While there are many policies drafted and bills legislated, really the only components that comprise successful reentry to the community are skills, support, and shelter. Thinking about what I needed when I came home from prison looks much different now than it did 20 odd years ago. Back then, I thought serving my time in prison was my punishment; I didn’t know I was facing a life sentence after leaving prison. And for many people reentering society after leaving incarceration, that’s what reentry is — a life sentence.
 
When the corrections officer stopped by my bunk to tell me I was being paroled, my world stood still, and my head spun. All of a sudden life after prison was real, and my time inside was finally over. After 2,095 days, I was finally going home, and I had no idea how unprepared I was for freedom. I thought it was going to be as simple as the woman that taught the pre-release class said it would be. She said all I had to do was be honest about my past and be willing to work hard. So, as I sat in that hot, stuffy gym with 750 other men waiting to be released from prison, I thought I had it all worked it out. It all seemed so simple.
 
Walking out of prison I was handed a check for $50 and a bus voucher. The voucher allowed for travel to Dallas or Houston, and from there I had to purchase my own bus fare to Austin. I was expected to provide myself with clothing, food, travel, and shelter with that same $50. To say I was being set up to fail is being gracious. I was released on Thursday afternoon and didn’t have to report to my parole officer until the following Monday morning, so I spent the weekend with family I hadn’t seen in years and convinced myself that everything was going to work out fine.
 
When I reported to my parole officer that Monday, he informed me I was to spend the next 60 days on an electronic monitor. The monitor was supposed to be affixed to my ankle, but it was too small, so I was forced to wear it on my wrist. The conditions of my release mandated that while I was on parole I was to be gainfully employed. Who did my parole officer think was going to hire me with an electronic ankle monitor on my wrist? How did he think I was going to explain that to a prospective employer?
 
He didn’t seem to think about how the monitor would affect my life or even whether it would affect my ability to comply. He didn’t care that I was unemployable. He didn’t care how many times I was denied an interview after my application was reviewed and I had disclosed my conviction. When I sat in that prison gym before my release, I came up with a plan to apply at McDonald’s and work my way up from there. Aim low, I told myself. Don’t get your hopes up. Now, with a monitor on my wrist, I was worried that even this plan wouldn’t work out.
 
I had convinced myself if I aimed low enough, I was bound to hit my target and everything would work out fine. There was no sense in aiming high, those days were far behind me. Those halcyon days of youth had been stripped from me, right along with my dignity and self-worth. Aim low, I thought, so when I didn’t hit the mark I could remind myself it was because I was a convicted killer. Not formerly incarcerated, but a felon convicted of voluntary manslaughter, undeserving of anything other than failure.
 
What I needed was someone who had been to prison and was successfully navigating reentry to mentor me. I needed someone to tell me that applying for a job, for housing, or for a loan was different for folks with a felony conviction. Having someone tell me that being a father, a son, and even a brother was totally different after prison would have made an enormous difference in my life. My family needed to be informed about the limitations that were going to be placed on me and my ability to find employment, housing, or treatment. My church needed to see me as who I had become, not who I was. Creating pathways to successful reentry is just as incumbent upon the community as the individual, as transformation and redemption is expected, if not demanded, from formerly incarcerated individuals.
 
There can be no sustainable drop in rates of recidivism until we embrace successful reentry as an antidote for mass incarceration. Society must embrace the reality that 95 percent of the people currently in prison are coming home, and we have to find a better way to onboard them back into our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities.

Lewis Conway, National Campaign Strategist, ACLU

For nearly three decades, my former colleague Rep. John Conyers of Michigan would introduce H.R. 40, legislation seeking to establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals. Though many thought it a lost cause, he believed that a day would come when our nation would need to account for the brutal mistreatment of African Americans during chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the enduring structural racism endemic to our society. With the rise and normalization of white supremacist expression during the Trump administration, the discussion of H.R. 40 and the concept of restorative justice have gained more urgency, garnering the attention of mainstream commentators and illustrating the need for a national reckoning.

Slavery is America’s original sin, and this country has yet to atone for the atrocities visited upon generations of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Moreover, the mythology built around the Civil War has obscured our discussions of the impact of chattel slavery and made it difficult to have a national dialogue on how to fully account for its place in American history and public policy. H.R. 40 is intended to create the framework for a national discussion on the enduring impact of slavery and its complex legacy to begin that necessary process of atonement.

The designation of this legislation as H.R. 40 is intended to memorialize the promise made by Gen. William T. Sherman, in his 1865 Special Field Order No. 15, to redistribute 400,000 acres of formerly Confederate-owned coastal land in South Carolina and Florida, subdivided into 40-acre plots. In addition to the more well-known land redistribution, the order also established autonomous governance for the region and provided for protection by military authorities of the settlements. Though Southern sympathizer and former slaveholder President Andrew Johnson would later overturn the order, this plan represented the first systematic form of freedmen reparations. 

With the withdrawal of Union troops from the South in 1877, the promise of Reconstruction proved short-lived, and over the next century and a half, the Black Codes would morph into Jim Crow segregation and federal redlining and the war on drugs and mass incarceration and racism in policing and underfunded schools — injuries not confined solely to the South. These historical injustices connect through a web of government policies that have ensured that the majority of African Americans have had to, in the words of President Obama, “work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.” Black America’s unemployment rate is more than twice that of white America’s. Black families have just one-sixteenth of the wealth of white families. Nearly one million Black people — mostly young men — are incarcerated across the country. Though remote in time from the period of enslavement, these racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, employment, and other social goods are directly attributable to the damaging legacy of slavery and racial discrimination.

Since its introduction, H.R. 40 has spurred some governmental acknowledgment of the crime of slavery, but most often the response has taken the form of an apology. Even the well-intentioned commitments to examine the historical and modern-day implications of slavery by the Clinton administration, however, fell short of the mark and failed to inspire substantive public discourse. For many, it was not until The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” that the mainstream public began to reckon with, or even consider, the concept of reparations. 

Though the federal government has been slow to engage on the issue of reparations, individuals, corporations, and other public institutions have engaged the discussion out of both necessity and conscience. In 1994, a group of California plaintiffs brought suit against the federal government, and by 2002, nine lawsuits were filed around the country by the Restitution Study Group. Though litigation has yielded only mixed success in court, a serious foundation was laid for alternative forms of restitution. For example, in 2005, J.P. Morgan & Company tried to make amends for its role in the slave trade with an apology and a $5 million, five-year scholarship fund for Black undergraduates in Louisiana. In 2008, the Episcopal Church apologized for perpetuating American slavery through its interpretation of the Bible and certain dioceses have implemented restitution programs.

In 2003, Brown University created the Committee on Slavery and Justice to assess the university’s role in slavery and determine a response. Similarly, in 2016, Georgetown University apologized for its historical links to slavery and said it would give an admissions edge to descendants of slaves whose sale in the 19th century helped pay off the school’s debts. These are only a few examples of how private institutions have begun reckoning with their past records. I expect that a growing number of institutions will be forced to examine their histories of discrimination, if for no other reason than increasing public scrutiny will force their history to light.   

Since my reintroduction of H.R. 40 at the beginning of this Congress, both the legislation and concept of reparations have become the focus of national debate. For many, it is apparent that the success of the Obama administration has unleashed a backlash of racism and intolerance that is an echo of America’s dark past that has yet to be exorcised from the national consciousness. Commentators have turned to H.R. 40 as a response to formally begin the process of analyzing, confronting, and atoning for these dark chapters of American history.

Even conservative voices, like that of New York Times columnist David Brooks, are starting to give the reparations cause the hearing it deserves, observing that: “Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.” Similarly, a majority of the Democratic presidential contenders have turned to H.R 40 as a tool for reconciliation, with 17 cosponsoring or claiming they would sign the bill into law if elected.
 
Though critics have argued that the idea of reparations is unworkable politically or financially, their focus on money misses the point of the H.R. 40 commission’s mandate. The goal of these historical investigations is to bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African Americans and to make America a better place by helping the truly disadvantaged. Consequently, the reparations movement does not focus on payments to individuals, but to remedies that can be created in as many forms necessary to equitably address the many kinds of injuries sustained from chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges. To merely focus on finance is an empty gesture and betrays a lack of understanding of the depth of the unaddressed moral issues that continue to haunt this nation. 

While it might be convenient to assume that we can address the current divisive racial and political climate in our nation through race-neutral means, experience shows that we have not escaped our history. Though the civil rights movement challenged many of the most racist practices and structures that subjugated the African-American community, it was not followed by a commitment to truth and reconciliation. For that reason, the legacy of racial inequality has persisted and left the nation vulnerable to a range of problems that continue to yield division, racial disparities, and injustice. 

By passing H.R. 40, Congress can start a movement toward the national reckoning we need to bridge racial divides. Reparations are ultimately about respect and reconciliation — and the hope that one day, all Americans can walk together toward a more just future.

Sheila Jackson Lee is a member of the Congress representing Texas’ 18th congressional district.

This spring, something extraordinary and worthy of imitation occurred on Georgetown University’s campus in Washington, D.C.

On April 11, two-thirds of the undergraduate student body who took part in a referendum voted “yes” to create a reparations fund for the descendants of 272 slaves the university sold in 1838 to save the university from bankruptcy. When the Maryland Jesuits sold these human beings into further bondage on brutal Louisiana cotton plantations nearly two centuries ago, they received $115,000 in return, or about $3.3 million today. Fast forward to the present, and Georgetown’s endowment is valued at nearly $1.8 billion — a premier American institution of higher learning built with blood money.

The effort to make amends for the university’s trafficking in human misery and subjugation was the work of the GU272 Foundation. The organization, founded by the descendants of that wicked sale, asked Georgetown students to increase their university tuition fees by $27.20 each semester to honor those whose lives financed the college’s continued existence. As Shepard Thomas, a member of a student group who advocated for the referendum and a descendant of some of the original 272 slaves sold in 1838, told The New York Times, “The school wouldn’t be here without them.”

Georgetown’s students have shown colleges and universities, particularly those that also profited from slavery, one way to right the wrongs of the nation’s original sin. In the name of reparatory justice, private and public universities should underwrite the establishment of reparations funds — similar to the Georgetown initiative — to ensure that students of African descent do not leave these institutions in debt.

Members of the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), such as myself, want to work with student leaders in petitioning the administrators at universities whose establishment was made possible by wealth generated from slavery, slave trading, and the unpaid labor of people of African descent to make restitution to African Americans in the name of racial healing. There have been presidential commissions and task forces at Brown, Harvard, Columbia, and other universities that have investigated and reported on the wealth these institutions accrued due to their direct or indirect participation in slavery and slave trading.

As a result of these inquiries, there have been efforts to change the names of buildings named after slave owners and traders, such as Yale’s Calhoun College, and other symbolic actions. However, given the persistence of extreme racial disparities in wealth between Black and white college graduates, there is need to address the income gap through the application of reparatory justice, which calls for repair, remediation, and restitution to those who historically and currently have been unjustly damaged and targeted for exploitation.

Economists have found that the income levels and unemployment rates of African-American college graduates are the same as those for white high school graduates. It is also reported that African Americans graduate from college with the highest student loan debt. In The Atlantic, Duke University economist William J. Darity reminds us “that completion of a college education leads blacks to carry twice the level of student loan debt than whites after a four year degree.” In addition, the default rate on student loans is much higher for African-American graduates, negatively affecting their creditworthiness at the outset of their professional careers.

At the same time, the descendants of the enslaved workers do not want the successors of their ancestors’ original oppressors to determine the form of reparations and reparatory justice. Georgetown University is a unique situation where the descendants of those enslaved workers are still being identified. In the case of Harvard, Yale, and other universities and colleges that benefited from the slave trade, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to locate actual descendants of the enslaved workers. Some could be found, but not many.

Credit: Library of Congress

Therefore, it is the responsibility of the current generation of African and African-American students to collect on “The Debt” that is owed. In the case of Brown University, whose founders accumulated their wealth through active participation in slavery and slave trading, the administration has pledged to use the school’s substantial endowment funds to ensure that no student — African American or non-African American — leaves the university in debt.

The students at other private schools with huge endowments need to organize and petition college and university officials to demand support for the establishment of an independent foundation devoted to receiving and disseminating reparations funds so that no African-American student graduates from these colleges and universities in debt. 

But what about the problem of low-income African Americans graduating from flagship state universities or other public colleges and universities in debt, crippling their ability to purchase a home, start a family, and save for the future?

Those who are interested in pursuing reparatory justice should mobilize and demand the formation of reparations funds to cover the financial needs of graduating students and alumni. African-American students can make this demand on the basis of their extreme underrepresentation at these tax-supported universities in the past and currently.

For example, while African-American taxpayers make up 6.5% of California’s population, African Americans were only 3.8% of the enrollment at the University of California in 2017 (10,785 out of 273,180). NAARC members will work with students interested in creating reparations funds to be used to increase the number of the African-American students enrolling in these institutions and in making sure that these students do not graduate from these schools in debt.

Reparatory justice is aimed at addressing the extreme disparities in wealth, income, formal education, health outcomes, home ownership, and other areas between African Americans and white Americans. Scholars have determined that these disparities can be traced directly to the enslavement of African Americans before 1865 and the racial exclusion and discrimination that continues into the 21st century. Pursuing reparations to address Black student debt, both at public and private schools, should be at the top of the political agenda of African Americans — as well as all progressive elected leaders and students who understand why African Americans are so underrepresented in America’s colleges and universities.

V.P. Franklin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education, University of California, Riverside