Reparations for slavery in the United States


Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily by individuals and institutions.
The first recorded case of reparations for slavery in the United States was to former slave Belinda Royall in 1783, in the form of a pension, and since then reparations continue to be proposed. To the present day, no federal reparations bills have been passed. The 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 is the most well known attempt to help newly freed slaves integrate into society and accumulate wealth. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed this order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners.
Reparations have been a recurring idea in the politics of the United States, most recently in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The call for reparations intensified in 2020, amidst the protests against police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, which both kill Black Americans disproportionately. Calls for reparations for racism and discrimination in the US are often made by black communities and authors alongside calls for reparations for slavery. The idea of reparations remains highly controversial, due to questions of how they would be given, how much would be given, who would pay them, and who would receive them.
Forms of reparations which have been proposed in the United States by city, county, state, and national governments or private institutions include: individual monetary payments, settlements, scholarships, waiving of fees, and systemic initiatives to offset injustices, land-based compensation related to independence, apologies and acknowledgements of the injustices, token measures, and the removal of monuments and streets named to slave owners and defenders of slavery.
Since further injustices and discrimination have continued since slavery was outlawed in the US, some black communities and civil rights organizations have called for reparations for those injustices as well as for reparations directly related to slavery. Some suggest that the US prison system, starting with the convict lease system and continuing through the present-day government-owned corporation Federal Prison Industries, is a modern form of legal slavery that still primarily and disproportionately affects black populations and other minorities via the war on drugs and what has been criticized as a school-to-prison pipeline.

US historical context

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.
During the Revolutionary War, Warner Mifflin advocated for restitution for freed ex-slaves as early as 1778, in the form of cash payments, land, and shared crop arrangements. 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. He also quotes an earlier poem, by William North, that refers to "the course of reparation".
Later that year, after Brown's execution, Redpath reported in the first biography of Brown that he was not merely an emancipationist, but a reparation advocate. He believed, not only that the crime of slavery should be abolished, but that reparation should be made for the wrongs that had been done to the slave. What he believed, he practiced. On this occasion , after telling the slaves that they were free, he asked them how much their services had been worth, and—having been answered—proceeded to take property to the amount thus due to the negroes."
Calls for permanent confiscation and redistribution of plantation lands had already been made by Representatives George W. Julian and Thaddeus Stevens, both of the Radical Republican faction.

The Reconstruction period

The arguments surrounding reparations are based on the formal discussion about many different reparations, and actual land reparations received by African Americans which were later taken away. In 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 freed slaves. Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres 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 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 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:
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.