We are two months away from the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in what would become the United States of America. It is time to renew the public discussion about reparations to descendants of Africans who were enslaved as our country was forming and growing rich. 

First as colonies and then as a nation, America has existed longer with slavery (1619-1865: 246 years) than without it (1865-2019: 154 years). And the reality of the institution of enslaving people is not the “good food and a decent place to live” narrative of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and others who minimize the horror of the practice. The first 100 of the 154 years without slavery were characterized by socially mandated and legally enforced white supremacy. There were 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950 (an average of a little over one lynching every week).

If the 1965 Civil Rights Act, passed the year after three civil rights workers were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, “leveled the playing field” in America, descendants of enslaved Africans have lived “free” in America for about 54 years. Of course, that 54 years has been characterized by the Republican-inspired war on drugs, the Democratic 1994 crime bill, and a report from the Economic Policy Institute last year that identified “no progress” since 1968 in closing gaps between whites and Blacks in home ownership, employment, or incarceration. In this world, freedom does start to sound like “nothing left to lose.” 

In 1980, Congress responded to a campaign led by Japanese-Americans and established a commission to investigate the legacy of America’s imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in “camps” during World War II. The final report of the commission called the imprisonment of Japanese-American families for 3½ years a “grave injustice” motivated by “racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership.”

In 1988, 43 years after the end of the war, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act that compensated more than 80,000 people of Japanese descent who were imprisoned in camps during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid out $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. America paid more than $1.6 billion as a symbol of trying to right this horrible wrong.

read the full reparations series

The legacy of enslaving Africans is no less a “grave injustice.” It too flourished because of racial prejudice and a failure in political leadership. America’s political leaders could not see the moral high ground because of notions of white supremacy and piles of money coming from enslaving a race of people. In 1619, some “20 and odd” enslaved people arrived in America. Less than 170 years later, the enslaved population had grown to about 700,000 humans, and America was producing 1.5 million pounds of cotton a year.

On the eve of the Civil War, America’s cotton production had grown to 2.3 billion pounds a year. It was 60% of all U.S. exports. The enslaved population was now almost 4 million humans. The estimated value of enslaved people in the American economy in 1860 was about $3.5 billion (about $100 billion in today’s money). 

The idea of reparations for slavery is not new. Most Americans know of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, but not many know about the Compensated Emancipation Act of the same year. That law authorized the payment of more than $1 million in 1862 money (more than $24 million in 2017) to D.C. owners of enslaved people for “lost property” when their enslaved people were freed. Believe it or not, America has already paid reparations for the practice of enslaving people — to those who did the enslaving. 

An objective, fact-based evaluation of America’s history regarding home ownership, education, the use of the criminal legal system, and other critical areas of American life will reveal a government-supported philosophy that is best described by Thurgood Marshall in his Supreme Court argument in Brown v. the Board. He described the concept of separate but equal as part of “the inherent determination that people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible.”

If reparations are the right path for America, how do we get there? Is it through litigation, legislation, state-based work, or is it all three and more? Should payments be made to individuals or should benefits be distributed in other ways? Should every descendant benefit or only those who have a “need”? 

Numerous scholars, leaders, and organizations committed to racial justice have wrestled with these questions and others, and their work has made this opportunity for a public conversation possible.

Four years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ monumental essay on reparations for The Atlantic won over the minds of many who had previously bristled at the idea. Between 1989 and his resignation in 2017, former U.S. Rep. John Conyers proposed H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.” It was defeated every Congress. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives called for reparations and published a list of solutions ranging from open access to public universities to a universal basic income.

Now, Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee has re-introduced HR 40. Presidential candidates are discussing the concept, and the 400th “anniversary” of the first enslaved people arriving in America provides an opportunity for serious consideration of this issue in terms of racial justice — an issue which is at the heart of America’s past and present. 

The ACLU believes the issue of reparations should be seriously considered by all Americans, and in furtherance of that belief, we are beginning a series of essays on the concept of reparations written by those who have labored on this issue for decades.

Congresswoman Jackson Lee has authored the first article on H.R. 40. You will hear from scholars and leaders associated with the National African American Reparations Commission, like Nkechi Taifa, who writes on her experience on being on the frontlines of the reparations movement since the 1960s. Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a political economist and president emeritus at Bennett College of Women, writes on post-13th Amendment terrorism and economic justice. Dr. V.P. Franklin, who edits the Journal of African American History, writes on his views about college tuition and technical training for descendants of enslaved people. Activist and lawyer Aislinn Pulley writes about the Chicago reparations ordinance, created in response to Chicago Police Department’s torture ring, and how that could be a model for reparations for enslaved African Americans. And Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and a chairman at the CARICOM Reparations Commission, writes about how the 21st century will know no greater global movement than the reparations movement. The ACLU is convinced that it is critical for these voices to be heard at this important moment in American history, and we want to do our part in making that happen.

When we talk about race in America, we are always trying to skirt the edges because getting to the heart of the matter requires a journey to a place where people and nations seldom want to go. William Burroughs described it as avoiding the “Naked Lunch” — that moment when everyone has to look at what is really on the end of their fork. It requires a journey to the front of the mirror, with all the lights on, to see who we really are as a nation and how we got to this point. 

George Orwell warned us that who controls the past controls the future. It is only by confronting the truth about how we got to 2019 that we can move forward together. We look forward to exploring the truth about reparations with the rest of America.

SEND YOUR MESSAGE TO CONGRESS in support of H.R. 40

During a lull one afternoon when I was a high school student selling Black Panther Party newspapers on the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., in 1971, I sat down on the curb and opened the tabloid to the 10-point program, “What We Want; What We Believe.” The graphic assertion of “Point Number 3” particularly grabbed me:

“We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules … promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.”

The absence of justice continually flustered me because, even at that young age, I knew that Black people had been kidnapped and brought to this country to labor for free as slaves; stripped of our language, religion, and culture; raped and tortured; and then subjected to a Jim Crow-era of lynchings, police brutality, inferior education, substandard housing, and mediocre health care. I did not know then about the massacres in Rosewood, Florida, or Tulsa, Oklahoma; the merciless experimentations on defenseless Black women devoid of anesthesia that led to modern gynecology; or about the enormous profits from slavery made by corporations, insurance companies, the banking and investment industries, and academic institutions.

But on a psychic level, I could feel in my bones the enslavement era’s inhumane cruelty to Black children — its destruction of kindred ties and its economic exploitation and cultural deprivation. There was an incessant gnawing in my soul for amends and redress. I was passionate about injustice, felt the idea of reparations to be reasonable and fair, and vowed to talk about the concept whenever and wherever I could.  My analysis, however, had not crystallized beyond a check. But just to mouth the word “reparations” was a starting point to its validity. Thus talk about it I did, despite my views being often rejected, ridiculed, or otherwise summarily dismissed.

Standing on the street corner that afternoon nearly five decades ago, little did I realize that I would one day be in the company of leading academics, economists, historians, attorneys, psychiatrists, politicians, and more — domestically and internationally — promoting the right to, and the need for, reparations.

The Fight for Reparations Has a Long History

But that day would be far into the future. 

Despite my advocacy and that of many others during my high school, college, and law school years and beyond, the issue of reparations for descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States was not fashionable, but fringe, and definitely not part of the mainstream popular discourse. Indeed, one would be branded as a militant or a revolutionary (both of which I was), or just plain crazy (which I was not), or in today’s dubious governmental surveillance parlance, a “Black Identity Extremist.”

Indeed, it is almost surreal being amidst all the buzz surrounding reparations today, from universities to talk show pundits and, interestingly, to 2020 Democratic candidates vying for the presidency.

Despite or perhaps because of today’s surge in attention to this longstanding issue, I feel it critical that the populace understands that the demand for reparations in the U.S. for unpaid labor during the enslavement era and post-slavery discrimination is not novel or new. The claim did not drop from the sky with Ta’Nehisi Coates’ brilliant treatise, “The Case for Reparations,” in The Atlantic, or from Randall Robinson’s impassioned book, “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” both of which galvanized the issue in different decades and thrust it into national conversation.

read the full reparations series       

Although there have been hills and valleys in national attention to the issue, there has been no substantial period of time when the call for redress was not passionately voiced. The first formal record of a petition for reparations in the United States was pursued and won by a formerly enslaved woman, Belinda Royall. Professor Ray Winbush’s book, “Belinda’s Petition,” describes a petition she presented to the Massachusetts General Assembly in 1783, requesting a pension from the proceeds of her enslaver’s estate — an estate partly the product of her own uncompensated labor. Belinda’s petition yielded a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings.

Former U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry illuminated the case of Callie House in her book, “My Face Is Black Is True.” Callie, along with Rev. Isaiah Dickerson, headed the first mass reparations movement in the United States, founded in 1898. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association had 600,000 dues-paying members who sought to obtain compensation for slavery from federal agencies.

During the 1920s, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association galvanized hundreds of thousands of Black people seeking repatriation with reparation, proclaiming, “Hand back to us our own civilisation. Hand back to us that which you have robbed and exploited of us … for the last 500 years.” During the 1950s and 1960s, New York’s Queen Mother Audley Moore was perhaps the best-known advocate for reparations. As president of the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, she presented a petition against genocide and for self-determination, land, and reparations to the United Nations in both 1957 and 1959. She was active in every major reparations movement until her death in 1996.

In his 1963 book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” Dr. Martin Luther King proposed a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged,” which emphasized redress for both the historical victimization and exploitation of Blacks as well as their present-day degradation. “The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of labor on one human being by another,” he wrote. “This law should be made to apply for the American Negroes.”        

After the Black Panther Party’s stance in 1966, the Republic of New Afrika proclaimed in its 1968 “Declaration of Independence:”

“We claim no rights from the United States of America other than those rights belonging to people anywhere in the world, and these include the right to damages, reparations, due us from the grievous injuries sustained by ourselves and our ancestors by reason of United States’ lawlessness.” 

In April 1969, the “Black Manifesto” was adopted at a National Black Economic Development Conference. The manifesto, presented by civil rights activist James Forman, included a demand that white churches and synagogues pay $500 million in reparations to Blacks in the U.S. The amount was based on a calculation of $15 for each of the estimated 20 to 30 million African Americans residing in the U.S. He touted it as only the beginning of the amount owed. The following month, Forman interrupted Sunday service at Riverside Church in New York to announce the reparations demand from the “Black Manifesto.” Notably, several religious institutions did respond with financial donations.

In 1972, the National Black Political Assembly Convention meeting in Gary, Indiana, adopted “The Anti-Depression Program,” an act authorizing the payment of a sum of money in reparations for slavery as well as the creation of a negotiating commission to determine kind, dates, and other details of paying reparations. Consistently, the Nation of Islam’s publications — such as Muhammad Speaks and, later, The Final Call — have demanded that the United States exempt Black people “from all taxation as long as we are deprived of equal justice.”

The Modern-Day Reparations Movement

But it was the end of the 20th century that brought broad national attention to the call for reparations for people of African descent in the United States with the founding of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA). I was proud to be a founding member of NCOBRA at the historic gathering on Sept. 26, 1987, which brought together diverse groups under one umbrella, from the Republic of New Afrika to the National Conference of Black Lawyers. For its first decade in existence, I served as chair of NCOBRA’s legislative commission.

Since the creation of NCOBRA, the demand for reparations in the United States substantially leaped forward, generating what I’ve dubbed “The Modern-Day Reparations Movement.” Inspired by and organized on the heels of the passage of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted reparations to Japanese-Americans for their unjust incarceration during World War II, NCOBRA reinvigorated the demand for reparations for African Americans and broadened the concept through public education, accompanied by legislative and litigation-based initiatives.

The 1988 Civil Liberties Act authorized the payment of $20,000 to each Japanese-American detention-camp survivor, a trust fund to be used to educate Americans about the suffering of the Japanese-Americans, a formal apology from the U.S. government, and a pardon for all those convicted of resisting detention camp incarceration.

It is a sad commentary that the U.S. government has not taken formal responsibility for its role in the enslavement or post-slavery apartheid segregation of millions of Blacks. It has never attempted reparations to African Americans for the extortion of labor for many generations, deprivation of their freedom and human rights, and terrorism against them throughout the centuries. The U.S. Senate and House did pass symbolic resolutions apologizing for slavery and segregation. However, the 2009 bill passed by the Senate contained a disclaimer that those seeking reparations or cash compensation could not use the apology to support a legal claim against the U.S.

Since the introduction of H.R. 40, several state legislatures and scores of city councils across the country have passed reparations-type legislation or resolutions endorsing H.R. 40. In 1990, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a resolution in support of reparations. In 1991, legislation was introduced in the Massachusetts Senate providing for the payment of reparations for slavery, the slave trade, and individual discrimination against the people of African descent born or residing in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1994, the Florida Legislature paid $150,000 to each of the 11 survivors of the 1923 Rosewood Race Massacre and created a scholarship fund for students of color.

In 2001, the California State Assembly passed a resolution in support of reparations. After a four-year investigation, the Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act was enacted in 2001. Oklahoma legislators settled on a scholarship fund and memorial to commemorate the June 1921 massacre that left as many as 300 Black people dead and 40 square blocks of exclusively Black businesses, homes, and schools obliterated. That same year, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly to create a “Commission to Quantify the Debt Owed to African Americans.”

Bills are also pending within several other state legislatures, but the reparations movement isn’t just targeting state houses. City councils in the states of Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and the District of Columbia have all passed resolutions in support of H.R. 40.

Reparations advocates have also challenged corporations who benefited from the profits made from trafficking in human beings during the enslavement era. Countless companies and industries benefited and were enriched from the profits made as a result of chattel slavery.

There are companies that sold life insurance policies on the lives of enslaved persons, such as Aetna, New York Life, and AIG. Financial gains were accrued by the predecessor banks of financial giants like J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Others with documented ties to slavery included railroads like Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific, and Canadian National. Newspaper publishers that assisted in the capture of runaway persons include Knight Rider, Tribune, E.W. Scripps, and Gannett. The financial backers of many of the country’s top universities were wealthy slave owners, and it has been disclosed that the reason Georgetown University stands today is because the Jesuits who ran the college used profits from the sale of Black people to continue its operation.

Survivors of torture by Chicago police received an unprecedented compensatory package based on a reparations ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council in 2015. Numerous civil and human rights organizations, religious groups, professional organizations, civic groups, sororities, fraternities, and labor unions have also officially endorsed the call for reparations. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table released its platform, which prominently featured the issue of reparations.

The role that governments, corporations, industries, religious institutions, educational institutions, private estates, and other entities played in supporting the institution of slavery and its vestiges are roles that can no longer be ignored, dismissed outright, or swept under the rug. The time is now ripe that their involvement be recognized, examined, discussed, and redressed.

The Demand Deserves Serious Consideration