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Reparations for slavery
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Borneti Phillipis, an older Black man wearing a colorful striped cap, stands in front of a bright yellow sign reading Reparations Now! at a rally on the National Mall. Draft and Race Riot Slavery in Virginia Trail of Tears Tuskegee Syphilis Study Japanese American Reparations
Interning Japanese Americans
Pres. Barack Obama and Vice Pres. Joe Biden in 2015. Gov. Wes Moore
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Borneti Phillipis, an older Black man wearing a colorful striped cap, stands in front of a bright yellow sign reading Reparations Now! at a rally on the National Mall.
Reparations for slavery. Borneti Phillipis from Waukegan, Illinois, joins hundreds of Black demonstrators for slavery reparations on the National Mall, Washington, D.C., August 17, 2002. 

Reparations for slavery

Should reparations be paid to the descendants of slavery?
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History

Reparations are justice measures (acts of “reparative justice”) designed to acknowledge, repair, or compensate for the lasting social, economic, and psychological effects of grave injustices, including slavery, human rights abuses, and war. The reparations can take many forms, including financial payments, land grants, policy changes, or memorials, commemorations, and official apologies.[1] [46]

The United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights groups reparations into the following categories:

  • Restitution, which should restore the victim to their original situation before the violation occurred, e.g., restoration of liberty, reinstatement of employment, return of property, return to one’s place of residence.
  • Compensation, which should be provided for any economically assessable damage, loss of earnings, loss of property, loss of economic opportunities, moral damages.
  • Rehabilitation, which should include medical and psychological care, legal and social services.
  • Satisfaction, which should include the cessation of continuing violations, truth-seeking, search for the disappeared person or their remains, recovery, reburial of remains, public apologies, judicial and administrative sanctions, memorials, and commemorations.[46]

18th- and 19th-century reparations

Draft and Race Riot
Draft and Race RiotDissatisfaction with the Civil War and the draft and hostility toward African Americans among laboring and immigrant groups led to the four days of rioting in New York City that killed and wounded hundreds, July 13-16, 1863.

Reparations in the United States are nearly as old as the country itself. The earliest examples involved slavery and violence against the Black community. In 1773, Caesar Hendrick of Newburyport, Massachusetts, was awarded £18 in damages “for false imprisonment and restraint in servitude.” In 1783, after 50 years of enslavement, Belinda Sutton was awarded a pension of 15 pounds, 12 shillings, from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1863, during the Civil War, after the four days of draft protests in New York City turned into a race riot targeting the Black community, white merchants raised over $40,000 to care for the injured and repair the damaged property.[54]

One of the most famous acts of reparations was sparked on January 12, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Union General William T. Sherman met with 20 Black American ministers in Savannah, Georgia. Stanton and Sherman asked 12 questions, including, “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.” Appointed spokesperson, Baptist minister, and former enslaved person Garrison Frazier replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor . . . and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. . . . We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” [2] [3]

Slavery in Virginia
Slavery in VirginiaEnslaved people in Virginia, ca. 1862.

Four days later, on January 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 that authorized 400,000 acres of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida to be divided into 40-acre plots and given to newly freed people for their exclusive use. The land had been confiscated by the Union from white slaveholders during the Civil War. Because Sherman later gave orders for the Army to lend mules to the freedmen, the phrase “40 acres and a mule” became popular. [1] [4]

However, shortly after Vice Pres. Andrew Johnson became president following Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, he worked to rescind the order and revert the land back to the white landowners. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had confiscated 850,000 acres of former Confederates’ land. By mid-1867, all but 75,000 acres had been returned to the Confederate owners. [1] [4] [5]

20th-century reparations

Trail of Tears
Trail of TearsThe Trail of Tears, oil on canvas by Robert Lindneux, 1942; the Trail of Tears was the forced relocation during the 1830s of Native Americans in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River; some 100,000 indigenous people were forced from their homes and their land, with some 15,000 of them dying during the journey from starvation, disease, and severe weather.

In 1924, the U.S. Congress passed the Pueblo Lands Act, which settled long-standing land title disputes between the Pueblo people and non-indigenous settlers in New Mexico. The act included the payment of $1,300,000 in reparations to the Pueblo for their lost land. In 1927, the Shoshone were paid $6 million for land illegally seized from them. In 1946, the U.S. Congress created the Indian Claims Commission to hear fraud cases and treaty violation claims against the U.S. government. When the Commission was closed in 1978 (with cases transferred to what became the U.S. Court of Federal Claims), it had adjudicated 546 cases and awarded more than $818 million in damages.[55]

Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Tuskegee Syphilis StudyA U.S. public health worker drawing blood from a man as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study in Macon county, Alabama.

In 1974, $10 million was paid to the surviving participants (and their families) of the notorious “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The United States Public Health Service, in collaboration with the Tuskegee Institute, conducted the study in Macon County, Alabama, between 1932-72 to examine the natural course of untreated syphilis in Black men; the participants were denied penicillin even after it had become the standard cure for the disease. Most of the participants in the study were impoverished sharecroppers who were unaware of the true nature of the experiment or that the government had intentionally withheld effective treatment from them. Of the some 600 Black men who participated in the study (399 of them had the disease, 201 of them did not), 128 of them died of syphilis or its complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had acquired congenital syphilis.[56] [57]

Japanese American Reparations
Japanese American ReparationsU.S. President Ronald Reagan signs the Reparations Bill for Japanese-Americans, on August 10, 1988, in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.

In 1988, Pres. Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which provided $1.2 billion ($20,000 per person) and an apology to each of the approximately 60,000 living Japanese Americans who, because their loyalty to the United States was questioned, had been forcibly relocated to internment camps during World War II. As the president stated,

Yes, the Nation was then at war, struggling for its survival, and it’s not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese-Americans was just that: a mistake. For throughout the war, Japanese-Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States. Indeed, scores of Japanese-Americans volunteered for our Armed Forces. [58] [59]

Interning Japanese Americans
Interning Japanese AmericansListen to Sam Mihara describe how the U.S. government forced Japanese Americans to sell their property before they were forcibly evacuated to internment camps during World War II.

Attached to the legislation was the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act, which offered reparations to the Unangans (Aleuts, who are closely related to Eskimos), some 900 of whom had also been interned following the Japanese invasion of the westernmost islands of Alaska’s Aleutian Chain in 1942. They were held in squalid camps in southeast Alaska for the next three years, and one in ten of them died in the camps. An apology and $12,000 were offered to each of the some 450 living survivors of the camps.[60]

21st-century reparations

Pres. Barack Obama and Vice Pres. Joe Biden in 2015.
Pres. Barack Obama and Vice Pres. Joe Biden in 2015.The pair have questioned the logistics of reparations.

In 2021, President Barack Obama discussed reparations and the political difficulty in issuing them on his podcast with Bruce Springsteen, Renegades: Born in the U.S.A.:

So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes. There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part—not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it—but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves. What I saw during my presidency was the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action . . . all that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program struck me as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counterproductive. [47]

Despite the political headwinds facing the idea of reparations, the city of Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, pushed forward with its own reparations program in 2021, becoming the first American city to actually issue payments. The city program offered up to $25,000 to Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and to their direct descendants. At first, recipients could only use the money for housing costs, but the reparations can now be issued as general cash payments to residents. The city funds the reparations through taxes on real estate and recreational marijuana, a funding method that other cities, such as Cincinnati, have studied for their own reparation programs. [61] [53]

An October 2021 survey by the Gallup Center on Black Voices found 62 percent of American adults believed the federal government had an obligation to reduce the effects of slavery; 37 percent believed the government had no such obligation. Of those who supported government action, 65 percent believed all Black Americans should benefit, while 32 percent believed only the descendants of those enslaved should benefit. [48]

In May 2023, Representative Cori Bush (D-MO) introduced a bill (H. RES. 414) to pay $14 trillion in reparations to Black Americans. “The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people,” she said. “We know that we continue to live under slavery’s vestiges. We know how slavery has perpetuated Jim Crow. We know how slavery’s impacts live on today.” The bill died in the House.[49]

Gov. Wes Moore
Gov. Wes MooreThe Maryland governor vetoed a 2024 bill to study reparations, favoring “continued action” instead.

In December 2023, New York joined California and Illinois in considering statewide reparations. However, in May 2024, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (the country’s only sitting Black governor at the time) vetoed a bill that would have studied reparations, stating: “While I appreciate the work that went into this legislation, I strongly believe now is not the time for another study. Now is the time for continued action that delivers results for the people we serve.” [50] [51]

Pros and Cons at a Glance

PROSCONS
Pro 1: Slavery spurred giant wealth disparities that should be addressed via reparations. Read More.Con 1: No one currently living is responsible for righting the wrongs committed by long-dead slave owners. Read More.
Pro 2: Slavery left Black communities with a health deficit that should be addressed via reparations. Read More.Con 2: Reparations are demeaning to Black Americans and would further divide the country along racial lines. Read More.
Pro 3: There is great government precedent for paying reparations. Read More.Con 3: Reparations would be too expensive and difficult to implement nationally in a fair way. Read More.

Pro Arguments

 (Go to Con Arguments)

Pro 1: Slavery spurred giant wealth disparities that should be addressed via reparations.

The wealth of the United States was largely built on the backs of enslaved people. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and correspondent for The Atlantic, explains,

By 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America: $3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined.[7]

Black Americans were not compensated for their economic contributions, leading to decades of financial struggle. The 2021 U.S. Census showed that Black Americans held about 4.7 percent of U.S. wealth while being 13.6 percent of the population. On average, households with a white, non-Hispanic householder (the person who holds the deed or lease on a dwelling) held 10 times more wealth than those with a Black householder.[9]

William A. Darity, Jr., Duke University economist, and Kirsten Mullen, folklorist, state, “The origins of this gulf in Black and White wealth stem from the immediate aftermath of slavery when a promise made to provide the formerly enslaved with 40 acres in land grants went unmet—while many White Americans were provided substantial ‘hand outs’ (typically 160 acres) of land in the west.” [1]

Experts from the Hamilton Project, the Federal Reserve, and the Brookings Institute add,

Efforts by Black Americans to build wealth . . . have been impeded in a host of ways, beginning with 246 years of chattel slavery and followed by Congressional mismanagement of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (which left 61,144 depositors with losses of nearly $3 million in 1874), the violent massacre decimating Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921 . . . and discriminatory policies throughout the 20th century including the Jim Crow Era’s ‘Black Codes’. . . the GI bill, the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act . . . and redlining. Wealth was taken from these communities before it had the opportunity to grow.[10]

As Darity and Mullen conclude, “Public policy has created the Black-White gulf in wealth, and it will require public policy to eliminate it.” Reparations is one such public policy that should be pursued. [8]

Pro 2: Slavery left Black communities with a health deficit that should be addressed via reparations.

As health policy research scholar Brittney Butler explains,

The health effects of slavery and racism in the U.S has transcended generations and laid the foundation of poor health for Black families in the U.S. . . . The connection between health disparities and racism dates back to slavery. The Slave trade introduced European diseases to African and Indigenous populations, and prior to arriving to these shores, the long journey to North America and the horrible ship conditions increased risk for disease and mortality with the leading cause of death being dysentery. If they survived the treacherous journey, they were forced to live and work under inhumane conditions that further exacerbated their risk for chronic and respiratory diseases. During slavery, white physicians experimented on, exploited and discarded Black bodies under the auspice of advancing medicine . . . once the enslaved people were free, they had minimal access to health care and other basic necessities.[11]

Post-slavery, health disparities continued in terms of differences in access to and care within the health care system, as well as higher levels of disease due to higher rates of exposure and differing life opportunities. Black Americans are more likely to be under-insured or uninsured and less likely to have a primary-care physician. High blood pressure, asthma, strokes, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are more prevalent among Black Americans than white Americans. [12] [13]

Adds Oliver T. Brooks, president of the National Medical Association, “It is known that the social determinants of health (SDoH) play as important a role in a person’s health as genetics or medical treatment. There are broadly six SDoH categories: economic stability, physical environment, education, food community and social content and healthcare systems. African Americans are adversely affected in this arena.” [13]

As Brooks explained during the COVID-19 pandemic, “With poorer housing we cannot generally socially isolate at home each in a different wing of the house; in some instances, there may be six people in a 2-bedroom apartment. We work in types of employment that will not allow us to work from home; going out to work puts one at a higher risk of acquiring the infection. Many of these jobs also do not provide healthcare coverage.” [13]

Reparations could bolster Black American health care while helping to alleviate the underlying social conditions that have contributed to this health disparity.

Pro 3: There is great government precedent for paying reparations.

In 2025, the government of Portland, Oregon, agreed to pay $8.5 million and transfer the ownership of two parcels of land in North Portland to the 26 descendants of Black residents who were forcibly displaced from their Central Albina neighborhood homes and businesses between the 1950s and 1970s. [52]

The U.S. federal government paid reparations to victims of Japanese internment camps via the Japanese-American Claims Act of 1948 ($38 million between 1948 and 1965), and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (a $20,000 payment to each survivor for a total of $1.6 billion by 1998). [14]

Victims of the Tuskegee Study, which infected 399 Black men with syphilis and left them untreated, were paid $10 million in reparations, and they and their families were given lifelong medical care by the U.S. government. [14] [15]

Not only has the U.S. paid reparations to victimized groups, but around 900 Washington, D.C., slaveholders were paid about $23 million in 2020 dollars to free 2,981 enslaved people in April 1862 through the Compensated Emancipation Act in D.C., which Lincoln also tried in several states, where the acts failed. [16] [17]

North Carolina set up a $10 million reparations program for the estimated 7,600 people the state forcibly sterilized between 1929 and 1974. [18]

Virginia paid $25,000 to each of the living survivors of about 8,000 people forcibly sterilized by the state. Florida passed a $2 million reparations plan for victims of the 1923 Rosewood race riot. Chicago passed an ordinance to pay a minimum of $20 million in reparations to victims of police brutality from 1972 to 1991 under police commander John Burge. [14] [19] [20] [21]

As of 2012 the German government had paid $89 billion to victims of the Nazis through a reparations program begun in 1952. The country continues to pay reparations. [22]

In 2003 South Africa paid $85 million in reparations to 19,000 victims of apartheid crimes. [23]

Georgetown University offered reparations to descendants of the 272 enslaved people whom the Jesuits sold in 1838. Students voted for a $27.50 increase in fees to raise about $400,000 per year for a reparations fund. Virginia Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary followed suit, setting aside millions of dollars in slavery reparation funds, and more than 100 colleges and universities have joined Universities Studying Slavery to explore the legacy of slavery and how to address its lasting effects. In 2018 the Society of the Sacred Heart, an organization of Catholic nuns, paid reparations to descendants of people enslaved by the organization. [24] [25]  [26] [27] [28] [29] [6]

In 1998 German electronics company Siemens created a $11.9 million fund for the labor of enslaved people used in World War II, following a similar announcement by German automaker Volkswagen. [30]

With a rich history like this of reparations, there’s no reason why the federal government can’t likewise make amends by paying reparations to the descendants of slavery.

Con Arguments

 (Go to Pro Arguments)

Con 1: No one currently living is responsible for righting the wrongs committed by long-dead slave owners.

Over 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, ending slavery in the United States. The first enslaved African arrived on American soil more than 400 years ago in 1619. The last living survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, Matilda McCrear, who arrived in Alabama in 1860, died in January 1940. [31] [32] [45]

Millennials are the largest living adult age group in the United States. Born in 1981 or later, the some 74 million American millennials would have to go back at least five or six generations to find an enslaved person or slave owner in their lineage, if there were any at all. [33]

Should people so far removed from slavery be held accountable for the damage caused by an admittedly heinous chapter in world history? U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said no: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea. . . . We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president.” [34]

McConnell continued, “I think we’re always a work in progress in this country but no one currently alive was responsible for that and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.” [34]

As pointed out by Steven Greenhut, western region director for R Street Institute, “White Americans whose families arrived after the segregation era will wonder why they must pay for the sins of other people’s ancestors. Instead of solving problems, everyone will fight over money. It will end up only being about the money. This is not how to help a nation reckon with its past.” [35]

Adds journalist Scott Reader, “I don’t believe in collective guilt. I don’t believe all Muslims can be blamed for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that all gun owners are to blame for violence in our cities or that all Americans are responsible for the injustice of slavery.”[36]

Con 2: Reparations are demeaning to Black Americans and would further divide the country along racial lines.

Reparations require the country to put a literal price on the generational traumas of slavery. How much is one enslaved person’s suffering worth to the country? What is the compensation for several generations of enslaved ancestors? Determining those numbers could insult descendants and other Americans alike.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, stated in 2019 testimony before Congress:

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants. [37]

As Hughes continues, “paying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake [because] the people who were owed for slavery are no longer here, and we’re not entitled to collect on their debts. Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims. So the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent.” [37]

Former NFL player Burgess Owens expands on the idea of victimhood:

At the core of the reparation movement is a divisive and demeaning view of both races. It grants to the white race a wicked superiority, treating them as an oppressive people too powerful for black Americans to overcome. It brands blacks as hapless victims devoid of the ability, which every other culture possesses, to assimilate and progress. Neither label is earned. . . . It is their divisive message that marks the black race as forever broken, as a people whose healing comes only through the guilt, pity, profits and benevolence of the white race. [38]

Meanwhile, if reparations were paid, the country’s problems with racial inequality would not be solved and may actually be exacerbated.

“Angry white Americans will say, ‘Stop whining about racism in modern America. Stand for the flag of the country that just sent you a check. We paid you, that’s it and we’re done.’ But we wouldn’t be done, because racism certainly does still exist in America. It’s more subtle than slavery, and it won’t be solved only through legislation because you can’t entirely legislate basic human respect,” explains journalist Ron Chimelis.[39]

Con 3: Reparations would be too expensive and difficult to implement nationally in a fair way.

While the potential cost of reparations is abstract without a definite plan, one estimate figured by William A. Darity, Jr., an economist at Duke University, and Kirsten Mullen, a folklorist, based on Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” order put the 2019 cost at $80,000 per Black American descended from an enslaved person, or approximately $2.6 trillion taxpayer dollars if estimating for about 30 million descendants of enslaved people. That estimate is about 55 percent of the $4.7 trillion U.S. budget for 2019. [40]

Financial writer Brett Arends took another approach to calculations, using the values assigned to generations of those enslaved in 1800, 1830, and 1860 and adding interest, resulting in a $16 trillion price tag for reparations. At the time of this 2019 calculation, the entire U.S. national debt was $22 trillion. [41]

Beyond the financial difficulty of affording reparations, there is the question of who would receive payments. Oprah Winfrey can trace her lineage to 19th-century enslaved people, but she’s worth an estimated $4 billion. Does her net worth negate a reparations payment? [40] [42]

Then there is the trouble of determining who is a descendant of enslaved people. Barack Obama, though African American, does not have Black American ancestry because his father was Kenyan and his American mother was white. Many biracial people or more recent Black immigrants, though not descendants of American enslaved people, may have suffered the societal results of slavery but may not be included in reparations payments.[40]

Further, Ancestry.com notes the unique difficulties of tracing Black American ancestry in the South to prove ancestors were enslaved, including “family members’ name and nickname changes, the passage of enslaved people from one family member to another without a deed of sale, and the dispersion of family members who were sold away from the rest of their families.” [43]

The article continued, “When slaves arrived on American shores, they often were given the surname of their first owner, if they had a surname at all. Others did not take the slave owner’s name until after Emancipation. As former slaves grew accustomed to their freedom in the years after the Civil War, many rejected their former owners’ names and created new surnames for themselves.” Proving one is a definitive ancestor of slavery can be very difficult. [43]

Finally, as Joe Biden asked in 2020, “will it [a reparation program] include Native Americans as well?” According to one estimate, reparations to Indigenous Americans would cost another $35 trillion. [41] [44]

Clearly, simply determining who is eligible for reparations could come with a hefty price tag. Then there’s the cost of paying for the reparations themselves. 

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Discussion questions

  1. Should the federal government pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people? Why or why not?
  2. Should the federal government, state or local governments, or individual businesses offer contrition for slavery in other ways? If so, what ways and why? If not, why?
  3. Would paying reparations to the descendants of those enslaved help or hurt race relations in the United States?
  4. What questions do you have after reading the debate above? Where might you find answers?
  5. What was the most interesting thing you learned from this debate?
  6. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? How and why?. If your thoughts have not changed, explain how and why you better understand the other side of the debate.
  7. Push for the position and policies you support by writing local officials, U.S. senators and representatives, or other people in a position to make the change you champion.

Sources

  1. Jameelah Nasheed, “What are Reparations, How Could They Happen, and Why Do They Matter?” (August 8, 2019), teenvogue.com
  2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule’”pbs.org (accessed March 11, 2026)
  3. Freedmen and Southern Society Project, “Newspaper Account of a Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities” (August 3, 2020), freedmen.umd.edu
  4. Barton Myers, “Sherman’s Field Order No. 15” (June 8, 2017), georgiaencyclopedia.org
  5. Rich Beard, “A Promise Betrayed: Reconstruction Policies Prevented Freedmen from Realizing the American Dream” (June 2017), history.net
  6. University of Virginia, President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, “Universities Studying Slavery” slavery.virginia.edu (accessed March 11, 2026)
  7. The New York Times, “Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations” (June 19, 2019), nytimes.com
  8. William Darity and Kirsten Mullen, “Black Reparations and the Racial Wealth Gap” (June 15, 2020), brookings.edu
  9. Briana Sullivan, et al, “Wealth by Race of Householder” (April 23, 2024), census.gov
  10. Kristen McIntosh et al., “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap” (February 27, 2020), brookings.edu
  11. Brittney Butler, “Reparations as a Tool to Address Health Inequalities for Black Families” (October 18, 2019), racialhealthequality.org
  12. Brian K. Gibbs, “Policies, Practices and Partnerships to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in Health and Health Care” (February 21, 2013), wmich.edu
  13. Oliver T. Brooks, “COVID-19 Underscores Wealth and Health Disparities in the African American Community” (April 8, 2020), nmanet.org
  14. Dylan Matthews, “Six Times Victims Have Received Reparations — Including Four in the US” (May 23, 2014), vox.com
  15. CDC, “The Tuskegee Timeline” (March 2, 2020), cdc.gov
  16. Kali Holloway, “Since Emancipation, the United States Has Refused to Make Reparations for Slavery” (March 23, 2020), thenation.com
  17. Kenneth J. Winkle, “Emancipation in the District of Columbia” civilwardc.org (accessed September 2, 2020)
  18. Kimberly Johnson, “Righting a Wrong: NC to Pay Victims of Forced Sterilization” (August 23, 2013), america.aljazeera.com
  19. Gary Robertson, “Virginia Lawmakers OK Payout to Forced Sterilization Survivors” (February 26, 2015), reuters.com
  20. Adam Yeomans, “Florida Pays Survivors of a 1923 Racist Attack: Rosewood: Blacks Were Run out of Town by a White Mob. At Last, the State Allocates $2 Million in Reparations” (February 12, 1995), latimes.com
  21. Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, “The Reparations Ordinance” chicagotorture.org (accessed September 2, 2020)
  22. Melissa Eddy, “For 60th Year, Germany Honors Duty to Pay Holocaust Victims” (November 17, 2012), nytimes.com
  23. Ginger Thompson, “South Africa to Pay $3,900 to Each Family of Apartheid Victims” (April 16, 2003), nytimes.com
  24. Manisha Sinha, “The Long History of American Slavery Reparations” (September 20, 2019), wsj.com
  25. PR Lockhart, “Georgetown University Plans to Raise $400,000 a Year for Reparations” (October 31, 2019), vox.com
  26. Virginia Theological Seminary, “VTS to Designate $1.7 Million as a Fund to Make Reparations” (September 5, 2019), vts.edu
  27. Harmeet Kaur, “A New Jersey Religious College Will Set aside Nearly $28 Million for Slavery Reparations” (October 26, 2019), cnn.com
  28. Thai Jones, “Slavery Reparations Seem Impossible. In Many Places, They’re already Happening.” (January 31, 2020), washingtonpost.com
  29. Society of the Sacred Heart, “Enslavement” rscj.org (accessed September 2, 2020)
  30. Deidre Berger, “Siemens Follows V.W.’s Lead in Starting Slave Laborers Fund” (September 24, 1998), jta.org
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