has the effect that it actually does, which I didn’t expect, it’s very hard to say. I have to conclude that I clearly have something to say, and a way of saying it, that can affect things. So, if that’s the case, what is your responsibility now? What right have you to say, “I’m done talking about this”? “Because I feel like it.” I don’t know that you get to do that. I’m actually, I feel myself to be very, very grounded in the African-American struggle, even though I’m not. I don’t consider myself an activist. When I think about writing that article, I think about all the people before me who’ve been making the case for reparations from street corners—One Twenty-fifth, in Harlem—and couldn’t get access to an august publication like that. And I think about how I got access, and it strikes me that you owe folks something. You don’t get to just do what you want.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” Named Top Work of Journalism of the Last Decade

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” a 2014 essay in the Atlantic, has been named the “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by a panel of judges convened by NYU's Carter Journalism Institute.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “ The Case for Reparations ,” a 2014 essay in the Atlantic that crafted accounts from the century and a half after the end of slavery into a powerful argument that African Americans are owed compensation for their treatment in the United States, has been named the “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade” by a panel of judges convened by New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (No. 2), Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement (No. 3), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (No. 4), and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (No. 5) round out the first five selections of the “ Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade .”

“The extraordinary work we are honoring—as the best not just of one year and not just in one kind of journalism—reflect important changes in journalism and in society in the past 10 years, says Mitchell Stephens, a professor at the Carter Journalism Institute who oversaw the selection process. “Seven of the first eight were reported by women. Half of these works speak to questions of racial justice.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (photo credit: Gabriella Demczuk)

The honor recognizes nonfiction works on current events that appeared from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019. The Top 10 were drawn from more than 120 nominations, which were announced last month.

The winners will be celebrated at a virtual event tonight, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. For more information and to register, please visit the event's website .

The complete list of “Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade,” which includes comments from the judges, is as follows:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “ The Case for Reparations ,” the Atlantic. “Beautifully written, meticulously reported, highly persuasive …” “The most powerful essay of its time.” “Ground breaking.” “It influenced the public conversation so much that it became a necessary topic in the presidential debate.”
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration . “It's a masterwork by one of our greatest writers and most diligent reporters. Exquisitely written as it is researched, embracing breadth and detail alike, essential reading to understand America.” “A masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.”
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement . Based on their reporting for the New York Times . “ A chronicle of the #MeToo era.” “A pitch-perfect primer on how to take a hot-button-chasing by-the-minutes breaking story and investigate it with the best and most honorable journalistic practices.” “This is one of the defining issues of our times, one whose impact will be felt for a long time.”
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers . “Unbelievably well written and well reported portrait of a slum in Mumbai.” “Vividly reports on the life of this slum's inhabitants.”
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . “The book demonstrates the ways in which the War on Drugs, and its resulting incarceration policies and processes, operate against people of color in the same way as Jim Crow. Powerful on its own terms and crucial as an engine toward transforming the criminality of our ‘justice’ system.”
Julie K. Brown, “ How a Future Trump Cabinet Member Gave a Serial Sex Abuser the Deal of a Lifetime ,” the Miami Herald. “Investigative journalist for the Miami Herald , examines a secret plea deal that helped Jeffrey Epstein evade federal charges related to sexual abuse.” “Brown essentially picked up a cold case; without her reporting, Epstein's crimes and prosecutors' dereliction would not be known.” “Great investigative reporting.” “Documenting the abuses of Jeffrey Epstein when virtually everyone else had dropped the story.” “What makes this particularly compelling for me is that Brown did the reporting amid the economic collapse of a great regional paper.” “A remarkable effort to empower victims.”
Sheri Fink, Five Days At Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital . “In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This is narrative medical journalism at its finest: compelling, compassionate, and unsettling.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones , Matthew Desmond, Jeneen Interlandi, Kevin M. Kruse, Jamelle Bouie, Linda Villarosa, Wesley Morris, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Bryan Stevenson, Trymaine Lee, Djeneba Aduayom, Nikita Stewart, Mary Elliott, Jazmine Hughes, The 1619 Project , New York Times Magazine . “Explores the beginning of American slavery and reframes the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” “A definitive work of opinion journalism examining the lingering role of slavery in American society.”
David A. Fahrenthold, Series of articles demonstrating that most of candidate Donald Trump's claimed charitable giving was bogus , the Washington Post . “By contacting hundreds of charities—interactions recorded on what became a well-known legal pad—Fahrenthold proved that Trump had never given what he claimed to have given or much at all, despite, in one instance, having sat on the stage as if he had.”
Staff of the Washington Post , Police shootings database 2015 to present . “The definitive journalistic exploration and documentation of fatal police shootings in America. In a decade defined, in part, by the emergence of Black Lives Matter, this Washington Post project set a new standard for real-time, data journalism and was a vital resource during a still-raging national debate.” “In the wake of Ferguson, newsrooms across the country took up admirable data reporting efforts to fill the longstanding gaps in existing federal data on police use of force. This project stands out both in its comprehensiveness and sustained dedication.”

The winners were chosen by a panel of 14 external judges drawn from many different forms of journalism and representing multiple approaches to reporting as well as by Carter Journalism Institute faculty.

All of the decade’s nominees are listed on the Carter Journalism Institute web site . These nominees were proposed by a panel of judges that included Pulitzer Prize winners Leon Dash and David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker , as well as author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather, faculty at NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, and selected Institute students and alumni.

In 2000, NYU’s journalism program selected the “ Top 100 Works of Journalism of the 20th Century .” Heading that list were John Hersey’s Hiroshima , Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigations. In 2010, it chose the “ Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade ,” covering the first 10 years of the 21 st century.

For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, please visit its website .

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Ta-Nehisi Coates On Reparations: 'We're Going To Be In For A Fight'

In his latest think piece, Coates writes that "until the U.S. pays its moral debts to African-Americans, our country will never be whole." He discusses his latest essay for The Atlantic.

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The Case for Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reckoning with U.S. Slavery & Institutional Racism

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic , where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He has just written a cover story for the magazine called “The Case for Reparations.” Coates is also the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle .
Read: "The Case for Reparations." By Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic)
Watch Part 2: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Segregation, Housing Discrimination and “The Case for Reparations”

An explosive new cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine by the famed essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates has rekindled a national discussion on reparations for American slavery and institutional racism. Coates explores how slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and federally backed housing policy systematically robbed African Americans of their possessions and prevented them from accruing intergenerational wealth. Much of the essay focuses on predatory lending schemes that bilked potential African-American homeowners, concluding: “Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” Click here to watch Part 2 of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN : “The Case for Reparations. Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

So begins an explosive new cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine by the famed essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates. The article is being credited for rekindling a national discussion on reparations for American slavery and institutional racism.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and federally backed housing policy systematically robbed African Americans of their possessions and prevented them from accruing intergenerational wealth. Much of the piece focuses on predatory lending schemes that bilked potential African-American homeowners. This is a video that The Atlantic released to preview its new cover story, “The Case for Reparations.”

BILLY LAMAR BROOKS SR.: This area here represents the poorest of the poor in the city of Chicago.

MATTIE LEWIS : I’ve always wanted to own my own house, because I worked for white people when I was in the South, and they had beautiful homes, and I always said, one day I was going to have me one.

JACK MacNAMARA: White folks created the ghetto. And it drives me crazy today even that we don’t admit that. This is the best example I can think of of institutional racism.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, to talk about the case for reparations, we’re joined now by Ta-Nehisi Coates here in New York City.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

TA- NEHISI COATES : Thanks so much for having me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You start your article with one particular figure, Clyde Ross.

TA- NEHISI COATES : Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Tell us his story and why you decided to begin with him.

TA- NEHISI COATES : Well, Mr. Ross is really just emblematic of much of what’s happened to African Americans across the 20th—and I emphasize 20th—century. Mr. Ross was born in the Delta region of Mississippi. His family was not particularly poor; they were actually quite prominent farmers. They had their land and virtually all of their possessions taken from them through a scheme around allegedly back taxes and were reduced to sharecropping. In the sharecropping system, there was no sort of assurances over what they might get versus what they actually picked.

When I first met Mr. Ross, the first thing he said to me was he left Mississippi for Chicago because he was seeking the protection of the law. And I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that, but as he explained it to me, he said, “Listen, there were no black judges, no black prosecutors, no black police. Basically, we had no law. We were outlaws. People could take from us whatever they wanted.” And that was very much his early life.

He went to Chicago thinking things would be a little different. And on the—you know, on the surface, they were. He managed to get a job. He got married. He had a decent life and was basically looking for that, you know, one more emblem of the American middle class in the Eisenhower years, and that was the possession of a home.

Unfortunately, due to government policy, Mr. Ross at that time, like most African Americans around the country, was unable to secure a loan, due to policies around redlining and deciding, you know, who deserved the loans and who doesn’t. There was a broad, broad consensus that African Americans, for no other reason besides blanket racism, could not be responsible homeowners.

Mr. Ross, as happens when people are pushed out of the legitimate loan market, ended up in the illegitimate loan market and got caught up in a system of contract buying, which is essentially just a particularly onerous rent-to-own scheme for people looking to buy houses, and ended up purchasing a house, I believe at $27,000, I think, he paid for it. The person who sold it to him had bought the house only six months before for $12,000. And Mr. Ross later became an activist, helped formed the Contract Buyers League, and just fought on behalf of African-American homeowners on the West Side of Chicago. I should add that it’s estimated during this period that 85 percent of African Americans looking to buy homes in Chicago bought through contract lending.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let’s hear Clyde Ross in his own words, speaking in 1969 on behalf of the Contract Buyers League, a coalition of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predatory lending.

CLYDE ROSS : Who have cheated us out of more than money. We have been cheated out of the right to be human beings in a society. We have been cheated out of buying homes at a decent price. Now, it’s time now. We’ve got a chance now. The Contract Buyers League have presented a chance for these people in this area to move out of this grip of society, to move up, stand on your own two feet, be human beings, fight for what you know is right. Fight!

AMY GOODMAN : Ta-Nehisi Coates, can you talk about this example, and others in this remarkable piece, and how you then talk about the bill for reparations that’s been introduced by John Conyers year after year in the House, and what reparations would actually look like?

TA- NEHISI COATES : What I tried to establish in this piece was that there’s a conventional way of talking about the relationship in America between the African-American community and the white community, and it’s one that we’re very comfortable with, and I call it basically the lunch table view of the problem with racism in America, is that black people want to sit at one lunch table and white people want to sit at, you know, another lunch table, and if we could just get black and white people to like each other, love each other, everything would be solved.

In fact, even these terms that we’re using—black and white—are inventions, and they’re inventions of racism. And if you trace back the history back to 1619, a better way of describing the relationship between black and white people is one of plunder, the constant stealing, the taking from black people that extends from slavery up through Jim Crow policy—I mean, slavery is obviously the stealing of people’s labor; in some cases, the outright theft of people’s children and the vending of people’s children, the taking of the black body for whatever profit you can wring from it—up through the Jim Crow South, where you have a system of debt peonage, sharecropping, which really isn’t much different—minus the actual selling of children, you’re still exploiting labor and taking as much as you can from it—into a system—when you think about something like separate but equal, in the civil rights movement, we traditionally picture, you know, colored-only water fountains, white-only restrooms. But the thing people have to remember is, if you take a state like Mississippi or anywhere in the Deep South where you have a public university system, black people are paying into that. Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren’t getting the same return. This is theft. It’s systemized.

And when we try to talk about the practicality of it—I spent 16,000 words, almost, just trying to actually make the case. And at the end, what I come to is that, you know, the actionable thing right now is to support Representative John Conyers’ bill, H.R. 40, for a study of what slavery has actually done, what the legacy of slavery has actually done to black people and what are remedies we might come up with. And I did that not so much to dodge the question, but because I think to actually even sketch out what this might be would take another 16,000 words. I mean, we have to calculate what slavery was. We have to calculate what Jim Crow was. We have to calculate what we lost in terms of redlining, come to some sort of ostensible number and then figure out whether we can actually pay it back, and if we can’t, what we might do in lieu of that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when you mention the systemic plunder that’s occurred, I mean, this is not ancient history. This—

TA- NEHISI COATES : No, no, it’s not.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the most recent—

TA- NEHISI COATES : No, no.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —economic crisis in the country, there was this enormous reduction in the wealth—

TA- NEHISI COATES : Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —of African Americans in the country as a result of the housing crisis. And yet the narrative portrays it as, well, the housing crisis was caused—the conservative narrative is—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —by affirmative action policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make it easier—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —for African Americans with low credit to get loans. Talk about that and this enormous wealth loss that occurred recently.

TA- NEHISI COATES : Right. Well, the great sociologist Douglas Massey has a very interesting paper out specifically about, you know, the foreclosure crisis—it should be rightly called—that happened very, very recently. And one of the things he demonstrates in the paper is the thing that made this possible, segregation was a driver of this. And if you think about it, you know, it makes perfect sense. In the African-American community—the African-American community is the most segregated community in the country, and what you have in that community is a population of people who have been traditionally cut off from wealth-building opportunities, so, anxious to get wealth-building opportunities. If you are a banker and you are looking sell a scheme to somebody and rip somebody off, well, there your marks are, right there, right in the same place. And that’s essentially what happened.

AMY GOODMAN : Ta-Nehisi, I wanted to go to this issue of reparations and the examples you’ve seen—for example, after the Holocaust, Germany and the Jews. Can you talk about how those reparations took place?

TA- NEHISI COATES : Well, it’s very, very interesting. I mean, one of the reasons why I included that history, because, as we know, reparations for African Americans has all sorts of practical problems that we would have to deal with and have to fight about, and I wanted to just demonstrate that even in the case of, you know, reparations to Israel, the one that’s most cited, this was not a sure thing. One of the things that people often say about African-American reparations is, “Well, oh, you’re just talking about slavery. That was so long ago,” as though if, you know, we were talking about a more proximate or more present case, it would be much easier. But, in fact, the fact that it was so close made it really, really hard for people. It made it hard for some Israelis who didn’t want to feel like they were taking a buck off of, you know, folks’ mothers or brothers or sisters or grandmas who had just been killed. In Germany, in fact, you know, if we look at the public opinion surveys at the time, they were no more—Germans, in the popular sense, were no more apt to take responsibility today than Americans are for slavery. So, it was a very, very difficult piece.

What’s interesting, and I think one of the lessons that can be learned from it, however, is the way it was structured. In fact, Germany didn’t just cut a check to Israel. What they actually did was they gave them vouchers. And those vouchers, you know, that were worth a certain amount of money—and those vouchers had to be used with German companies. So, essentially, what they structured was a stimulus for West Germany while giving reparations to Israel at the same time. And it gives us some clue at, you know, some sort of creative solutions we might have in the African-American community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, one of the issues you also raise is that this reparations demand is not new in American history itself.

TA- NEHISI COATES : No.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You talk about Belinda Royall, who in 1783—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —had been a slave for 50 years, became a freed woman. She petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations.

TA- NEHISI COATES : Right. Right, right, right. And I think people think of this as something that just sort of came up, you know, 150 years—black people—you know, reparations is basically as old as this country is. And it’s not just, as you mention, Belinda Royall, people like that, but it’s also white people who understood at the time that some great injury had been done. Many of the Quaker meetings, for instance, basically, you know, would excommunicate people who didn’t just free their slaves, but actually gave them something, you know, paid them reparations in return. We have, you know, the great quote from Timothy Dwight, who was the president of Yale, who says, “Listen, to liberate these folks, to free these folks and to give them nothing would be to entail a curse upon them.” And effectively, that’s actually what happened, you know, upon African Americans and really, I would argue, upon the country at large. Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated. Some of them educated them. But they understood to just cut somebody out into the wild, which is basically what happened to black people, would not be a good thing.

AMY GOODMAN : Ta-Nehisi Coates, we want to thank you very much for being with us. We’re going to do part two right after the show, and we will post it online at democracynow.org. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic , where he writes about culture, politics and social issues, has just written the cover story called “The Case for Reparations.” Ta-Nehisi Coates is also the author of the memoir, The Beautiful Struggle .

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The Case for Reparations

A slow convert to the cause.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

I’ve been traveling around the country for the past few years studying America’s divides — urban/rural, red/blue, rich/poor. There’s been a haunting sensation the whole time that is hard to define. It is that the racial divide 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.

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. We don’t talk about sin much in the public square any more. But I don’t think one can grasp the full amplitude of racial injustice without invoking the darkest impulses of human nature.

So let’s look at a sentence that was uttered at a time when the concept of sin was more prominent in the culture. The sentence is from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address. Lincoln had just declared that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. He was fondly hoping and fervently praying that the scourge of war would pass away. But then he added this thought:

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

There are a few thoughts packed into that sentence. First, there is a natural moral order to the universe. There is a way things are supposed to be — more important than economic wealth or even a person’s life.

Second, moral actions are connected to each other. If somebody tears at the moral order by drawing blood through the lash of slavery, then that wrong will have to be paid for by the blood of the sword. History has meaning. It’s not just random events.

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The Case for Reparations

24 pages • 48 minutes read

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Reparations for American Slavery

“The Case for Reparations” concentrates solely on the question of whether or not reparations ought to be paid, and concludes that they should. Coates does not delve into the separate topic of what form those reparations should take. He demonstrates that the idea of reparations has been around a long time, and in some ways they were taken more seriously in the past. He cites a former slave named Belinda Royall, who was granted reparations by an American court around the time of the American Revolution. Royall had been brought to the colonies from Africa and forced into bondage for 50 years. When her owner fled to Britain during the war, she was freed, but she felt she was due more than her freedom and sued for compensation. A Massachusetts court awarded her 15 pounds and 12 shillings out of the estate of her former owner. At that point, Coates writes, slavery had existed for 150 years already and “the idea that [slaves] might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous” (Part III).

As time went on, however, more people did consider reparations outrageous. Though some African Americans continued to seek reparations, those opposed argued that former slaves had gained enough to counteract their enslavement: They had been freed, taught to speak English, and had the ideas of Christianity bestowed upon them, which would not have happened had they stayed in Africa.

For the remainder of the 19th century and much of the 20th century, African Americans were “terrorized” and systematically deprived of multiple means of generating wealth. Put simply, “practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals” (Part V). He refers mainly to the practice of redlining that denied African Americans the opportunity to purchase homes and accumulate wealth. In Coates’s view, slavery would have been bad enough if African Americans had started on a level playing field with other citizens when it ended, but ample evidence shows this was not the case.

White Supremacy in the United States

In Coates’s view, the existence of white supremacy underlies the entire history of the United States. In fact, he argues, it goes hand in hand with democracy. In the section entitled “The Ills that Slavery Frees Us from,” he quotes historian Edmund S. Morgan, who wrote that the Founding Fathers of America “had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected” (Part IV). Coates writes that during Bacon’s Rebellion in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1676, poor white indentured servants joined together with black slaves in protest. From then on, white elites worked to harden racial divisions through legal and other means. As Coates puts it, “For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens” (Part IV).

After slavery ended, the system of Jim Crow in the South continued the existence of white supremacy. Legal and extralegal means kept whites in total control of the government and society, while blacks were citizens in name only. However, it didn’t end there. What Coates highlights in his essay is that the system of white supremacy went beyond individual bad actors to include policies of the federal government. The author states,

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. (Part IX)

Federal agencies that promoted home ownership , for example, systematically excluded African Americans. Therefore, discrimination cannot simply be attributed to a few individual outliers.

Racial Discrimination by the United States Government

If the federal government had never engaged in discrimination after 1865, those opposed to reparations could always blame post-Civil War injustices done to African Americans on individual prejudice, something that cannot be legislated out of existence. Coates marshals much evidence to show that even after the legal system of slavery ended, government-sanctioned discrimination continued well into the next century. The primary means for middle class Americans to gain wealth in the 20th century—home ownership, which was made possible by federal agencies set up during the Roosevelt administration—was purposely not made available to African Americans. Instead, the only way African Americans could buy a home was through predatory lending and contracts.

The resulting wealth gap between whites and blacks, as well as the de facto segregation of neighborhoods in many of the nation’s cities, resulted from what Coates refers to as government-enabled “social engineering.” As Coates puts it, “[t]he traditional terminology, white flight , implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors” (Part VI). Since the beginning of slavery in the New World, the plunder of wealth from blacks to whites, combined with the exclusion of blacks from many wealth-producing opportunities by the government, amounted to an astronomical amount of money. Therefore, the cumulative sins of slavery and plunder warrant the payment of reparations.

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The Case for Reparations

By ta-nehisi coates, the case for reparations summary and analysis of part i: “so that’s just one of my losses”.

The article begins with three epigraphs. The first is from the Bible, specifically Deuteronomy 15, in which God instructs the people of Israel to free Hebrew slaves after they have served them six years, and to support them financially upon their emancipation, in remembrance of when they were slaves in Egypt. Second comes a quote from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government , which talks about how after someone is done wrong by another, they have the right to “seek reparation.” Finally, Coates closes the section on epigraphs with a quote from an enslaved person, who says that their labor and suffering has given them the right to American soil, and that they are determined to have it.

Part One begins with the story of Clyde Ross , an African-American man born near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1923. Early on in his childhood, his family was fairly well-off, owning a decently-sized farm, and wanting for almost nothing—except the full protection of the law. Jim Crow Mississippi, however, did not provide that, lynching more Black people than any other state between 1882 and 1968 and systemically denying African-Americans access to basic sociopolitical rights. The Ross family was no exception, as Mississippi authorities accused the family of having back taxes while the Ross family had no effective way to respond. The state seized their assets, and forced them to turn to sharecropping.

This was not uncommon practice, and like many other Black children at the time, Ross lost the opportunity for a better education because of the family's lack of funds. When he was ten, a group of white men forced him to sell his horse, an exertion of power that was among the first of many losses the Rosses would see in the coming years. Sharecropping was a fundamentally dishonest practice, where landowners would often make bales of cotton disappear, or suddenly change the landowner/worker profit split, leaving families almost destitute. Ross was shaped by this deep injustice as he grew older, and left as soon as he could by way of the military draft. When he returned home from service, he decided to become one of six million African-Americans that left the South over the course of the 20th century in what is called the Great Migration. He moved to Chicago and was enjoying his time there, relative to Mississippi.

In 1961, he and his wife bought a home in a community in North Lawndale, which was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood at the time. It seemed promising, but soon the Ross family found out that to be untrue. The boiler burst, which normally would be a straightforward issue for a homeowner. Only Ross was not a homeowner, having bought the home “on contract,” a predatory scheme where sellers would buy houses, sell them to people far in excess of their worth, but keep the deed until the contract is paid in full, rather than turning the deed over to the “homeowner” and being paid by the bank (who is then paid by the homeowner). Not only did Ross not own the house, but he could not acquire equity and would have to forfeit the house, the down payment, and the monthly payments if he missed a single payment.

This practice targeted Black families specifically, and financing an actual mortgage was near impossible for African-American families at the time. The government also furthered housing inaccessibility for the Black community, particularly through the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages based on a grading scale, one which rated neighborhoods with Black people, regardless of social class or percentage, as a “D,” making them ineligible for FHA support in a process referred to as redlining.

This process resulted in the ruin of countless Black families and made predatory lenders millions. In the wake of this, neighborhoods like North Lawndale became worse and worse. Despite feeling embarrassed about being taken advantage of, Ross nevertheless joined the Contract Buyers League in 1968, an organization designed to fight back against contract sellers.

The group used a variety of strategies, like spreading information and going to court, to fight against the unfair contract system. But notably, their fight wasn’t only for equality: they were “charging society with a crime against their community….They were seeking reparations.”

All three of the epigraphs Coates includes have a deep connection to the African American population. The first, a quote from Deuteronomy, is important with the context that many African American slaves drew parallels between their experience and that of Hebrew slaves living in Egypt— Harriet Tubman, for example, was also referred to as "Moses" and several sorrow songs (songs written in slavery) refer to Egypt as a comparable place of bondage. John Locke's Two Treatises on Government is one of the foundational political theories of the United States, and Locke is probably the political theorist with the biggest influence on the founding fathers. Finally, the last quote is from a formerly enslaved person. Taken together, it is striking that all three of these influential sources have explicitly mentioned reparations in some form.

Clyde Ross's childhood in the Jim Crow South is unfortunately not very unique. Living in Mississippi at the time, Black families were constantly subject to all different forms of legal and social harassment and subjugation. Though Coates does not say so explicitly, it's extremely likely that the back taxes claimed by the government were a false charge by the government. Important to understanding this is to understand that this action was not a one-off: the government was deeply, deeply corrupt as well as invested in preventing Black people from advancing. Ross's father's lack of literacy itself is a symptom of a society that purposefully made it harder for certain people to succeed because of their race. Ross tries to escape this injustice by moving to the North, only to find that Northern racism simply takes a different shape.

Contract selling was a manifestation of this other form of racism. While lynching, for instance, was extremely rare in the North, policies like contract selling, which intentionally targeted Black people, were pervasive. Because the FHA made it almost impossible for Black people to get mortgages, countless Black families were forced to rely on speculators, and the majority of people who bought homes on contract had to take on additional debt and still lost the homes the majority of the time. This dynamic was made possible by the public and the private sector working together. As seen in the illustrations in Coates' article, redlining still has profound effects on the demographics of Chicago in the present day.

The Contract Buyers League 's choice to seek restitution for damages puts them squarely in the reparations conversation. Although reparations remain extremely controversial, at their heart is the simple belief that society owes a community something material, beyond just an apology, for injustices committed.

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The Case for Reparations Questions and Answers

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What does Ta-Nehisi Coates argue about the roots of American wealth and democracy

One of the key elements to understanding Coates' arguments is that the problems he describes are systemic, meaning that they can be present in multiple facets of society and that it is a problem faced by the vast majority of a group. For example,...

Why does Coates devote so much time to the story of CLyde Ross? In what ways do Ross's experiences reflect the experience of black Americans more generally?

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations, Sources

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The Case for Reparations - Discussion Guide

Related Papers

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Allison Rank

L. Camille van der Marel

This essay examines the relationship between debt and memory that is emerging in contemporary calls for reparation and Caribbean Canadian literature. CARICOM's and Ta-Nehisi Coates's discussions of reparatory justice, as well as David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, characterize the black Atlantic's colonial history as an outstanding debt. Collectively, they demonstrate that this past continues to overdetermine the transnational present. This assertion challenges cultural studies' tendency to parse “the colonial,” “the postcolonial,” and “the transnational” as distinct historical phases in a teleologic progression, and exposes the polarization of history and memory, archive and body, that increasingly undergirds diaspora studies' memory-work. Although the concept of “diasporic memory” has scholarly traction, it also places enormous pressure on diasporic bodies to demonstrate specific forms of counter-memory. Rather than supporting this binary or the ethical distinctions it relies on, Chariandy and Espinet underscore embodied memory's fragility and offer an unexpected archival alternative in diasporic characters' financial records.

Building an Architecture of Peacebuilding in the United States

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This article considers responses to U.S. slavery through the lens of transitional justice mechanisms. Government as well as universities are examined as sites of amends-making. Using this as a background, the article argues for a form of reparations not yet considered; free higher education for three generation of descendants of enslaved persons.

Bill Benzon

President O'bama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney took the form of a sermon in the black vernacular tradition. This particular sermon exhibits ring-form composition; as such it is symmetrical about a structural midpoint. It opens with the recitation of a scriptural passage and closes with the hymn, “Amazing Grace”. Grace is introduced as a theme in the middle section, which is also where Obama mentions the killer. The sermon is placed in a traditional of black performance going back to 19th century camp-meetings. Finally it is suggested that the performance takes place in an emerging discursive space that is neither religious nor political, but partakes of both.

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on " black bodies. " On one hand, the language of " black bodies, " as opposed to simply " black people " or " black personhood, " makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of " black disembodiment. " This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates's book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.

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The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US Essay (Article Review)

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Introduction

The policies and practices that the author uses in his essay, the main kinds of reparations, the main arguments for reparation, what the government and society should do.

Slavery, racial segregation, and discrimination are critical topics in American society as the effects of these events are noticeable in the modern world. Black Americans, despite legislative equality, more often than white citizens experience poverty and limited opportunities, which is an effect of artificially created unequal conditions in the past. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his essay The Case for Reparations , examines the consequences of slavery and segregation in the United States and argues the importance of reparations for black Americans, both in a financial and moral perspective.

Coates examines the problem of racial injustice of the past to prove the unfairness of the government’s attitude towards its citizens and to link this trend with the current situation in American society. His arguments are based on real stories and discriminatory policies that had been existing for centuries. The author demonstrates the story of a regular black American, Ross, to explain the arguments for reparations. Coates talks about Ross’s life in Mississippi, where his parents were forced to give up their farm and continue to work for the state government, fearing for their life and health (par.6). Then he studies scams with the sale of houses in Chicago when white owners profiteered on black Americans several dozen times. Black Americans were cut off from the possibility of obtaining a mortgage at the bank because the FHA identified available for them areas as a category that does not fall under the conditions of leases (Coates par.22). Therefore, the government formed black ghettos by creating conditions for speculation, since black people had to overpay to white owners for an opportunity to get a house.

The author argues the need for financial reparations in his essay but also focuses on justice by saying that all cases should be documented and recognized by society. This step not only helps to create precedents and reduce the gap between racial groups but will teach people of history. Such a move is also logical and right for the morale of society as the segregation is a clear demonstration of the violation of all seven principles of Catholic social teaching. The very concept of slavery violated the idea of human dignity, and the slave trade undermined the institution of the family, since the masters often separated relatives by selling only one of them. For centuries, unfair laws violated the principle of protecting the rights and dignity of work, since black people were just a tool for making money even after the abolition of slavery. Ignoring the problems of black citizens and refusing to pay reparations now violate the principles of caring for God’s creation, helping the vulnerable, and solidarity. Thus, reparations are the right decision for Americans who want to live in a democratic and fair society.

The author considers as the main reasons for the reparations, both elimination of the consequences of inequality and the fact of admitting guilt for the damage caused to people. Coates concludes that the situation has not changed much since the 1970s by analyzing the income gap of citizens and other social indicators (par.39). This problem exists due to the created unequal conditions and opportunities in which many black people have not been able to improve their lives. For this reason, reparations have to help needy citizens as they can use the money for treatment, education, or moving from the ghetto. The fact of a guilty plea is also an important reason, since it helps to reduce existing discrimination and to develop real democracy in the country. Black Americans will be able to receive moral satisfaction for the fact that today they are equal with other citizens, and the years of their suffering will at least partially justify themselves. Besides, such a demonstration of respect and understanding of the horrors of discrimination contributes to the fact that such a situation will not be repeated with any other resident of the United States.

The author also considers the bill already proposed by the congressman and believes that new law is the right step towards solving the problem. Although there is still no law regulating the procedure for considering and paying reparations, there are already some precedents when lawsuits were settled in favor of black Americans. Thereby, the government needs to develop a bill in which the reasons, procedures for considering the case, and the sources of paying reparations will be identified precisely. Besides, it is necessary to convey to the public the need for such a law and explain the reasons for its creation to teach Americans history. These steps contribute to reducing financial and social inequalities among the population.

Therefore, The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work that reveals the consequences of racial injustice in American society from a legal and moral point of view. The author explains the reasons and demonstrates that reparations are a way to fix these consequences and improve the lives of US citizens. Besides, a society that learns from the mistakes of the past and exists according to the principles of morality has a much higher chance of a brighter future.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “ The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, 2014. Web.

Critique of Colin Thies’ “Commercial Slavery”
Mercantilism, Enlightenment, and Slave Economics
Significance of Perceived Racism:Ethnic Group Disparities in Health
Dominant Ideology and Contradiction
Service of the United Nations and Reparations
Concept of Slavery Rousseau's Analysis
Enslaved Women's Means of Resistance
Enslaved Women and Importance of Their Studying
"Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades" by Patrick Manning
Slavery in Latin America and North America
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, January 16). The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-case-for-reparations-article-review/

"The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US." IvyPanda , 16 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-case-for-reparations-article-review/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US'. 16 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US." January 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-case-for-reparations-article-review/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US." January 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-case-for-reparations-article-review/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US." January 16, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-case-for-reparations-article-review/.

Units May 31, 2022

The Case for Reparations

This unit was created by African American Studies Teachers in Columbia Public Schools, as part of the 2021 cohort of The 1619 Project Education Network. It is designed for facilitation across approximately 2 weeks, and includes four 90-minute lessons.

Objectives and Outcomes

Students will be able to:

Examine how intergenerational trauma and systemic and institutional racism affect us today.
Examine arguments for and against reparations.
Use the inquiry process to analyze arguments and evaluate historical maps.
Develop a written argument for or against reparations providing a detailed plan which addresses the social, historic, economic, and political needs of African Americans.

Unit Overview

Our unit focuses on understanding American chattel slavery as key to understanding the Black experience in America. The goal is to explore how intergenerational trauma and systemic and institutional racism affect us today. Our essential question for the unit: What are some of the lasting impacts of slavery in American society?

Unit Narrative: From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, in this unit students learn the institutional oppressions inflicted on the Black community over centuries in America. By grappling with reparations, students stop viewing these racist structures as finite eras composed of racist events and instead must explore the ways in which history informs the present, the generational impacts of oppression on an individual, and the relationship between America’s morality and the Black community’s humanity.

Students will enter this historic and ongoing conversation first through Lee’s 2019 overview of the wealth gap and, secondly from the narrative of Clyde Ross as told in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 piece in The Atlantic , “The Case for Reparations.” Through Ross’ story, students encounter the structures that justify arguments for reparations including Jim Crow, seizure of Black-owned land, lynchings, unfair creditor practices, and redlining. Beginning with Ross’ story serves the same purpose that it does in Coates’ exhaustive argument, to humanize what often begins as an economic discussion. Students will note the effects of institutional racism within generations of one family, its geographical movement effects from Mississippi to Chicago, and its prevailing detriment in one Chicago neighborhood.

This inquiry process develops student-skills in research, analyzing argument structure, map reading, and rhetorical strategies. Following these lessons, students will continue to read Coates’ case before developing their own argumentative stance on reparations, including how their proposal may be logistically implemented individually, in their community, or nationally. Our aim is that students enter the conversation on reparations rather than view it from afar.

Performance Task

Constructed Response: Construct a written argument that details a plan for or against reparations which addresses the social, historic, economic, and political needs of African Americans. This argument should answer the compelling question by developing claims and using specific evidence from both primary and secondary sources. It should also address and/or acknowledge arguments opposite the stance students took for/against reparations.

Extension: Create a multimedia presentation that assesses and addresses the need(s) for reparations. This presentation should address the needs of the Black community as well as answer the primary strategies and the strengths & weaknesses used in this campaign for redress.

Two-week unit plan for teachers, including pacing, texts and multimedia resources, and performance task for the unit. Download the full unit below and scroll down to browse the unit resources.

Facilitation Resources

Essays	: An essay about the closing of African American funeral homes and the impact on community. : An essay, written in several sections, detailing the long-term impact of institutional systems that lead to economic injustice against Black communities. : An essay outlining some of the systemic causes behind the vast wealth gap between Black and white Americans today.
Website	American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers: An interactive website with a digital archive of Home Owners Loan Corporation files, security maps, and area descriptions used to promote redlining and inequality following the New Deal.
Reparations Proposals	, which is also detailed in the Coates article, from the late 18th Century, offers students a glimpse at the first documented case for reparations. The Royall House & Slave Quarters Museum in Medford, MA offers a thorough explanation of the case and links to the original documents held by in the Massachusetts Archives Collection at Harvard University. (1920) by the United Negro Improvement Association addresses the issues surrounding reparations and is the beginning point of activism for life long reparations advocate, Audley (Queen Mother) Moore. Presented to the United Nations in 1951, the Civil Rights Congress document, offers a comprehensive tallying of crimes committed against African Americans who sought redress from the United Nations instead of the US government. The brief yet poignant, showcases the issue of reparations in the context of the beginnings of the Black Power movement. Another Black Power advocate, outlines their program to create a Black nation in the southern United States. seeks redress from White Christian churches and Jewish synagogues for the ravages of slavery. provides an international perspective about reparations. by Dania Francis gives an overview of past and current reparations movements in the United States and discusses the logistics of various bills and programs laid out for policy makers.

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts

CCSS ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.7

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g. visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

C3 Framework for Social Studies

C3 FRAMEWORK, D2.Eco.13.9-12

Explain why advancements in technology and investments in capital goods and human capital increase economic growth and standards of living

C3 FRAMEWORK, D2.Soc.17.9-12

Analyze why the distribution of power and inequalities can result in conflict

C3 FRAMEWORK, D2.Soc.18.9-12

Propose and evaluate alternative responses to inequality

NCSS Curriculum Standards for Social Studies

VI. Power, Authority & Governance

Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of how people create and change structures of power, authority, and governance , so that the learner can:

D. recognize how groups and organizations encourage unity & deal with diversity to maintain order & security;
H. recognize and give examples of the tensions between the wants and needs of individuals and groups, & concepts such as fairness, equity and justice.

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Reparations Syllabus

The Case for Black Reparations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independent presidential candidate RFK Jr speaks at crypto conference in Nashville

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What to know about the ruling that bounced RFK Jr. from the New York ballot

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign suffered a blow this week when a judge in New York invalidated his petition to put his name on the state ballot, a ruling that could potentially create problems for the candidate as he faces challenges elsewhere.

Kennedy’s attorneys filed an appeal Wednesday to a ruling this week from Justice Christina Ryba, who said the residence listed on his nominating petitions was a “sham” address he used to maintain his voter registration and to further his political aspirations. The judge ruled in favor of the challengers, who argued Kennedy’s actual residence was the home in Los Angeles he shares with his wife, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actor Cheryl Hines.

New York is just one of more than a half-dozen states where challenges have been made to Kennedy’s petitions from Democrats and their allies. Some of the challenges allege he falsely listed the same New York address that was the subject of litigation in that state, or that there were problems with petition signatures.

WATCH: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on why he thinks he has a chance as an independent candidate

In Pennsylvania, challengers contend that papers filed by Kennedy list an incorrect address in New York and that he and his running mate demonstrated “at best, a fundamental disregard” of state law and the process by which signatures are gathered. An attorney for Kennedy said the challenge contained specious allegations. A court will conduct an evidentiary hearing next Tuesday in Harrisburg.

Kennedy’s campaign says it has collected enough signatures for ballot access in all 50 states and that it is officially on the ballot in 17 states.

His candidacy has at various times drawn concerns from both Democrats and Republicans who think he could siphon votes from their candidates.

National Democrats in particular have been active in trying to undercut his candidacy, while former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has alternated between criticizing Kennedy as liberal and courting his endorsement or the backing of some of his supporters.

Here’s a look at what is happening in New York, what it might mean and other ballot access challenges Kennedy faces.

What happened in New York? What’s next?

The ruling Monday followed a short trial in state court over whether Kennedy falsely listed a New York residence on his state nominating petitions.

The candidate listed a residence in the well-off suburb of Katonah, where he said he rents a bedroom in a friend’s house. Kennedy testified that he moved to California a decade ago so he could be with his wife, and that he always planned to return to New York, where he is registered to vote.

The lawsuit bought by several voters and backed by Democrat-aligned Clear Choice Action claimed Kennedy’s actual residence is in Los Angeles.

WATCH: What you need to know about 2024’s third-party candidates so far

Days after the non-jury trial ended, Ryba ruled that using “a friend’s address for political and voting purposes, while barely stepping foot on the premises, does not equate to residency under the Election Law.”

In announcing the appeal Wednesday, the environmental lawyer and scion of a famous political family said the current Democratic Party was unrecognizable to him.

“The party of my father and uncle’s time was committed to expanding voters’ rights and understood that competition at the ballot box is an essential part of American Democracy,” he said in a statement.

Kennedy’s legal team also promised to seek injunctive relief in federal court in New York City. They argue that the U.S. Constitution’s 12th Amendment governs the residency of presidential and vice presidential candidates, not state law.

If upheld, will the New York decision affect challenges in other states?

Experts say officials in other states might pay attention to the ultimate ruling from New York courts about Kennedy’s residency.

The U.S. Constitution gives broad authority to individual states to oversee elections, said Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at Texas Christian University. He said many states have laws that outline strict signature-gathering details or other requirements for candidates to get on the ballot as an independent.

“The question is whether or not in other states where they have similar criteria (as New York), it could be used to disqualify RFK Jr. from the ballot,” Gaddie said. “It may not happen everywhere, but it will happen somewhere else.”

Speaking to reporters after court in Albany last week, Kennedy acknowledged that a loss in New York could lead to lawsuits in other states.

Clear Choice Action said Kennedy has listed the same New York address on nominating petitions in 17 other states.

READ MORE: Libertarians nominate Chase Oliver as their presidential candidate, spurning both Trump and Kennedy

“It’s up to each state to determine whether Mr. Kennedy violated their laws and statutes by providing a false residence and deceiving voters,” Clear Choice Action founder Pete Kavanaugh said in a prepared statement.

Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News and an activist who supports ballot access for minor parties, said while some state-level challenges to Kennedy’s candidacy already have focused on the issue of his address, he doubted that new challenges will emerge because of the New York ruling.

“I don’t think they can just all of a sudden willy nilly change the basis of their objection,” he said. “I think generally it’s too late.”

He also doubted other laws in other states “make such a big deal” out of a candidate’s address.

Where else has Kennedy been challenged?

Winger said there have been challenges to Kennedy’s candidacy in states including Hawaii, Nebraska, New Jersey and Washington based on a variety of claims, such as problems with his address and the signatures needed to qualify him for the ballot.

The Democratic National Committee is backing challenges to Kennedy’s petitions in Nevada, Delaware and Georgia, according to a spokesperson. The committee is backing a separate lawsuit in New York.

Hearings will begin Monday in Georgia on challenges to ballot petitions filed by Kennedy and other-third party and independent candidates. Among other things, Democrats allege that Kennedy’s petitions are invalid because they are wrongly or incompletely filled out. The Kennedy campaign disputes those claims.

Outside of New York, Clear Choice Action is backing challenges to Kennedy’s petitions in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas. In Texas, an attorney for the group told state officials Kennedy’s listed New York address doesn’t comply with state election laws and that his candidacy should be invalidated.

Murphy contributed from Oklahoma City. Also contributing were Associated Press writers Mark Scolforo, Jeff Amy and Nomaan Merchant.

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What happened in the Kolkata rape case that triggered doctors’ protests?

Activists and doctors in India demand better safeguarding of women and medical professionals after a trainee medic was raped and murdered in Kolkata.

Following a murder of a 31 year old post-graduate trainee (PGT) doctor by rape and torture inside a government hospital, activists of different humanitarian and political organisations and medical professionals participate in a rally with posters and torches demanding adequate intervention of the ruling government and exemplary punishment of the culprits, in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024.

Activists and doctors across India continued to protest on Wednesday to demand justice for a female doctor, who was raped and murdered while on duty in a hospital in the eastern city of Kolkata.

Feminist groups rallied on the streets in protests titled “Reclaim the Night” in Kolkata overnight on Wednesday – on the eve of India’s independence day – in solidarity with the victim, demanding the principal of RG Kar Medical College resign. Some feminist protesters also marched well beyond Kolkata, including in the capital Delhi.

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While the protests were largely peaceful, a small mob of men stormed the medical college and vandalised property. This group was dispersed by the police.

This comes after two days of nationwide protests by doctors following the incident at RG Kar Medical College in West Bengal’s capital city. “Sit-in demonstrations and agitation in the hospital campus will continue,” one of the protesting doctors, identified as Dr Mridul, told Al Jazeera.

Services in some medical centres were halted indefinitely, and marches and vigils shed light on issues of sexual violence, as well as doctors’ safety in the world’s most populous nation.

What happened to the doctor in Kolkata?

A 31-year-old trainee doctor’s dead body, bearing multiple injuries, was found on August 9 in a government teaching hospital in Kolkata.

The parents of the victim were initially told “by hospital authorities that their daughter had committed suicide,” lawyer and women’s rights activist Vrinda Grover told Al Jazeera. But an autopsy confirmed that the victim was raped and killed.

Grover has appeared for victims in sexual violence cases in India in the past, including Bilkis Bano , a Muslim woman who was gang-raped during the 2002 Gujarat riots, and Soni Sori, a tribal activist based in Chhattisgarh state.

Thousands of doctors marched in Kolkata on Monday, demanding better security measures and justice for the victim.

On Tuesday, the Kolkata High Court transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA) called for a nationwide halting of elective services in hospitals starting on Monday. Elective services are medical treatments that can be deferred or are not deemed medically necessary.

Doctors hold posters to protest the rape and murder of a young medic from Kolkata, at the Government General Hospital in Vijayawada on August 14

On Tuesday, FORDA announced on its X account that it is calling off the strike after Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda accepted protest demands.

One of these demands was solidifying the Central Protection Act, intended to be a central law to protect medical professionals from violence, which was proposed in the parliament’s lower house in 2022, but has not yet been enacted.

FORDA said that the ministry would begin working on the Act within 15 days of the news release, and that a written statement from the ministry was expected to be released soon.

Press release regarding call off of strike. In our fight for the sad incident at R G Kar, the demands raised by us have been met in full by the @OfficeofJPNadda , with concrete steps in place, and not just verbal assurances. Central Healthcare Protection Act ratification… pic.twitter.com/OXdSZgM1Jc — FORDA INDIA (@FordaIndia) August 13, 2024

Why are some Indian doctors continuing to protest?

However, other doctors’ federations and hospitals have said they will not back down on the strike until a concrete solution is found, including a central law to curb attacks on doctors.

Those continuing to strike included the Federation of All India Medical Associations (FAIMA), Delhi-based All India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indira Gandhi Hospital, local media reported.

Ragunandan Dixit, the general secretary of the AIIMS Resident Doctors’ Association, said that the indefinite strike will continue until their demands are met, including a written guarantee of the implementation of the Central Protection Act.

Medical professionals in India want a central law that makes violence against doctors a non-bailable, punishable offence, in hopes that it deters such violent crimes against doctors in the future.

Those continuing to protest also call for the dismissal of the principal of the college, who was transferred. “We’re demanding his termination, not just transfer,” Dr Abdul Waqim Khan, a protesting doctor told ANI news agency. “We’re also demanding a death penalty for the criminal,” he added.

“Calling off the strike now would mean that female resident doctors might never receive justice,” Dr Dhruv Chauhan, member of the National Council of the Indian Medical Association’s Junior Doctors’ Network told local news agency Press Trust of India (PTI).

Which states in India saw doctors’ protests?

While the protests started in West Bengal’s Kolkata on Monday, they spread across the country on Tuesday.

The capital New Delhi, union territory Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow and city Prayagraj, Bihar capital Patna and southern state Goa also saw doctors’ protests.

Interactive_India_doctor_rape_protests_August14_2024

Who is the suspect in the Kolkata rape case?

Local media reported that the police arrested suspect Sanjoy Roy, a civic volunteer who would visit the hospital often. He has unrestricted access to the ward and the police found compelling evidence against him.

The parents of the victim told the court that they suspect that it was a case of gang rape, local media reported.

Why is sexual violence on the rise in India?

Sexual violence is rampant in India, where 90 rapes were reported on average every day in 2022.

Laws against sexual violence were made stricter following a rape case in 2012, when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was brutally gang-raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi. Four men were hanged for the gang rape, which had triggered a nationwide protests.

But despite new laws in place, “the graph of sexual violence in India continues to spiral unabated,” said Grover.

She added that in her experience at most workplaces, scant attention is paid to diligent and rigorous enforcement of the laws.

“It is regrettable that government and institutions respond only after the woman has already suffered sexual assault and often succumbed to death in the incident,” she added, saying preventive measures are not taken.

In many rape cases in India, perpetrators have not been held accountable. In 2002, Bano was raped by 11 men, who were sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2022, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi authorised the release of the men, who were greeted with applause and garlands upon their release.

However, their remission was overruled and the Supreme Court sent the rapists back to jail after public outcry.

Grover believes that the death penalty will not deter rapists until India addresses the deeply entrenched problem of sexual violence. “For any change, India as a society will have to confront and challenge, patriarchy, discrimination and inequality that is embedded in our homes, families, cultural practices, social norms and religious traditions”.

What makes this case particularly prominent is that it happened in Kolkata, Sandip Roy, a freelance contributor to NPR, told Al Jazeera. “Kolkata actually prided itself for a long time on being really low in the case of violence against women and being relatively safe for women.”

A National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report said that Kolkata had the lowest number of rape cases in 2021 among 19 metropolitan cities, with 11 cases in the whole year. In comparison, New Delhi was reported to have recorded 1, 226 cases that year.

Prime Minister Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has called for dismissing the government in West Bengal, where Kolkata is located, led by Mamata Banerjee of All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). Banerjee’s party is part of the opposition alliance.

Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in parliament, also called for justice for the victim.

“The attempt to save the accused instead of providing justice to the victim raises serious questions on the hospital and the local administration,” he posted on X on Wednesday.

Roy spoke about the politicisation of the case since an opposition party governs West Bengal. “The local government’s opposition will try to make this an issue of women’s safety in the state,” he said.

Have doctors in India protested before?

Roy explained to Al Jazeera that this case is an overlap of two kinds of violence, the violence against a woman, as well as violence against “an overworked medical professional”.

Doctors in India do not have sufficient workplace security, and attacks on doctors have started protests in India before.

In 2019, two junior doctors were physically assaulted in Kolkata’s Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital (NRSMCH) by a mob of people after a 75-year-old patient passed away in the hospital.

Those attacks set off doctors’ protests in Kolkata, and senior doctors in West Bengal offered to resign from their positions to express solidarity with the junior doctors who were attacked.

More than 75 percent of Indian doctors have faced some form of violence, according to a survey by the Indian Medical Association in 2015.

What happens next?

The case will now be handled by the CBI, which sent a team to the hospital premises to inspect the crime scene on Wednesday morning, local media reported.

According to Indian law, the investigation into a case of rape or gang rape is to be completed within two months from the date of lodging of the First Information Report (police complaint), according to Grover, the lawyer.

The highest court in West Bengal, which transferred the case from the local police to the CBI on Tuesday, has directed the central investigating agency to file periodic status reports regarding the progress of the investigation.

The FIR was filed on August 9, which means the investigation is expected to be completed by October 9.

Bengal women will create history with a night long protest in various major locations in the state for at 11.55pm on 14th of August’24,the night that’ll mark our 78th year as an independent country. The campaign, 'Women, Reclaim the Night: The Night is Ours', is aimed at seeking… pic.twitter.com/Si9fd6YGNb — purpleready (@epicnephrin_e) August 13, 2024

Justice League of Greater Lansing awards $50K in scholarships as first reparations disbursement

LANSING — The Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan made its first distributions from its Reparations Fund in the form of 10 $5,000 scholarships to graduating seniors in the region. The fund was created to address the racial wealth gap in Greater Lansing.

The students submitted essays about the racial wealth gap, how it has affected them and their communities and what can be done to address it.

“A common thread in their essays is that discrimination today has resulted from years of social injustices," Willye Bryan, founder and vice president of the Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan, said in a news release. "It continues to limit African American families’ access to basic wealth builders — education, higher paying jobs and home ownership. This doesn't allow for generational wealth building, nor does it allow for closing the Racial Wealth Gap."

The winners were honored at a reception on Aug. 3. They are listed here with their hometown, high school and where they will study this fall:

Zachary Barker, East Lansing, Okemos High School, Michigan State University
Olivia Burns, East Lansing, East Lansing High School, MSU Honors College
Ahja Crawford, Lansing, Holt High School, Lansing Community College
Marvin Deh, Lansing, Eaton Rapids High School, MSU
Lydia-Anne Ding-Mejok, Lansing, East Lansing High School, Central Michigan University
J'Kyla Hobbs, Lansing, Haslett High School, University of Michigan
Braelyn Jackson-Pointer, Lansing, Grand Ledge High School, Howard University
Nala Noel, East Lansing, East Lansing High School, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Hailey Perkins, Okemos, Okemos High School, Howard University
Joseph Pizzo, Lansing, J.W. Sexton High School, Siena Heights University

Here are essays from two of the winners:

Politics and policies block generational wealth

Generational wealth is something Black families struggle to have. It seems like there are obstacles put in our way to keep us from attaining it, and people ready to knock us back if we look like we are going to achieve it. Generational wealth means having resources, property, assets, valuables, money, businesses you can pass on in your family from generation to generation.

Having generational wealth gives the next generation opportunity and a head start for success. It gives families a sense of financial security. When I think of generational wealth I think of families like the Rockefellers, Gateses, and Buffets. Recently, some famous Black people have achieved billionaire status like Michael Jordan, Jay Z, Lebron James and Oprah. But the rest of us are still struggling to get by.

My family is working to achieve generational wealth. My maternal great-grandmother was an entrepreneur. She was “The Help.” My grandmother was The Help's help, and my mother was three times The Help. My great-grandmother desperately wanted more for her family. She and her husband had 10 children and started out in the projects. They eventually purchased their own home and my grandmother had to go to work. She began as a maid, but in time started her own business called, “Days Work,” a maid service.

She and her husband saved money and she later became a certified nursing assistant. The money from that job was used send their children to college and to buy a small rental apartment complex. She became a widow at a young age and the money she generated sustained her for her entire life. She left an inheritance for each of their 10 children, which helped jump-start their future.

The lessons learned from her example laid the foundation for the pursuit of generational wealth for our family. We have not achieved billionaire status, but we are working to make sure the next generation does better than the one before.

African Americans have less generational wealth because politics and policies have blocked our potential. Homeownership is really important for generational wealth. A home is something that can be passed from generation to generation. It can build equity that a family can use to borrow against to start a business. Many Black families are not able to afford a home, cannot obtain a loan to make the purchase, or their home is marked as lower value.

Creating programs that will help African Americans afford homes is key in addressing the wealth gap. Lack of financial literacy also contributes to the problem. You have to understand what to do with money, how to stay out of debt, invest and save.

Generational wealth is worth pursuing. African Americans have to stand up against systems that were created to keep us down. When I think of the solution to the generational wealth problem, I think of the Kwanzaa principles, particularly Ujamaa, cooperative economics. We must understand that all of us, not just one or two, needs generational wealth.

— Zachary Barker, an Okemos High graduate, plans to attend Michigan State University

Adoptive, biological families provide first-hand case study in generational wealth

According to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, “between 2019 and 2022, median wealth increased by $51,800, but the racial wealth gap increased by $49,950 adding up to a total difference of $240,120 in wealth between the median white household and median Black household.”

Historically speaking, there have always been disparities between white and Black Americans. For example: access to education, job opportunities, and housing. All of which prohibited access to greater resources. Past discrimination directly affects the lives of Black Americans today.

I have had the unique opportunity to learn this from both sides. As a Black transracial adoptee,I was exposed to the generational differences that changed the amount of income in my white parents' household and my biological family's household.

Racial disparities passed down, including the environment where a family begins, play a big role in the amount of income a family can make in the future. According to my grandmother, my adoptive parents' families started in Virginia and other southern states and moved to Detroit for factory jobs, more specifically working for Henry Ford car factories.

My biological family mainly lived in Detroit their entire lives; my great-grandfather wasn’t able to get a job in factories at the time because employers didn’t want jobs to be taken from white people. Because of this, he mostly worked as a cook when he could. Since it was difficult for my biological family to get jobs to have enough food on the table, many children in my family had to start working as young as 10 years old instead of going to school, and this cycle continued throughout the years.

My adoptive family had the privilege of going to high school, and few had the opportunity to attend college. Today, both my adoptive parents went to college paid for by their parents and received bachelor's degrees. Neither of my biological parents nor siblings have had the opportunity to attend college, and most were barely able to finish high school because they had other responsibilities like working or providing childcare for my younger siblings.

Today my adoptive family owns their homes and no one in my biological family owns their homes. Even when applying for jobs, a study done by Bowdoin University found that employers just looking at resumes are 30% more likely to hire applicants they believe are white based off their name than Black.

Narrowing the wealth gap could potentially be very simple if the government can change its institutional racist ways. We can eliminate redlining and housing discrimination causing Black Americans to not have access to certain houses and to pay more property taxes despite receiving fewer benefits than white-dominated areas. This originated all the way back to the civil war period to try to force Black Americans to move back to plantations.

We also need to increase access and expand equity for higher education for low-income families and minimum wage should be raised to match the cost of living.

— Olivia Burns, an East Lansing High graduate, plans to attend Michigan State University Honors College

Wednesday Journal

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The case for reparations now

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the North Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago

The Case for Reparations

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

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

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

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

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

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

— John Locke, “Second Treatise”

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

— Anonymous, 1861

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explore Redlining in Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

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

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

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

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

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

Video: The Contract Buyers League

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

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

II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”

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

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

Interactive Census Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. The Quiet Plunder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”

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

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

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

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

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

“That’s their corner,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX. Toward A New Country

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

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

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

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

And this was just one of their losses.

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

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

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

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

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

On some level, we have always grasped this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About the Author

Politics | ‘A movement, not just a moment’: Inside the…

Politics | ‘A movement, not just a moment’: Inside the arduous work of Illinois’ reparations efforts

His name, Harper would learn, was Swansey Adams. Born into chattel slavery in Virginia in 1796, Adams was eventually taken to Illinois, where his enslavers forced him to toil in the salt mines near downstate Shawneetown and, later, in the lead mines around Galena before he gained his freedom.

The revelation of his ancestor’s enslavement and indentured servitude startled Harper, a military veteran and social worker, in part because he, like many others, incorrectly assumed that Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, had been a so-called free state leading up to the Civil War.

“I’m tired that American history is not being told as it should be,” Harper, 57, said. “I want for people to hear and understand what Swansey Adams went through.”

Harper’s family story is one of many being documented by the Illinois African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission , a state panel tasked with a sweeping mandate that includes the eventual creation of a comprehensive report for state lawmakers on the feasibility of reparations for Illinois’ descendants of chattel slavery.

Illinois was the second state to create such a commission, born out of legislation passed in 2021 amid a national racial reckoning following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.

But its existence has been somewhat overshadowed by similar efforts elsewhere. Since the commission’s official formation on Jan. 1, 2022, its output has largely centered on educating the public about the commission and on orchestrating a study on possible reasons for reparations. That study began last month and is projected to take more than a year to complete.

The pace has frustrated some observers, particularly in light of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to effectively end affirmative action in college admissions, a conservative group’s federal lawsuit this May against Evanston’s groundbreaking reparations program and a Springfield-area police officer’s fatal shooting of Sonya Massey last month.

“I think it needs urgency because it’s an emergency,” said Karl Brinson, NAACP Chicago Westside Branch president. “It’s not being treated the way it should be treated. Each day that goes by, people get disheartened. They get apathetic.”

The commission’s ambitious to-do list extends beyond reparations to include recommendations on neighborhood stabilization, vocational training centers and a “slavery-era disclosure bill.”

Paul Harper, a fourth great-grandson of Swansey Adams, who was enslaved in Illinois, talks with an attendee during the African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC) public hearing at Kennedy-King College on July 13, 2024, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

And yet, its progress on an inherently arduous set of tasks has been further slowed as commissioners struggle to attend meetings in person amid competing personal and professional demands (with the expiration of COVID exceptions, virtual attendance does not count toward being present, per state law).

Those absences have been exacerbated by lengthy delays in filling commission seats, a persistent problem in state government . Until two months ago, seven of the 18 commissioner spots were vacant.

As such, a Chicago Tribune review of records found, the commission has failed to reach a quorum in a little over a third of its meetings since its first in December 2022, causing delays in votes on key issues.

“You would hope they’d be further along,” said La Kisha Latham, a spokesperson and board member of the nonprofit Conrad Worrill Community Reparations Commission , which has pushed for reparations in Chicago. “And so, the fact that they’re just now having hearings, from the community’s perspective, it may seem disappointing and concerning. Even so, we know that things take time and we look forward to collaborating and contributing to the mutual cause of reparations.”

Still, despite stiff headwinds, the commission has started to gather momentum.

More than 300 people filled the auditorium at Englewood’s Kennedy-King College on a Saturday morning in July for the commission’s first public hearing, which featured presentations and speeches (Harper being one of the speakers) on the topics of enslavement, racial terror and political disenfranchisement.

Eight other hearings are planned across the state; the next two are scheduled for Saturday in East. St. Louis and Oct. 19 in Springfield.

Also in July, at the behest of the commission, a research team from the University of Illinois Chicago Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy started work on a study of harms done to generations of the state’s Black residents — a study commissioners anticipate will help lay the foundation for their reparations recommendations.

“I believe that the commission is working actively to move as fast as we can … making sure we understand what exactly is asked of us, so we can propose things that are both efficient and practical for the state,” said commission Chairman Marvin Slaughter Jr., a University of Chicago researcher and reparations scholar.

Marvin Slaughter Jr., board chair of the African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC), speaks during the commission's public hearing at Kennedy-King College on July 13, 2024, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

“That might take a little bit longer than some people may have hoped. But also, when it comes to the reparations space, we’ve been demanding reparations since emancipation in 1865. As one of the younger members of the reparations space nationally, I’m OK with moving a little bit slower and making sure that we get it right and being able to bring along the community.”

‘We know the nation that we live in’

Smaller reparations programs across Chicagoland are experiencing mixed results as well.

Considered the first attempt by a U.S. city to pay reparations to its Black residents, Evanston’s reparations program approaches its fourth year of existence with its future uncertain after the conservative group Judicial Watch filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of six plaintiffs who argue the program is race-based and violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The lawsuit names as plaintiffs six people whose relatives lived in Evanston during what that city’s reparations program has identified as a 50-year period of housing discrimination that often deprived Black residents of building wealth through homeownership and kept them segregated to a tiny enclave on the city’s western edge.

Three groups were eligible to receive benefits: ancestors who were Evanston residents and at least 18 years old from 1919 to 1969, direct descendants of those ancestors and any current residents who can show they were victims of racially discriminative housing post-1969.

None of the plaintiffs in the suit identify as Black, according to lawsuit documents.

Each disbursement of $25,000 was initially permitted to be used one of three ways: On a down payment for a new home, on mortgage payments, or on home repairs. Evanston was forced to expand on that framework when two of the first 16 selected recipients, siblings Kenneth and Shelia Wideman, told the city they couldn’t use the money for housing.

Both in their 70s, the Widemans said they wanted to stay in their respective rental apartments. They previously told the Tribune that homeownership would be a burden, the payments insufficient for them or their children to purchase a home in Evanston’s expensive real estate market.

Kenneth Wideman puts on his jacket before leaving his apartment in Evanston on April 27, 2023. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)

From there, Evanston’s Reparations Committee began exploring the possibility of direct cash payments to recipients. It took some time to ensure those on welfare programs wouldn’t be negatively impacted by the funding but solutions were found.

Once allowed in early 2023, direct cash payments quickly became the most popular disbursement method.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton previously told the Tribune that Evanston’s program is “just a proxy for giving out money to people based on race.”

“It looks to me like Evanston wants to be on the cutting edge,” Fitton said. “We don’t want those anti-discrimination protections to be upended through these types of programs. It’s important this be corrected as soon as possible so other states, localities and the federal government don’t go down this path of doling out tax money to individuals simply based on race.”

Evanston filed a motion last month to dismiss the federal lawsuit, arguing in part that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. Plaintiffs have until Aug. 19 to respond.

Chair of Evanston’s Reparations Committee Robin Rue Simmons told supporters following the lawsuit filing that the city would not waver in its support of the program.

“This lawsuit is not a surprise,” she said. “We know the nation that we live in. This is from outside our community and we have been preparing to fight it. We have a legal framework and much support that will allow us to move forward with confidence.”

She went on to call the lawsuit an attack on all communities engaging in the hard work of reparations.

Vanessa Johnson McCoy, left, and her sister Loretta Johnson look for their unique identification number for reparations during the Evanston reparations committee meeting at Evanston Township High School on Jan. 11, 2024. About 200 people attended the meeting to see the random selection order of direct descendants who will receive $25,000 each in reparations funding. (John Konstantaras/for the Chicago Tribune)

Al Tillery, a Northwestern professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, called the claims in the lawsuit nonsense.

Tillery accused the plaintiffs’ organization of being “centered in a political movement that aims to reestablish a racialized caste system in America.”

“Anyone that knows the history and understands how our legal system has traditionally functioned should know that these claims are as founded as saying that the world is flat,” he said.

Still, he worries Evanston could lose, pointing to the existence of conservative judges in all levels of the judicial system.

Evanston’s program issued its first round of disbursements in 2022. According to data presented at the May 2 meeting, the program has paid more than $4.8 million to 193 recipients across the ancestor and descendant categories. All those in the ancestor group have been contacted, and the city has begun disbursing payments to descendants with the expectation of handling about 80 recipients per year .

Updated data will be available in September when the committee begins meeting again.

Funding for the program has been gathered from the city’s recreational cannabis sales tax and portions of taxes accrued from the real estate transfer tax.

‘We didn’t want to wait’

Just west of Chicago in Oak Park, village officials have considered embarking on a reparations program. A citizen-led task force began in fall 2021 from a protest group called Walk the Walk in response to Floyd’s murder.

“We didn’t want to wait for the village to move forward,” former task force member Christian Harris said. “There were things we could do as far as studying the history that could be done.”

The task force submitted its report to the Oak Park Village Board in February but wasn’t able to present the findings until the July 16 Village Board meeting .

The board spent a fair chunk of its discussion on the Evanston lawsuit, something Harris said the task force specifically tailored its report to avoid.

Harris said he was “profoundly disappointed” by the board’s reaction, arguing the board has been considering its own role in the reparations movement for years.

Christian Harris speaks during the African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC) public hearing at Kennedy-King College on July 13, 2024, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Trustee Susan Buchannan echoed Harris’ sentiments, saying the apology the task force included as part of its requests of the village was long overdue.

Another trustee, Brian Shaw, said the village can’t go another year without taking steps forward.

Harris called for an apology before the board in February 2023 when it appeared split on whether the issue should be tackled at the local or federal level. Some at the time pointed to the federal bill sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who died July 19. t

The task force gave a number of recommendations to the board beyond the official apology. They included partnerships with financial institutions to provide low-interest down payment assistance programs to Black residents, an allocation of 50% of the village’s Inclusionary Zoning Fund to create a restorative justice fund, and the purchase of the Percy Julian family home to allow his daughter Faith to remain in the property for as long as she likes and then repurpose the property into a community center.

Chemist Percy Julian pushed past racial barriers — amid attacks on his Oak Park home

Taxes on new apartment buildings in Oak Park are deposited in that zoning fund. The village requires all such buildings to allocate 10% of units for affordable housing, but owners can bypass that requirement by paying the tax equal to $100,000 per unit.

Proceeds from the zoning fund, which officials said currently is near $2 million, are used to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so.

Harris is doubtful anything will come of the report.

“Oak Park is a wonderful place in the sense that it’s always willing to have the conversation … but that’s where it starts and ends 99% of the time,” Harris said.

In Chicago: $500K, a task force and an apology

Chicago’s dormant reparations discussion received a boost two days before Juneteenth, when Mayor Brandon Johnson issued an executive order that created a task force to study the issue.

Aided by $500,000 in the 2024 budget, the task force will examine “all policies that have harmed Black Chicagoans from the slavery era to present day” and recommend remedies. Those policies could cover housing, policing, health, education and mass incarceration, among others.

The task force has 12 months from its first meeting to produce a public report on its findings.

Johnson’s executive order also included a formal apology on behalf of Chicago “for the historical wrongs committed against Black Chicagoans and their ancestors who have and continue to bear injustices.”

People clap as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson touts the creation of a Reparations Task Force to develop a Black Reparations Agenda during a Juneteenth Flag Raising Ceremony at Daley Plaza on Monday, June 17, 2024. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

Latham’s nonprofit, the Conrad Worrill Community Reparations Commission, is hoping to work with the city as a consultant to the new task force, she said. Established in 2020, the nonprofit has spread the word about reparations and engaged with city officials to get the movement going.

The commission is hosting a reparations rally Aug. 19, alongside the first day of the Democratic National Convention, beginning at 5 p.m. at the Dr. Conrad Worrill Track and Field Center.

“We could not pass the opportunity to gather national leaders and local leaders and the different organizations here for the rally during the DNC,” Latham said.

Invited speakers at the rally include the ADCRC’s Slaughter, Latham, Rue Simmons, the main architect behind Evanston’s reparations program, and others. Tickets for the event can be ordered online.

‘Stolen labor of our ancestors’

At the state level, two more commissioners have been appointed in the last two months, dropping the total vacant seats to five. Slaughter, the commission chair, said part of the issue has been finding candidates from outside Cook County.

Another persistent issue, the lack of public awareness, could be rectified when it brings on a public relations firm. Commissioners had discussed such a move as far back as March 2023, at the first meeting of the public engagement subcommittee (and the fourth overall meeting of the ADCRC). But, as is often the case with government bureaucracy, the hiring process has been slow. The state is still finalizing a request for proposals, Slaughter said, which should be released by the fall.

Asked when he hoped the firm could get started, he answered with a laugh, “yesterday.”

“It is really something that we would love to have as soon as possible because it does lift a burden,” Slaughter said.

With a public relations firm in place, Slaughter said the commission could focus more of its attention to what he and others informally call the “harms report” being compiled with the help of university researchers.

An audience member stands with a raised fist as Fred Hampton Jr., at podium, speaks during the African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC) public hearing at Kennedy-King College on July 13, 2024, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Before they can identify what reparations should entail and who should receive them — two undoubtedly thorny questions — the commission and its research partners aim to document centuries of past harms inflicted on Illinois’ Black residents and draw a connection to present inequities.

Among the focus areas is the state’s first constitution that allowed for the enslavement and indefinite indentured servitude of people like Harper’s fourth great-grandfather, Swansey Adams — a “brand of slavery,” said Kennedy-King College associate professor Daniel Davis during the July 19 public hearing, “just as brutal as the more well-known Southern version.”

Then there were the state’s draconian “ Black Codes ” that preceded the Civil War, which included among their punitive measures a ban on gatherings of three or more Black people.

The early 20th century saw acts of racial violence and terror against Black residents in Springfield (1908, a catalyst for the creation of the NAACP), East St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919).

‘Ready to explode’: How a black teen’s drifting raft triggered a deadly week of riots 100 years ago in Chicago

The research would also examine subsequent decades of denied opportunities in housing, education and employment that, along with overpolicing and mass incarceration, have driven racial disparities in health and carved a wealth chasm between Illinois’ Black and white residents.

“Our wealth situation in this country is a direct result of the stolen labor of our ancestors,” said Kamm Howard, a longtime reparations advocate and founder of the nonprofit Reparations United .

‘How long has this conversation been taking place?’

Some have criticized the state commission for spending time and resources researching seemingly well-trodden ground.

“How long has this conversation been taking place?” asked Brinson, the NAACP Chicago Westside Branch president. “You’ve got studies with cobwebs and dust on them.”

Others questioned whether similarly exhaustive studies were required before the U.S. government paid out billions of dollars to Native American tribes and Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.

A Black resident of the south side moves his belongings to a safety zone under police protection during the Chicago race riots of 1919. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

A few of the 31 people who spoke publicly during the ADCRC’s July hearing used their allotted two minutes to slam Chicago and the state for not waiting for a lengthy study to spend millions to address the recent influx of migrant arrivals, comments that drew spatters of angry agreement across the assembled crowd of roughly 300.

But Gabby Green, policy and program manager with the Chicago-based nonprofit, BlackRoots Alliance , said the research is essential.

“You and I both know that slavery existed and there have been multiple forms of systematic anti-Blackness since then,” she said. “But for any government entity, they need more direct evidence. It’s important to know our history so we can mend those historical wounds and really be able to thrive in a community.”

Slaughter is well-aware of the extensive research on the topic, having co-authored a 2022 report with noted reparations scholars William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen entitled, “The Cumulative Costs of Racism and the Bill for Black Reparations.”

William Yates, Chicago Tribune

Contract Buyers League members leave furnishings at the Chicago Civic Center on March 30, 1970. The items were removed from homes during evictions with the support of police. The Contract Buyers League fought back against redlining and restrictive racial covenants for housing that ruled Chicago.

Arthur Walker, Chicago Tribune

A crowd confronts police near the evictions of four Eggleston Avenue contract buyers March 31, 1970.

Michael Budrys, Chicago Tribune

People celebrate a failed eviction attempt as they block the entrance at 1235 S. Keeler Ave. at the Curtis Green residence on March 23, 1970. Because of a large group of protesters, sheriff's police had stopped the planned eviction.

Don Casper, Chicago Tribune

The Contract Buyers League was an organization of black homeowners in Chicago who banded together in the 1960s to protest housing discrimination. Unable to get mortgages, they were forced to buy homes on contract at exorbitant prices, and the contracts let speculators evict them if they missed a single payment. The league organized payment strikes, got many contracts renegotiated and collected information that led to the passage of federal anti-discrmination laws. Here, Chicago police carry a man away after a clash as sheriff's police evict four families from their homes in the 8000 block of State Street on April 6, 1970.

Chicago Tribune

Contract Buyers League members confront Chicago police after sheriff's police and movers evicted 12 families from their homes in the 9200 block of Eggleston Avenue on March 31, 1970.

Contract Buyers League members demonstrate in front of the federal building on May 19, 1970.

Charles Osgood, Chicago Tribune

A caravan is ready to depart for the Chicago Civic Center to drop off furnishings from the homes of the four contract buyers who were evicted March 30, 1970.

Contract Buyers League members move furnishings from evicted homes to dump at the Chicago Civic Center on March 30, 1970.

Walter Neal, Chicago Tribune

A sheriff's police bus drives away after officers evicted a contract buyer from 8547 King Drive on May 4, 1970.

Walter Kale, Chicago Tribune

Women hold a demonstration in front of Cook County Jail on Sept. 13, 1970, to show their support for four female members of the Contract Buyers League who were jailed for contempt of court.

Michael Budrys, Chicago Tribune historical phot

Contract Buyers League members wait outside a Cook County courtoomt for a hearing with Circuit Court Judge John Boyle on Oct. 6, 1969.

Guarded by sheriff's and Chicago police, movers remove belongings from a contract home at 9520 Emerald Ave. during an eviction March 30, 1970.

Chicago police stand guard at the end of the 9500 block of Emerald Avenue on March 30, 1970, as they try to prevent crowds from gathering to stop evictions.

And yet, he said, questions remain. “There still have to be more models that are built that explain to us if we were to do, hypothetically, cash payments to close the racial wealth gap, how long would it take for that gap to open again unless you have additional supports?”

Slaughter said he expects the research team to finish its report by the end of next year. That report, he added, should also help the commission make progress toward its other mandates, which include recommendations on the preservation of Black neighborhoods in the state, the building of a “Vocational Training Center for People of African Descent-Citizens,” and the creation of an “Illinois Slavery Era Disclosure Bill.”

A handful of cities and states — including Illinois and Chicago — have similar legislation that requires some or all companies bidding on government contracts to research and disclose historic ties to slavery. But those existing laws are rarely enforced, Howard told the state commission during a recent meeting, and the model his organization is proposing would be more robust than those earlier efforts.

In the meantime, the state commission will continue to hold public hearings, while the public eagerly awaits its recommendations on reparations and worries the window of opportunity could close.

“We’re actively working to educate individuals about this issue because, let’s be honest, when you talk about that window, a lot of individuals don’t understand the difference between moments and movements,” Slaughter said. “We’re attempting to build a movement, not just a moment.”

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PDF The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Case for Reparations Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations. "The Case for Reparations" is an article written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published in The Atlantic in 2014. The article focuses on redlining and housing discrimination through the eyes of people who have experienced it and the devastating effects it has had on the African-American community.
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations. Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations
In an interview with David Remnick, Ta-Nehisi Coates looks back at "The Case for Reparations," his article for The Atlantic on slavery, racism, and racial justice, and also speaks about the ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" Named Top Work of
Ta-Nehisi Coates' " The Case for Reparations ," a 2014 essay in the Atlantic that crafted accounts from the century and a half after the end of slavery into a powerful argument that African Americans are owed compensation for their treatment in the United States, has been named the "Top Work of Journalism of the Decade" by a panel of judges convened by New York University's Arthur ...
The Case for Reparations Summary
The Case for Reparations study guide contains a biography of Ta-Nehisi Coates, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
The Case for Reparations
Summary: "The Case for Reparations". Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, published the essay "The Case for Reparations" in that magazine's June 2014 issue. It was widely acclaimed and, according to the Washington Post, set a record at the time for the most-viewed article in a single day on The Atlantic website.
'The Atlantic's' Ta-Nehisi Coates Builds 'A Case For Reparations'
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates describes how the legacy of slavery extends to geographical and governmental policies in America and calls for a "collective introspection" on reparations.
The Case for Reparations Essay Analysis
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Ta-Nehisi Coates On Reparations: 'We're Going To Be In For A Fight'
We're talking about his 15,000 word essay, where he talks about the case for reparations. Now what do you say to people who say - OK, well, that's a bummer, but that was a long time ago.
Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes the Case for Reparations at Historic
His seminal 2014 essay, "The Case for Reparations," helped spur new calls to make amends for slavery. When we come back, he joins us for the rest of the hour.
The Case for Considering Reparations
Kevin Drum offers an interesting, and familiar, rebuttal to the reparations argument: A couple of years ago Coates famously wrote an Atlantic article titled "The Case for Reparations," and ...
The Case for Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reckoning with U.S
An explosive new cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine by the famed essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates has rekindled a national discussion on reparations for American slavery and ...
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Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations," with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind.
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Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations" Essay
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote 'The Case for Reparations,' featured in The Atlantic in 2014. The essay examines housing discrimination and institutional racism from the perspective of those who have faced it and the catastrophic consequences for the African-American generations. Although Coates's emphatic writing style might repulse some people, the use of evidence and logical construction of ...
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations study guide contains a biography of Ta-Nehisi Coates, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
The Case for Reparations
This essay examines the relationship between debt and memory that is emerging in contemporary calls for reparation and Caribbean Canadian literature. CARICOM's and Ta-Nehisi Coates's discussions of reparatory justice, as well as David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, characterize the black Atlantic's colonial history as an outstanding debt. Collectively, they ...
The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates in his essay 'The Case for Reparations' examines the consequences of slavery and segregation in the United States and argues the importance of reparations for black Americans.
The Case for Reparations
African American Studies Teachers in Columbia Public Schools Lesson Summary: Students engage with essays and primary source documents to discuss centuries of institutional racism in America and analyze the nuances and obstacles of enacting a nationwide system of redress for the Black community. Downloads: Full case for reparations unit Unit ...
The Case for Black Reparations
The Case for Black Reparations The texts in this section detail major arguments in favor of reparations. These arguments emerge in a variety of disciplines-legal studies, economics, history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy-and are generally focused on arguing for African American reparations.
A Debt Unpaid: Advocating for Reparations for Black Americans
The atrocities of slavery and the ongoing systematic racism that African Americans have to deal with provide a strong case for the need for reparations. Reparations can be a transforming ...
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The Case for Reparations
Now, despite that, the Atlantic writer has penned an article called "The Case for Reparations.". In it, he focuses on the economic underpinnings of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and federally backed housing policy to show how Black Americans were prevented from building wealth or passing it on to later generations.
Justice League of Greater Lansing makes first reparations disbursement
Ten high school graduating seniors each received a $5,000 Reparations Scholarship from the Justice League of Greater Lansing.
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The task force's request wasn't for personal individual reparations, but for community reparations starting with an apology for specific, collective, documented harms, and we provided the ...
The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Case for Reparations. Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our ...
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In case you missed any of last week's news, here's a roundup of the RoundTable's most-read stories, with a few new ones for good measure. ... and Evanstonian Aaron Cohen writes about his parents taking him and his siblings to see the commotion in a guest essay. ... avoids reparations tax. Evanston's quirky American Toby Jug Museum to ...
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Harper's family story is one of many being documented by the Illinois African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission, a state panel tasked with a sweeping mandate that includes the eventual ...

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The Case for Reparations

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”

Explore Redlining in Chicago

Video: The Contract Buyers League

II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”

Interactive Census Map

III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”

IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”

V. The Quiet Plunder

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

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

VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

IX. Toward A New Country

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