Reparations for slavery in the United States

In colonial times The debate on reparations reaches as far back as the eighteenth century. Quakers, who were some of the first abolitionists in the United States, almost unanimously insisted that freed slaves were entitled to compensation from their former owners. If an owner repented of his sin of owning a chattel slave, he needs to atone for it by making amends. Quakers cited the book of Deuteronomy, in which owners were exhorted to share their goods with former slaves. Gary B. Nash writes that, "he may fairly be called the father of American reparation". Before the Civil War Well before slavery was abolished nationally in 1865, abolitionists presented suggestions on what could or should be done to compensate the enslaved workers after their liberation. Early in 1859, in a book dedicated to "Old Hero" John Brown, James Redpath declared himself a "reparation advocate", and implies that in his view, the lands of the Confederacy should be given to the ex-slaves. and to solve problems caused by the masses of freed slaves, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land in the sea islands and around Charleston, South Carolina for the exclusive use of black people who had been enslaved. The army also had a number of unneeded mules which were given to freed slaves. Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (1,600 km2) in Georgia and South Carolina. However after Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order. The land was returned to its previous owners, and black people were forced to leave. In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it did not pass. Reconstruction came to an end in 1877 without the issue of reparations having been addressed. Thereafter, a deliberate movement of segregation and oppression arose in Southern states. Jim Crow laws were passed in some Southeastern states to reinforce the existing inequality that slavery had produced. In addition, white extremist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan engaged in a massive campaign of terrorism throughout the Southeast in order to keep African Americans in their prescribed social place. For decades this assumed inequality and injustice was ruled on in court decisions and debated in public discourse. In one anomalous case, a former slave named Henrietta Wood successfully sued for compensation after having been kidnapped from the free state of Ohio and sold into slavery in Mississippi. After the American Civil War, she was freed and returned to Cincinnati, where she won her case in federal court in 1878, receiving $2,500 (~$ in ) in damages. Though the verdict was a national news story, it did not prompt any trend toward additional similar cases. Post-Reconstruction Era In 1896, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (MRB&PA) was founded for the purpose of obtaining pensions for former slaves from the Federal government as compensation and reparations for their unpaid labor and suffering. Chartered in 1898 in Nashville, Tennessee, the organization was founded by former slaves Callie House and Isaiah H. Dickerson. According to some historians, the organization was "the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans." The organization and its leaders were hounded with false allegations and criminal prosecutions until its last local branches closed in the 1930's. In 1915, under Callie House's leadership, the association filed a class-action lawsuit, Johnson v. McAdoo, in federal court against the US Treasury Department for 68 million dollars. $68 million was the amount of cotton tax collected between 1862 and 1868 and, it was argued, was due to the plaintiffs because this cotton had been produced by them and their ancestors as a result of their involuntary servitude. This was the first documented Black reparations litigation in the US on the federal level. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied the claim based on governmental immunity as did the US Supreme Court, siding with the Appeals Court's decision. 2020 The topic became a prominent theme during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries as concerns surrounding race were heightened due to current events. It was further amplified because of African-American people were dying prematurely and disproportionately due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ongoing systemic racism and police brutality also sparked outrage across the country, notably the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency medical technician, fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police Department in her home; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, shot while out for a run by three white men in Georgia; and the murder of George Floyd, a Black American killed during an arrest by Minneapolis police after allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill, that sparked the nationwide George Floyd protests. Candidates that endorsed the idea included: • Andrew Yang supported H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, while speaking on the Karen Hunter show. • Marianne Williamson detailed a plan for reparations in an interview for Ebony Magazine. • Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have both indicated some level of support for reparations, according to NPR. • Tulsi Gabbard was a cosponsor of H.R. 40, the only piece of legislation in Congress to study and develop reparations proposals and Bernie Sanders was a co-sponsor for the Senate version of the bill. Kamala Harris declared in April 2019 she supports reparations. Beto O'Rourke is "open to considering some form of reparations," according to U.S. News & World Report. Tom Steyer in the 2020 Democratic Primaries Debate in South Carolina voiced his support for reparations. ==Proposals for reparations==

United States government Some proposals have called for direct payments from the US government. Various estimates have been given if such payments were to be made. ''Harper's Magazine'' estimated that the total of reparations due was about "$97 trillion, based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, regardless the United States wasn't a recognized independent country until after the Revolutionary War in 1787, compounded at 6% interest through 1993". Should all or part of this amount be paid to the descendants of slaves in the United States, the current US government would only pay a fraction of that cost, since it has been in existence only since 1789. For two centuries, from the 1700s until World War I, the average wage for one day's unskilled labor in America was one dollar. According to the Brookings Institution, in 1860, over $3 billion (~$ in ) was the value assigned to the physical bodies of enslaved Black Americans to be used as free labor and production. This was more money than was invested in factories and railroads combined. In 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Blacks was $250 million (~$ in ). "For the descendants of the 12.5 million Blacks who were shipped in chains from Western Africa, 'America has a genetic birth defect when it comes to the question of race,' as stated recently by US representative Hakeem Jeffries. If America is to atone for this defect, reparations for Black Americans is part of the healing and reconciliation process." At the first National Reparations Convention in Chicago in 2001, a proposal by Howshua Amariel, a Chicago social activist, would require the federal government to make reparations to proven descendants of slaves. In addition, Amariel stated "For those blacks who wish to remain in America, they should receive reparations in the form of free education, free medical, free legal and free financial aid for fifty years with no taxes levied," and "For those desiring to leave America, every black person would receive a million dollars or more, backed by gold, in reparation." At the convention Amariel's proposal received approval from the 100 or so participants. Nevertheless, the question of who would receive such payments, who should pay them and in what amount, has remained highly controversial, since the United States Census does not track descent from slaves or slave owners and relies on self-reported racial categories. On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws. Nine states have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans. Those states are: • Alabama – April 25, 2007 • Florida – 2008 • Tennessee • Virginia – 2007 Private institutions Private institutions and corporations were also involved in slavery. On March 8, 2000, Reuters News Service reported that Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a law school graduate, initiated a one-woman campaign making a historic demand for restitution and apologies from modern companies that played a direct role in enslaving Africans. Aetna Inc. was her first target because of their practice of writing life insurance policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slave owners as the beneficiaries. In response to Farmer-Paellmann's demand, Aetna Inc. issued a public apology, and the "corporate restitution movement" was born. By 2002, nine lawsuits were filed around the country coordinated by Farmer-Paellmann and the Restitution Study Group—a New York non-profit. The litigation included 20 plaintiffs, demanding restitution from 20 companies from the banking, insurance, textile, railroad, and tobacco industries. The cases were consolidated under 28 U.S.C. 1407 to multidistrict litigation in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The district court dismissed the lawsuits prejudice, and the claimants appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. On 13th December, 2006, that court, in an opinion written by Judge Richard Posner, modified the district court's judgment to be a dismissal prejudice, affirmed the majority of the district court's judgment, and reversed the portion of the district court's judgment dismissing the plaintiffs' consumer protection claims, remanding the case for further proceedings consistent with its opinion. Thus, the plaintiffs may bring the lawsuit again, but must clear considerable procedural and substantive hurdles first: In October 2000, California passed the Slavery Era Disclosure Law requiring insurance companies doing business there to report on their role in slavery. The disclosure legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Hayden, is the prototype for similar laws passed in 12 states around the United States. The NAACP has called for more of such legislation at local and corporate levels. It quotes Dennis C. Hayes, CEO of the NAACP, as saying, "Absolutely, we will be pursuing reparations from companies that have historical ties to slavery and engaging all parties to come to the table." Brown University, whose namesake family was involved in the slave trade, has also established a committee to explore the issue of reparations. In February 2007, Brown University announced a set of responses to its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. While in 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for the "sins" of racism, including slavery. In December 2005, a boycott was called by a coalition of reparations groups under the sponsorship of the Restitution Study Group. The boycott targets the student loan products of banks deemed complicit in slavery—particularly those identified in the Farmer-Paellmann litigation. As part of the boycott, students are asked to choose from other banks to finance their student loans. Pro-reparations groups such as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America advocate for compensation to be in the form of community rehabilitation and not payments to individual descendants. These calls for reparations have been bolstered amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the high rates of police brutality against Blacks. ==Arguments for reparations==

Accumulated wealth Housing discrimination played a major role in creating the racial wealth gap that exists today. After the Great Migration of Southern blacks to Chicago in the 1940s, redlining was used to keep former slaves segregated from whites and to prevent black families from getting a mortgage. According to this view, reparations would be valuable primarily as a way of correcting modern economic imbalances. In 2008 the American Humanist Association published an article which argued that if emancipated slaves had been allowed to possess and retain the profits of their labor, their descendants might now control a much larger share of American social and monetary wealth. Not only did the freedmen not receive a share of these profits, but they were stripped of the small amounts of compensation paid to some of them during Reconstruction. Therefore, many scholars and activists call for reparations to eliminate "racial disparities in wealth, income, education, health, sentencing and incarceration, political participation, and subsequent opportunities to engage in American political and social life". Ray and Perry state in a Brookings article that the lack of a social safety net and the wealth gap are particularly highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. They explain that "disparities in access to health care along with inequities in economic policies combine", making this inequality a life or death situation for black Americans. Current discrimination Many argue that giving reparations for slavery is too complicated, but there is a strong basis for them on the past and current discrimination that blacks in America face. Ta-Nehisi Coates explains it in "The Case for Reparations" article in The Atlantic as "ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty-five years of racist housing policy". As Bittker claims in his book The Case for Black Reparations, "as slavery faded into the background, it was succeeded by a caste system embodying white supremacy". Many argue that while reparations may be a first step towards amending the harms caused by slavery, the systemic racism that exists in many institutions will not be fixed as easily. Malcolm X stated: "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made." Precedents Advocates have used other examples of reparations to argue that victims of institutional slavery should be similarly compensated. In several cases the federal government has formally apologized to or compensated minority groups for past actions: • Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the US government apologized for Japanese American internment during World War II and provided reparations of $20,000 to each survivor, to compensate for loss of property and liberty during that period. No compensation was given to the descendants of affected individuals though. • The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act transferred land, federal money, and a portion of oil revenues to native Alaskans. • The Apology Resolution of 1993 apologized for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, but gave no compensation. US state governments have made reparations in some specific circumstances: • Virginia established a compensation fund for victims of involuntary sterilization in 2015. Other countries have also opted to pay reparations for past grievances, such as: • Reparations for the Holocaust, including the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany and various programs under the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. ==Arguments against reparations==

Statute of limitations Most state and federal laws under which parties can sue for damages have a statute of limitations which sets a deadline for filing; these have all long since passed, which prevents courts from granting relief under existing laws. This has been used effectively in several suits, including In re: African American Slave Descendants, which dismissed a high-profile suit against a number of businesses with ties to slavery. Technical complications The technical side of reparations is very complex, and could be a reason why they have not yet been implemented. Some argue against the idea of putting a monetary value on the traumas that Black Americans have faced, dubbing it "transactionalism". Some claim that closing the wealth gap involves paying descendants of slaves "individual cash payments in the amount that will close the Black-white racial wealth divide". Republican senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is a descendant of slave owners, while acknowledging that slavery was an "original sin" of the United States, opposes providing reparations because he believes "none of us currently living are responsible." One publication against reparations is David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (2002). Other works that discuss problems with reparations include John Torpey's Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2006), Alfred Brophy's Reparations Pro and Con (2006), and Nahshon Perez's Freedom from Past Injustices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Reparations in the US have never gained widespread public support. Often in these conversations, the White reaction is to claim that this is a form of unjustifiable "reverse racism", or that demands for reparations are an example of the "Black refusal to move beyond the memory of slavery". A 2020 poll from The Washington Post showed that "63% of Americans don't think the US should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves". Notably, 82% of Black Americans support reparations, while 75% of White Americans do not. Some arguments also highlight the complications behind reparations, such as "not all Black Americans are descendants of slaves" or that the people alive today are not responsible for the harms of slavery. Others still argue that reparations will do nothing in the face of racism, and that structural and policy changes would be more effective. In the midst of America's racial unrest from 2020 to the present, these tensions were particularly exposed. == Reparations and COVID-19 ==

The call for reparations has amplified due to the coronavirus pandemic, with people of color disproportionately likely to be laid off, to struggle financially, and to die from the virus. This relates back to the fact that white families have roughly ten times the wealth of black families. In August 2020, the CDC released data showing that Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are experiencing hospitalizations at rates 4.5 to 5.5 times higher than non-Hispanic whites, and that African Americans are dying at 2.4 times the white rate. == Legislation and other actions ==

Federal government On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws. States Legislation • California – Adopted legislation requiring insurance companies to determine whether they have records going back to when slavery existed in this country and, if so, to provide information on insurance policies held by slaveholders on slaves to the state's insurance department. The California Reparations Task Force was established in 2020 as a non-regulatory state agency to study and develop reparation proposals. • Illinois – Adopted legislation requiring insurance companies to determine whether they have records going back to when slavery existed in this country and, if so, to provide information on insurance policies held by slaveholders on slaves to the state's insurance department. • Connecticut – In 2009 apologized for its involvement in the enslavement of Africans. • Delaware – Apologized for its involvement in the enslavement of Africans on February 11, 2016. • Virginia – Apologized for its involvement in the enslavement of Africans on February 26, 2007. • Evanston, Illinois: "The City Council of Evanston, Illinois, voted to allocate the first $10 million in tax revenue from the sale of recreational marijuana (which became legal in the state on January 1, 2020) to fund reparations initiatives that address the gaps in wealth and opportunity of black residents." The Asheville City Council also voted unanimously on June 9, 2020, to remove two confederate monuments as a result of demands made by a group called "Black Asheville Demands" and the work of the Racial Justice Coalition with led the push for the effort. The city council meeting had so much community engagement public comment was extended for an extra hour beyond the normal meeting time. Organizations and institutions • Aetna: Apologized in 2000 for issuing life insurance policies to enslavers covering the lives of enslaved people from . In 2002, when Farmer-Paellman brought suit against Aetna, CSX and Fleet for unjust enrichment by "a system that enslaved, tortured, starved and exploited human beings," this suit was dismissed. • University of Alabama: Apologized for the history of slavery at the university in 2004. • Georgetown University: "In 2016 [the university agreed] to give admissions preference to descendants of the 272 slaves[,] formally apologized for its role in slavery [and] [renamed] two buildings on its campus to acknowledge the lives of enslaved people". In April, 2019 students at Georgetown University voted to increase their tuition by $27.20 to benefit the descendants of the 272 slaves sold by the Jesuits who ran the school in 1838. The student-led referendum was non-binding. Later that year, after further pressure and follow up from the Georgetown University Student Association, the university eventually moved forward with a similar proposal without the students' covering the cost with a tuition increase. • Harvard University started to research its relationship to slavery in 2007. In 2016 Harvard president Drew Faust acknowledged that the university had been "directly complicit" in slavery. In 2022 the university published Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, more than a hundred pages long. The report included recommendations to develop educational partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, create a public memorial, and identify living descendants of people enslaved by university staff, leaders and faculty. There was a US$100m endowment for implementation. The university has given descendants of slaves preferential consideration for admissions and set up a reconciliation fund for them. • JP Morgan Chase: Apologized for its connection to slavery in 2005. • Princeton Theological Seminary: In 2019 the Seminary announced a $27 million commitment for various initiatives to recognize how it benefited from black slavery. This is the largest monetary commitment by an educational institution. • Wachovia: Apologized for its connection to slavery in 2005. == See also ==

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