Reparations: a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments, corporations, institutions and families
On June 18, 2019, Stop Police Terror Project-DC hosted “If Not Now, When? A Discussion on Reparations” at the Peace Fellowship Church in Deanwood. One of the speakers was Mélisande Short-Colomb, a descendant of enslaved people who were sold by the Society of Jesus in 1838 to support the bankrupt Georgetown College. Anyone who thinks that reparations for African-Americans is impossible should listen to her story. The video below was shot by Grassroots DC Media Collective member Miheema Goodine.
Event participants agreed that most Americans do not have a clear understanding of reparations or indeed just how lasting and impactful the legacy of slavery has been. For example, if Black people had been paid for their agricultural labor, rather than enslaved, they would have received $6,400,000,000 in wages. Blacks owned 15 million acres of land at the turn of the last century, without reparations. Racist government policies, lack of access to capital and training, has dwindled that number to less than one million acres today. The few facts below, all researched by Stop Police Terror Project organizers, scratch the surface of the history that should be known when considering the issue of reparations.
1862: April 16, slavery is abolished in Washington, D.C., eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. The District of Columbia is also the only place in the United States where slave owners were compensated for having lost their human property. In other words, D.C. paid reparations to slave owners, but not to the slaves themselves.
1865: After The Confederate States of America were defeated in the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, to both “assure the harmony of action in the area of operations” 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 settlers. This is where the term “40 acres & a mule” originates.
Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres in Georgia and South Carolina. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after Lincoln was assassinated, and the land was returned to its previous owners.
1867: Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it was not passed.
1877: 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.
1948: The Japanese-American Claims Act was passed, a law which authorized the settlement of property loss claims by people of Japanese descent who were removed from the Pacific Coast area during World War II.
1968: Founding of the Republic of New Afrika, a Black nationalist group that called for several states in the Deep South to be set aside for the establishment of a Black nation. The RNA demanded that the U.S. government pay $400 billion in reparations to Black people for centuries of systemic oppression during and after slavery.
1974: The U.S. government reached a $10 million out of court settlement with the victims of the Tuskeegee experiment —in which 399 Black men with syphilis were left untreated to study the progression of the disease between 1932 and 1972—and their families, which included both monetary reparations and a promise of lifelong medical treatment for both participants and their immediate families.
1987: Founding of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), a coalition of groups that advocate for reparations for the African diaspora in the United States. They define reparations as “a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments, corporations, institutions and families. Those groups that have been injured have the right to obtain from the government, corporation, institution or family responsible for the injuries that which they need to repair and heal themselves,” and see the reparations issue as one of international human rights.
1988: The Civli Liberties Act of 1988 was passed, a federal law that granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the United States government during World War II.
1989: Michigan Representative John Conyers introduces for the first time H.R. 40, a bill that, if passed, would establish a commission to analyze slavery in the U.S., its impact, and ways to address its lasting affects. This bill was re-introduced multiple times in the intervening years, most recently in January 2019. A hearing on the bill was held on Wednesday June 19, 2019–Juneteenth. A link to the video is at the bottom of this page.
1994: The state of Florida agreed to a reparations package for the Rosewood Massacre of 1923 – where the primarily Black town of Rosewood on the Gulf Coast of Florida was destroyed in an uprising that had been triggered when white men from several nearby towns lynched a Black Rosewood resident because of unsupported accusations that a white woman in the nearby town of Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a Black drifter. The package was supposed to compensate the 11 or so remaining survivors of the incident, those who were forced to flee the town, and for college scholarships primarily aimed at descendants.
