thesis statement on reparations for slavery

Reparations for Slavery

• December 18, 2007
• June 19, 2019

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Introduction

The idea of paying reparations for slavery is not new. However, the decision of the US government in 1988 to apologize to and pay $20,000 to Japanese Americans interned during World War II gave impetus to the discussion of reparations for slavery. The US government has over the past 40 years also reached financial settlements with various Indian tribes, usually over management of Indian lands and as part of court proceedings.

The excerpted statements below present arguments for and against paying reparations for slavery. Neither covers all the arguments made with regard to this issue. Presenting the issue as a debate, we begin with the affirmative position, rather than presenting the statements in chronological order.

Sources: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, June 19, 2019, available at https://judiciary.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=2261 ; Stephan Thernstrom, Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, of the Committee on the Judiciary, House Of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, December 18, 2007 Serial No. 110–63 (Washington DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 2008), available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg39707/pdf/CHRG-110hhrg39707.pdf .

Testimony by Ta-Nehisi Coates, [1] 2019

Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell [2] offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago since “none of us currently are responsible.” This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance—that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties. Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually “responsible for.”

But we are American citizens and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders or the Greatest Generation on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance. And the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance.

It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery. As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of [America],” so that by 1836, “more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States … derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.” [3] 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. The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape, and child trafficking.

Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles— “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror—a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell.

It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement. But the logic of enslavement—of white supremacy—respects no such borders. And the god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs—coup d’états and convict leasing, vagrancy laws and debt peonage, redlining and racist G.I. bills, poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism. [4] We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. [5] He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. [6] He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil rights legislation yesterday—as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation, by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader.

What they know—what this committee must know—is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. [7] And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s “something”—it was 150 years ago. And it was right now. The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family.

Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is of course the shame of this “land of the free” boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share.

The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress. But it is also a question of citizenship. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology [8] for enslavement and reject fair-weather patriotism—to say that a nation is both its credits and its debits, that if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings; that if D-Day matters, so does black Wall Street; that if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. [9] Because the question really is not whether we will be tied to the “somethings” of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.

Testimony by Stephan Thernstrom, [10] 2007

No one doubts the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and everywhere else it existed—including, let us note, Africa, where slavery was widespread long before Europeans first reached its shores. Africans, it should be underscored, played a vital role in both the transatlantic and the equally large Mediterranean slave trades, which could not have existed without their active engagement. . . .

How are Americans today responsible for the evils of slavery long ago? The individuals who profited directly from slavery and might logically be expected to pay back their ill-gotten gains were the owners of slaves who sold the cotton they produced. Those slave-owners—who were a small minority of the population even in the South—are all dead today, of course, and so too are all of their children and just about all of their grandchildren. We can’t confiscate their riches to pay for reparations; much of that wealth in fact went up in smoke as a result of a great civil war over slavery.

Some proponents of reparations, though, attempt to link responsibility for the slavery of the past to present-day Americans by arguing that slavery was primarily responsible for the economic growth that led to our current high standard of living. We all gained economically from slavery, this claim goes, so we all owe restitution to its victims. Some even argue that the United States today would be a Third World nation economically but for slavery.

This is utter nonsense. The Industrial Revolution that began in the northern states in the second third of the nineteenth century launched the economic transformation that accounts for our riches today. Although slavery made many slaveowners wealthy in the antebellum years, it actually retarded our long-term economic growth. It was responsible for the backward, one-crop cotton economy that hung on in southern states for many decades after the Civil War and made the South by far the poorest region of the nation until after World War Two. The backward South was a serious drag on the national economy for close to a century; its initial dependence upon slavery put it into a developmental dead-end. We would likely enjoy a higher, not a lower, living standard today if the South had never developed a slave-based plantation economy. Americans today are not the beneficiaries of the exploitative labor system of the South in the antebellum years—nor, naturally, can they be considered responsible for it. . . .

This bill assumes that the social problems that afflict African Americans today should be understood as having been caused by slavery. The case for reparations rests upon this premise, but supporting evidence is woefully lacking. . . .

The principal source of black poverty today, for example, is African American family structure. One-paycheck families (or zero-paycheck families who are dependent upon public assistance) are far more likely to fall into poverty than two-parent, two paycheck families. Blaming African-American out-of-wedlock births and absent fathers upon an institution that disappeared 142 years ago makes little sense. This problem, after all, is much worse in 2007 than it was 1965, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his controversial report on black family structure. [11] The more we move back in time towards the days of slavery, the lower the rate of fatherless families among African Americans. If slavery were the explanation of this dysfunctional family pattern, we would see much higher rates a century ago than today.

Similarly, the average black seventeen-year-old has reading and math skills equal to those of whites and Asians in the 8th grade, a glaring disparity that is the single most important reason for persistent economic inequality. Over the past four decades, this disturbing achievement gap narrowed considerably, then widened enough to wipe out the previous gains, and then narrowed again. Slavery could certainly not be the cause; with the passage of each year its influence should be weaker.

. . .The current black population includes large numbers of people born in the West Indies or Africa, whose ancestors never experienced slavery in the U.S. but who may have married persons whose ancestors had. Do they get full or only partial reparations payments? What about the small but rapidly growing group of people with one white and one black parent? Would being of mixed race cut their claim by 50 percent? . . .

Finally, I would urge the members of this subcommittee and the House of Representatives as a whole to ponder carefully the message that will be conveyed by the passage of this bill. “When you are behind in a footrace,’’ the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1963, ‘‘the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he’s tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil.” [12] Dr. King’s words reflect an important tradition of self-reliance that has had eloquent advocates in the black community: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, [13] and W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. All were saying, in their different ways, that black people were not the helpless pawns of history who could do nothing to better their lives until America owned up to its historical sins and offered them a generous financial settlement. Their point is as important today as ever.

This committee is now considering a measure that delivers quite a different message: “If you’re having trouble with your homework, don’t sweat it. It’s not your fault. You had ancestors who toiled as slaves in Alabama before the Civil War, and what they experienced so long ago means that you naturally will find it hard to master differential equations and compound sentences. You have been damaged by American history, and are a victim. Why burn the midnight oil? You won’t have a fair chance of getting ahead in life unless you are able to collect damages for the wrongs that were inflicted on your great, great grandparents.” I can’t think of a worse message to send to African American youths. The past is past, and nothing Congress or anyone else can do can change it. . . .

In sum, this proposed legislation seems to me profoundly misguided. The great Civil Rights Act of 1964 [14] protected all Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It rested upon the powerful universal principle that every American is entitled to fair and equal treatment as an individual. The concept of reparations is a radical and regrettable departure from that sound principle.

• 1. Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975– ) is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
• 2. Addison Mitchell McConnell (1942– ) is a Republican Senator from Kentucky.
• 3. Baptist is the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
• 4. Convict leasing is the use of prisoners for work outside the prison; debt peonage is compelled work to pay off a debt; redlining is the practice of restricting the provision of the financial services needed for home ownership to certain geographic areas based on race. The G.I. Bill (The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944) provided various financial benefits to those who had served during World War II. The bill was administered in a way that discriminated against African Americans.
• 5. George Stinney, Jr. (1929–1944) was convicted of killing two white girls and executed by electric chair. In 2014, a court overturned his conviction because he had not received a fair trial.
• 6. To Secure These Rights. Isaac Woodard (1919–1992), who was on his way home in his uniform, was beaten and blinded by a police officer because he had argued with a white bus driver.
• 7. The term “Jim Crow” refers to laws that discriminated against African Americans from the late nineteenth century to 1964, when the Civil Rights Act of that year outlawed them.
• 8. H.R. 40 is a bill to establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans. Representative John Conyers (1929–2019) first introduced the bill in 1989 and introduced it subsequently every year. It continues to be introduced annually.
• 9. Most historians accept that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, who was his slave; “black Wall Street” refers to an area of Tulsa, OK, famous in the early 20th century for its concentration of African American businesses, destroyed in the Tulsa race riot of 1921; Fort Pillow was the site of a massacre of African American troops and their white officers by Confederate forces under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, later one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.
• 10. Stephan Thernstrom (1934– ) is a Professor at Harvard University and has written about ethnic groups and race in America.
• 11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family
• 12. Apparently a reference to a speech King gave in Chicago during the school boycott October 22, 1963.
• 13. Booker T. Washington, The Atlanta Exposition Address
• 14. The Civil Rights Act , 1964.

Morse v. Frederick

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Why we need reparations for Black Americans

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Rashawn ray and rashawn ray senior fellow - governance studies @sociologistray andre m. perry andre m. perry senior fellow - brookings metro @andreperryedu.

April 15, 2020

• 14 min read

Central to the idea of the American Dream lies an assumption that we all have an equal opportunity to generate the kind of wealth that brings meaning to the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” boldly penned in the Declaration of Independence. The American Dream portends that with hard work, a person can own a home, start a business, and grow a nest egg for generations to draw upon. This belief, however, has been defied repeatedly by the United States government’s own decrees that denied wealth-building opportunities to Black Americans.

Today, the average white family has roughly 10 times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. White college graduates have over seven times more wealth than Black college graduates. Making the American Dream an equitable reality demands the same U.S. government that denied wealth to Blacks restore that deferred wealth through reparations to their descendants in the form of individual cash payments in the amount that will close the Black-white racial wealth divide. Additionally, reparations should come in the form of wealth-building opportunities that address racial disparities in education, housing, and business ownership.

In 1860, over $3 billion was the value assigned to the physical bodies of enslaved Black Americans to be used as free labor and production. This was more money than was invested in factories and railroads combined. In 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Blacks was $250 million. Slavery enriched white slave owners and their descendants, and it fueled the country’s economy while suppressing wealth building for the enslaved. The United States has yet to compensate descendants of enslaved Black Americans for their labor. Nor has the federal government atoned for the lost equity from anti-Black housing, transportation, and business policy. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, anti-Black practices like redlining, and other discriminatory public policies in criminal justice and education have robbed Black Americans of the opportunities to build wealth (defined as assets minus debt) afforded to their white peers.

Bootstrapping isn’t going to erase racial wealth divides. As economists William “Sandy” Darity and Darrick Hamilton point out in their 2018 report , What We Get Wrong About Closing the Wealth Gap , “Blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by changing their individual behavior –i.e. by assuming more ‘personal responsibility’ or acquiring the portfolio management insights associated with ‘[financial] literacy.’” In fact, white high school dropouts have more wealth than Black college graduates . Moreover, the racial wealth gap did not result from a lack of labor. Rather, it came from a lack of financial capital.

Not only do racial wealth disparities reveal fallacies in the American Dream, the financial and social consequences are significant and wide-ranging. Wealth is positively correlated with better health, educational, and economic outcomes. Furthermore, assets from homes, stocks, bonds, and retirement savings provide a financial safety net for the inevitable shocks to the economy and personal finances that happen throughout a person’s lifespan.

Recessions impact everyone, but wealth is distributed quite unevenly in the U.S. The woeful inadequacy of a government-sponsored safety net was made apparent in the wake of economic disasters like the 2008 housing crisis and natural ones like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Those who can draw upon the equity in a home, savings, and securities are able to recover faster after economic downturns than those without wealth. The lack of a social safety net and the racial wealth divide are currently on display amid the COVID-19 crisis. Disparities in access to health care along with inequities in economic policies combine to make Black people more vulnerable to negative consequences than white individuals.

Below, we provide a history of reparations in the United States, missed opportunities to redress the racial wealth gap, and specific details of a viable reparations package for Black Americans.

History of reparations in the United States

Reparations—a system of redress for egregious injustices—are not foreign to the United States. Native Americans have received land and billions of dollars for various benefits and programs for being forcibly exiled from their native lands. For Japanese Americans, $1.5 billion was paid to those who were interned during World War II . Additionally, the United States, via the Marshall Plan , helped to ensure that Jews received reparations for the Holocaust, including making various investments over time. In 1952, West Germany agreed to pay 3.45 billion Deutsche Marks to Holocaust survivors.

Black Americans are the only group that has not received reparations for state-sanctioned racial discrimination, while slavery afforded some white families the ability to accrue tremendous wealth. And, we must note that American slavery was particularly brutal. About 15 percent of the enslaved shipped from Western Africa died during transport. The enslaved were regularly beaten and lynched for frivolous infractions. Slavery also disrupted families as one in three marriages were split up and one in five children were separated from their parents. The case for reparations can be made on economic, social, and moral grounds. The United States had multiple opportunities to atone for slavery—each a missed chance to make the American Dream a reality—but has yet to undertake significant action.

Missed policy opportunities to atone for slavery with reparations

40 Acres and a Mule

The first major opportunity that the United States had and where it should have atoned for slavery was right after the Civil War. Union leaders including General William Sherman concluded that each Black family should receive 40 acres. Sherman signed Field Order 15 and allocated 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land to Black families. Additionally, some families were to receive mules left over from the war, hence 40 acres and a mule .

Yet, after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Field Order 15 and returned land back to former slave owners. Instead of giving Blacks the means to support themselves, the federal government empowered former enslavers. For example, in Washington D.C., slave owners were actually paid reparations for lost property —the formally enslaved. This practice was also common in nearby states. Many Black Americans with limited work options returned as sharecroppers to till the same land for the very slave owners to whom they were once enslaved. Slave owners not only made money off the chattel enslavement of Black Americans, but they then made money multiple times over off the land that the formerly enslaved had no choice but to work.

The New Deal

There’s never a bad time to do what’s morally right, but the United States has had prime opportunities to atone for slavery. In the 1930s, the United States was reeling from the 1929 stock market crash and was firmly engulfed in the Great Depression. The Franklin Roosevelt administration implemented a series of policies as part of his New Deal legislation, estimated to cost roughly $50 billion then, to catapult the country out of depression. Current estimates price the New Deal at about $50 trillion.

Two particular policies of the New Deal fell short in redressing American’s racial wrongs—the G.I. Bill and Social Security. Though white and Black Americans fought in WWII, Black veterans could not redeem their post-war benefits like their white peers. While the G.I. Bill was mandated federally, it was implemented locally. The presence of racial housing covenants and redlining among local municipalities prohibited Blacks from utilizing federal benefits. White soldiers were afforded the opportunity to build wealth by sending themselves and their children to college and by obtaining housing and small business grants.

Regarding Social Security, two key professions that would have improved equity in America were excluded from the legislation—domestic and farm workers. These omissions effectively excluded 60 percent of Blacks across the U.S. and 75 percent in southern states who worked in these occupations. Roosevelt bargained these exclusionary provisions in the legislation on the backs of Black veterans and workers in order to propel mostly white America out of the Great Depression.

There are other policies and practices that contributed to racial wealth gap. Government-sanctioned discrimination related to the 1862 Homestead Act, redlining, restrictive covenants, and convict leasing blocked Blacks from the ability to gain wealth at similar rates as whites. Separate from slavery, damages should be awarded to Black people who were harmed by these policies and practices.

Reparations for slavery and anti-Black policies

We know the monetary value that was placed on enslaved Blacks and the productivity of their labor, as well as the amount of the racial wealth gap. We’ve seen other groups receive restitutions while the federal government pulled back reparations for Black Americans. Accordingly, if we want to close the racial wealth gap and live up to our moral creed to protect “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” a federal reparations package for Black Americans is in order. This package should include individual and collective public benefits that simultaneously builds wealth and eliminates debt among Black citizens. We assert that it should be similar to the Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act, which was recently heard before the Maryland General Assembly where Ray testified on its behalf . The Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act aims to atone for slavery and its legacy by addressing education, homeownership, and business ownership barriers.

Individual payments for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

The U.S. government owes lost wages as well as damages to the people it helped enslave. In addition to the lost wages, the accumulative amount of restitution for individuals should eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently exists. According to the Federal Reserve’s  most recent numbers  in 2016, based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, white families had the highest median family wealth at $171,000, compared to Black and Hispanic families, which had $17,600 and $20,700, respectively.

College tuition to 4-year or 2-year colleges and universities for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

People should be able to use the tuition remission to obtain a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s/vocational or technical degree. Tuition should be available for public or private universities. Considering the racial gap in the ability to obtain degrees at private schools, this part of the package will further help to reduce racial disparities by affording more social network access and opportunity structures.

Student loan forgiveness for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Student loan debt continues to be a significant barrier to wealth creation for Black college graduates. Among 25-55 year olds, about 40 percent of Blacks compared to 30 percent of whites have student loan debt . Blacks also have nearly $45,000 of student loan debt compared to about $30,000 for whites. Recent research finds that Blacks are more likely to be allocated unsubsidized loans. Furthermore, graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, compared to Predominately White Institutions, are more likely to receive subprime loans with higher interest rates.

Universities including  Georgetown  and  Princeton  Theological Seminary, which is the second-oldest seminary in the country, are aiming to atone for the fact that the sale of slaves helped to fortify their university endowments and establish them as elite institutions of higher education on a global scale. Descendants of the slaves sold by Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary are now entitled to full rights and benefits bestowed by those universities to obtain degrees across the higher education pipeline. The Virginia state legislature voted for some of its state universities to atone for slavery with reparations.  Other universities, along with state legislatures and the federal government, should follow suit. 

Down payment grants and housing revitalization grants for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Down payment grants will provide Black Americans with some initial equity in their homes relative to mortgage insurance loans. Housing revitalization grants will help Black Americans to refurbish existing homes in neighborhoods that have been neglected due to a lack of government and corporate investments in predominately Black communities. Given recent settlements for predatory lending , low and fixed interest rates as well as property tax caps in areas in which housing prices are significantly devalued should be part of the package. After accounting for factors such as housing quality, neighborhood quality, education, and crime, owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to a whopping $156 billion that homeowners would have received if their homes were priced at market rates, according to Brookings research .

As gentrification occurs, Blacks are typically priced out of neighborhoods they helped to maintain, while the historical and current remnants of redlining and restrictive covenants inhibited investments. Some Black Americans are being forced from their family home of decades because of tax increases as neighborhoods are gentrified. This is an important point because some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates aimed to redress the racial wealth gap by focusing on historically redlined districts. Perry’s research shows that these policies fall short of capturing a large segment of Black Americans.

Business grants for business starting up, business expansion to hire more employees, or purchasing property for descendants of enslaved Black Americans

Black-owned businesses are more likely to be located in predominately Black neighborhoods that need the infrastructure and businesses. However, Black business owners are still less likely to obtain capital from banks to make their businesses successful.

This reparations package for Black Americans is about restoring the wealth that has been extracted from Black people and communities. Still, reparations are all for naught without enforcement of anti-discrimination policies that remove barriers to economic mobility and wealth building. The architecture of the economy must change in order to create an equitable society. The racial wealth gap was created by racist policies. Federal intervention is needed to remove the racism that undergirds those polices. In some respects, the question of who should receive reparations is more controversial than what or how much people should be awarded.

Who should receive reparations?

One key question after deciding what a reparations package should include is who should qualify. In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in U.S. states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages. For instance, a person like Senator Cory Booker whose parents are descendants of slaves would qualify for slavery reparations whereas Senator Kamala Harris (Jamaican immigrant father and Indian immigrant mother) and President Barack Obama (Kenyan immigrant father and white mother) may seek redress for housing and/or education segregation. Sasha and Malia Obama (whose mother is Michelle Robinson Obama, a descendant of enslaved Africans) would qualify.

To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification . Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage. This is how Senator Booker, who first introduced a reparations bill in the Senate, learned that his lineage stemmed from Sierra Leone.

For the descendants of the 12.5 million Blacks who were shipped in chains from Western Africa, “America has a genetic birth defect when it comes to the question of race,” as stated recently by U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries. If America is to atone for this defect, reparations for Black Americans is part of the healing and reconciliation process.

With April 4 marking the fifty-second year since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, we think it is appropriate to end with an oft-forgotten quote from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” that he gave in 1963 in Washington, D.C. This statement is still one of the unfulfilled aspects of this policy-related speech:

We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. … It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

Given the lingering legacy of slavery on the racial wealth gap, the monetary value we know that was placed on enslaved Blacks, the fact that other groups have received reparations, and the fact that Blacks were originally awarded reparations only to have them rescinded provide overwhelming evidence that it is time to pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved Blacks.

Related Content

Read Andre Perry’s new book,  “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities”

Read Rashawn Ray’s testimony   before the Maryland General Assembly on the  Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act.

Watch a  virtual Brookings event  on economic reparations with William “Sandy” Darity.

Listen to Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry discuss their proposal on an episode of  The Brookings Cafeteria  podcast.

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June 15, 2020

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April 7, 2020

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PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review

• Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Introduction: On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

By Anna Kirstine Schirrer

Emergent Conversation 10

A special series of essays, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism

Juneteenth reparations rally to demand reparations from the United States government St. Paul, Minnesota June 19, 2020 About 300 people gathered outside the Minnesota capitol building to demand reparations from the United States government for years of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and violence against black people from police. On May 25, Minneapolis Police officers arrested George Floyd, handcuffed him, then held him down on his stomach while Derek Chauvin put a knee on his neck as Floyd pleaded for breath. George Floyd died soon after. The four officers at the scene have been fired. Derek Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter. By Fibonacci Blue . CC BY 2.0 .

This PoLAR Online series, On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism , engages anthropological and socio-legal scholars to understand the challenges that new reparations movements simultaneously pose and confront. It seeks to contribute to an emergent research program that engages the social worlds that produce and are produced by reparations claims for historical injustices with a focus on slavery, colonialism, segregation, and racial discrimination. On the one hand, the series seeks to encourage scholars working in post-colonial, post-slavery, and settler societies to take seriously histories of structural violence in their scholarly work and to ponder the kinds of reparative demands these histories require of our analytical and theoretical frameworks and ethnographic engagements. On the other hand, this series offers a small overview of the complex legal, moral, and practical circumstances within which questions of reparatory justice emerge. While the series assumes that logics of repair have long histories, it also seeks to confront the stunning absence of ethnographic research on contemporary claims for reparations for slavery and colonialism within the discipline of anthropology.

The anthropology of reparations has principally focused on reparations for international human rights violations in the latter half of the twentieth century (see Dill 2009; Laplante and Theidon 2008; Phillips 2009). The limited anthropological works on reparation claims prior to this period have investigated post-World War II lawsuits and compensation programs in the context of the Japanese Empire (Koga 2013), as well as post-Holocaust Jewish reparations. Susan Slyomovics (2014) considers Holocaust reparations vis-à-vis the German notion of wiedergutmachung , or “to make good again,” problematizing the “monetization of guilt” and the impetus to render money a vehicle for forgiveness. Anthropological studies of reparatory justice and repair in the context of slavery and colonialism remains glaringly absent.

This series builds on Deborah Thomas’s guidance to conceive of reparations as an analytical framework for studying structural lineages of violence emanating from the New World encounter (Thomas 2011). Echoing the recently published article “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn” by Ryan Cecil Jobson and his conversation with PoLAR contributor Kamari Clarke conducted by Lucia Cantero, this series contends with a case for letting anthropology burn by seeking to prioritize political projects of reparations, repair, and abolition in our conceptual and methodical work  (Jobson 2020). By “letting anthropology burn,” Jobson argues that anthropology must abandon liberal suppositions and the universal liberal subject to adopt and practice radical humanism. This series contributes to the project of “letting anthropology burn” by focusing on “political life in the wake of plantations” (Thomas 2019) within the context of transnational legal institutions and practices in the postcolonial aftermath.

The series also highlights a number of pressing questions for exploration. For example, what are the implications of quantifying Black suffering when thinking through international and national reparation programs (Thomas 2011)? And furthermore, what is the relationship between reparatory justice and an abolitionist anthropology (Shange 2019)? Or further still, what is the relationship between claims for reparations and our studies of repair, reparatory justice, and liberal progressive state logics? And what ethical demands does a critical orientation impose on our research?

By including contributors from disciplines beyond anthropology such as economics, law, and public policy, this series confronts limitations within anthropology as a discipline with regards to reparations studies. Research on how to ethnographically conceive of reparations for slavery and colonialism is long overdue; this series is a preliminary attempt to engage multiple disciplines with the histories and politics of repair, and to identify possible directions for ethnographic studies of reparatory justice for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

Contemporary Calls for Reparations

The statue of Colston is pushed into the river Avon. Edward Colston was a slave trader of the late 17th century who played a major role in the development of the city of Bristol, England, on June 7, 2020. Photo by Giulia Spadafora/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Calls for reparations are on the rise in both legal and political venues, nationally and internationally. Internationally, in 2013, the multi-state Caribbean Community (CARICOM) presented a Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice from Western European nation-states.  Reparations are sought for both historical injustices and for ongoing racial harm, in recognition of the present and structuring legacies of these injustices. Reparations claims can be traced genealogically in a number of historical iterations. The historian Ana Araujo (2012), for example, provides a comparative and transnational historiography on reparations for slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, focusing on the central role of Black women in making reparations claims. Araujo shows how continuous demands have been shaped by their historical and social context (Araujo 2012). Danish philosopher and historian Astrid Nonbo Andersen has also documented the formation of a reparations movement in the U.S. Virgin Islands demanding redress from its former colonizer, Denmark, a decade prior to CARICOM making its official demand in 2013.

Claims for reparations in the Caribbean include iterations in Rastafari communities that have advocated for repatriation since the 1930s. Although the focus on relocation to the African continent is a separate, but recognized, issue in the CARICOM reparations program, the term repatriation—while related to reparatory justice—has a distinct set of historical and social meanings and significations (see Barnett 2012; Bedasse 2017; Rowe 1980; ). Other scholars have focused on the long history of the formation of reparations as a social movement within the U.S. Focusing on the history of The National Coalition for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), this scholarship examines a more recent turn to courts and law as instruments of justice, tensions within elite and non-elite Black populations over reparations, and the significance of competing ideologies within social movements for reparations (see Aiyetoro and Davis 2010).

More recently in the U.S., contemporary calls for reparations were already increasing before the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor directed national attention once more toward systemic racial injustices. The U.S. H.R. 40 bill first introduced in 1989, known as the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, was contentiously debated in the summer of 2018 during a congressional hearing. The term reparations was taken up more widely in U.S. domestic politics when Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris tentatively voiced support for reparations to African Americans during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. And more recently, the very week of George Floyd’s murder, Human Rights Watch published a report advocating reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 1921 race massacre. In June 2020, the state of California passed a bill to set up a Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, and in July 2020, the City Council of Asheville in North Carolina voted unanimously in favor of reparations for Black residents. Rather than individual payments based on ancestry, Asheville’s plan is focused on directing public funds toward populations in the city who have been collectively harmed over time by systemic and structural racism.

A number of reparative initiatives have also materialized at universities in North America and the UK. At Georgetown University, US, students voted for taxing themselves to pay descendants of enslaved persons. Working groups and other organizations have made cases for reparations in their respective universities such as “ A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago ” by Reparations at University Chicago Working Group. The University of Glasgow, in Scotland, and the University of the West Indies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing the two universities to working together to found a Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research. Glasgow has committed to raise £20 million as part of this programme of reparative justice. Although not addressing the question of reparatory justice, Columbia University has mapped out its historical relationship to the institution of slavery, and Harvard University has launched a similar mapping initiative.

CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan argues that Western European moral, legal, and political responses to the historical genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples in the region have been inadequate. In the same period, African countries such as Namibia demanded reparations from their former colonizers. Their case was brought to a New York court in 2017.

European governments’ willingness to embrace responsibility for historical injustices (Barkan 2001) is steadily growing and has recently extended to the crown of a former colonizing European nation-state. In late June of this year, the Belgian King Philippe issued a statement expressing his regret for the country’s harrowingly violent colonization of the Congo under the leadership of King Leopold II. Congolese politicians have demand ed that the conversation extend to reparations. The Belgium parliament has subsequently given mandate to a “ special commission ” to examine the country’s colonial occupation of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Similarly, civil society organizations in Suriname have long called for an official apology from the Netherlands, and in February of this year, the former Dutch colonizers announced their consideration of providing an apology to the Caribbean country. There is to date no coordinated effort on behalf of European former colonial powers to respond to CARICOM’s official claim. Importantly, the UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet (OHCHR) declared on June 17 th 2020 in an urgent debate during the 40th Meeting of the 43rd Regular Session Human Rights Council “We need to make amends for centuries of violence and discrimination, including through formal apologies, truth-telling processes, and reparations in various forms”. A reference to the Sustainable Development Goals could indicate a more substantial effort on the part of the UN to advocate for reparations. For now, the High Commissioner’s reference of the term “reparations” within the context of histories of slavery and colonialism is notable.

Although an international framework for reparation claims remains absent, these national and local initiatives indicate a larger global turn to reparatory justice in the early decades of the twenty-first century. While such willingness is welcomed, these new initiatives call for continued and increased scrutiny of the terms on which they are established.

Neither reparative logic nor appeals for mass reparations are new; what is new, however, is the conversation about material reparations occurring within governmental and international organizations, and the proliferation of various reparative rationales across multiple scales. Reparations are no longer considered merely in terms of apologies and other symbolic markers of redress. At this early stage of discussing material reparations at a larger institutional scale, the pieces in this feature are only a beginning for developing and thinking through ethnographically oriented research approaches to reparative justice.

“Clean up the Colonial Mess”

Press conference from the launch of the Centre of Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, in Kingston, Jamaica. From the left Mr. Eric Philips, Chair of the Guyana Reparations Committee, Honorable Olivia Grange Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sports, Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Sir Hilary Beckles, Ghanaian politician Samia Nkrumah and daughter of the the first president of Ghana and Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, Director of the Centre for Reparations Research Verene Shepherd, and Jomo Thomas former Speaker of the House of Assembly of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and representing Prime Minister of the twin islands Ralph Gonsalves.

The CARICOM reparation claim is ideological in its scope. It speaks to the moral imperative of reparatory justice, and it speaks directly to former colonial powers in Western Europe. The CARICOM demands are abundantly clear. Academics such as Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullen (2020) have laid out a blueprint focusing on national reparations for Black Americans in their recent publication From Here to Equality. In contrast, the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan does not provide a blueprint for how to materialize their demands. I think of this indeterminacy as a strategic response to the law of consent in international law, and as a diplomatic gesture to encourage European states to voluntarily participate in dialogue on the matter and on how to resolve it.

“Clean up the colonial mess” is how Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, characterized reparations demands during the press conference at official launch of the Centre for Reparations Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in Kingston, Jamaica. [1] I attended the launch in the fall of 2017 as part of my dissertation research. This phrasing accentuates the historical and practical implications of CARICOM’s comprehensive Ten-Point Reparation Plan.

Reiterating the region’s official commitment during a recent seminar at the Centre for Reparations Research entitled “ From Apology to Action: CARICOM’s call for Reparatory Justice ,” Sir Hilary Beckles opened the meeting by calling for a three-day summit with European governments to “discuss phase two of the independence project.” In the same seminar, Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados reaffirmed her commitment to the regional CARICOM claim. She asserted that colonial powers left the region’s people with the expectation that newly independent governments would right the wrongs of prior colonial administrations, and renewed her call for a Caribbean Marshall Plan. Honorable Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sports, also reaffirmed the government’s commitment to the claim.

Several other leaders from the Anglophone Caribbean have spoken on the issue in recent years. Vice President Ralph Gonsalves, of St Vincent and the Grenadines, who spearheaded an introduction of the claim to CARICOM heads of government, has repeatedly addressed the matter during the UN General Assembly over the last two decades. In November 2019, Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda went beyond the Ten-Point Plan and directly indicted Harvard University School of Law for founding its school with funding from a plantation owner in the twin islands. In 2016, President David Granger, of Guyana, published “Crime without Punishment: The Caribbean Case for Reparative Justice.”

The CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) insists on the twofold predicament of the claim: it is simultaneously an issue of past debt and an issue of future development. By proposing a summit, the CRC is effectively inviting former Western colonial powers to enter a conversation based on the premise that a debt exists and that the region, despite acquiring independence, was left with impossible conditions for development. It is now up to Western European states to mirror nascent U.S. state and private sector efforts in contributing to the organization of a summit and committing to attending.

“ Vicissitudes 3 .” The underwater sculpture “Visissitudes” in Moliniere Bay, Grenada. By SunCat. CC BY 2.0 .

This series emerged through the process of writing my doctoral dissertation focused on how international claims for redress for transatlantic slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean converge on or diverge from national organizations’ claims for land titling in Guyana. In my research we see how multiple, incommensurable claims to redress coexist within the single conceptual language of reparations. This project situates “political life in the wake of plantations” in relation to transnational legal institutions and practices in the postcolonial aftermath (Thomas 2019). It considers the legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. “Political life in the wake of plantations,” in my analytical orientation, encompasses the countries and regions of former colonizers as well. The Caribbean is an interesting point of entry for considering reparations because those in positions of power are themselves descendants of enslaved people. Caribbean nations are Black states seeking the institutional means to assert claims upon white European former colonizers. I investigate a relationship between the politics of post-colonial nation states and the moment at which reparatory justice comes to direct claims.

My research is in conversation with the contributions in the series through a shared concern with how international and national political and legal institutions embodying sovereignty formulate, administer, and adjudicate claims for redress. Read together, our research projects contend with the notion that reparatory justice demands we consider the structural lineages of violence undergirding European democracies, and their contemporary implications for our shared socio-economic and legal lives.

Contributions

Permanent Memorial to Honour Victims of Slavery The “Ark of Return”, the permanent memorial to honour the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, located at the Visitors’ Plaza of UN headquarters in New York. Designed by architect Rodney Leon, it was unveiled on 25 March 2015 . United Nations Photo/Rick Bajornas . CC BY NC ND 2.0 .

We have sought contributions from scholars who have focused directly on questions of reparations in their academic, and sometimes activist, work. Economist Keston Perry’s essay emphasizes international Black solidarity, connecting histories of ecologically extractive colonial slavery and of liberatory pan-Africanist movements to address the increasingly urgent need for climate justice. This approach sheds light on the ethical preoccupations of international reparations claims. By appealing to Black global solidarity, Perry pushes against the tendency to privilege nationally-oriented reparations programs.

Legal scholar Vasuki Nesiah’s essay considers nineteenth-century mixed tribunals, formed to implement slave trade abolition, in light of valorizing histories of human rights and international criminal law. She demonstrates how the history of categorizing humanity in law, and the current international regime’s origins in a racialized world order, actually work to erase those origins from the category of humanity itself. This historical analysis has profound implications for how Black subjects are conceived, or made inconceivable, in international law, and for judicial recognition of reparation claims for slavery and anti-Black racism today.

Drawing on his ethnographic research and a critical interest in the relationship between late liberalism and the twenty-first-century turn to reparatory justice, anthropologist Howard Rechavia-Taylor’s piece examines responses to a reparations case brought by descendants of Namibian genocide victims in a New York City court. Considering liberal common sense ideas about the emancipatory possibilities of international law in relation to slavery and colonialism, Rechavia-Taylor confronts the imaginary of a global liberal legal order and its ideological force.

Explicating the moral imperative of reparations, political scientist Thomas Craemer’s personal essay explores Holocaust reparations calculations to make the case for reparations for slavery. Craemer argues for scaling up per-victim Holocaust reparations to arrive at a would-be monetary amount for slavery reparations. He argues for settling a debt earlier rather than later, since postponement does not diffuse the debt, but rather exponentially compounds it.

Anthropologist and geographer Jovan Scott Lewis contributes a piece examining scamming in Jamaica as an articulation of reparative ethics, drawing from his forthcoming book Scammers Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica . Lewis argues that scamming remedies not only the injury of the colonial encounter but also the postcolonial retreading of the sites of inequality and injustice by newer actors like the United States government, its citizens, and its corporations.

Together, these pieces open a preliminary conversation about social worlds and logics of repair, and their pressing significance for anthropological research on reparations for slavery and colonialism.

We are introducing the series on August 1 st , Emancipation Day in the English-speaking Caribbean, with Keston Perry’s piece on climate reparations. We invite readers to continue their reflection and engagements in the coming weeks as we publish the above essays.

Anna Kirstine Schirrer  is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and a certificate fellow with the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. She is currently curating a PoLAR Online series on the politics of reparations for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Her dissertation project focuses on how international claims for redress for transatlantic slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean converge on or diverge from national organizations’ claims for land titling in Guyana. Anna is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grant from the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Science Programs (Award Abstract #1823901). Her broader research interests are international law, reparations, race, human rights, and postcolonial Western Europe.

[1] Sir Hilary Beckles is also vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies

Works Cited

Aiyetoro, Adjoa and Davis, Adrienne D. 2010. “Historic and Modern Social Movements for Reparations: The National Coalition for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and its Antecedents.” 16 Texas Wesleyan Law Review 16:687; Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-06-08.

Araujo, Ana. 2012. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History . London:  Bloomsbury Academic.

Barnett, Michael (Ed.). 2012. Rastafari in the New Millenium. Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press.

Bedasse, Monique A. 2017. Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the age of Decolonization . Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press.

Barkan, Elazar. 2001. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press.

Dill, Katherine. 2009. “Repairing” Plan de Sánchez: Reparations and the Subjects of History. In Anthropology News . Volume 25. Issue. 4, pp. 25-33. Jobson, Ryan Cecil. 2020. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.”  American Anthropologist 122(2):  259–27.

Koga, Yukiko. 2013. “Accounting for Silence, Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economoy of Legal Redress in China and Japan”. In American Ethnologist. 40(3):  494-507.

Laplante, Lisa J. and Theidon, Kimberly. 2008. “Truth with Consequences: Justice and Reparations in Post-Truth Commission Peru.” Human Rights Quarterly (29)2007:  228-250.

Rowe, Maureen. 1980. “The Woman in Rastafari” in Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture  26(4):  13-21.

Scott, David. 2014. “Preface: Debt, Redress.” Small Axe 18(1) March (43):  vii-x.

Slyomovic, Susan. 2014. How to Accept German Reparations. Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2019. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

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Home > Honors College > Honors Theses > 1565

Honors Theses

A past never past: an analysis of slavery and reparation at the university of mississippi.

Allen Coon Follow

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Undergraduate Thesis

Sociology and Anthropology

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Willa Johnson

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Dissertation/Thesis

The University of Mississippi was built using slaves, but the enslaved and their descendants were willfully denied admission to the university until forced desegregation in 1962. This interdisciplinary study employs a qualitative content analysis of antebellum university board of trustees and faculty minutes to investigate the benefits that slavery conferred to the university and the harms that slavery inflicted upon the campus enslaved. Analysis finds that slavery was a standard operation, that extrajudicial violence against slaves was a campus tradition, and that white supremacy was an institutional ideology at the University of Mississippi. This thesis integrates African American reparations literature with historical scholarship about U.S. colleges and universities’ investments in slave economies. Policy recommendations propose that the University of Mississippi supply slavery reparations by investing in Mississippi’s African American communities; and by educating the descendants of the enslaved, whom the university unjustly impoverished and mistreated.

Recommended Citation

Coon, Allen, "A Past Never Past: An Analysis of Slavery and Reparation at the University of Mississippi" (2018). Honors Theses . 1565. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1565

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Home > Graduate College > Theses > 4157

Masters Theses

A study in the morality of the african american reparation.

Jason L. Moulenbelt

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Master of Arts

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Dr. Michael S. Pritchard

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Dr. Insoo Hyun

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Dr. John Dilworth

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The question that is posed in this thesis is this: Do blacks have a moral claim for reparations for past indiscretions, such as slavery and legalized segregation? A second question dependent on an answer to this first is: If it is decided that blacks do have a claim to reparations, to whom can they make this claim? The first question will be answered through the clarification of the terms compensation and reparation, the exploration of current compensatory programs (such as Affirmative Action) that have claimed reparations as justification for the implementation of compensatory policies, and answering many of the current arguments against reparations. The thesis will conclude that African Americans have a moral claim, and therefore are owed reparations.

The second question will be answered through implementing a synoptic view of history and introducing and defining key concepts such as 'inheritance of wealth,' 'inheritance of racist practices,' and 'community.' This thesis will further conclude that blacks can look to the white community as a whole as well as the government as groups who owe them reparation.

Recommended Citation

Moulenbelt, Jason L., "A Study in the Morality of the African American Reparation" (2002). Masters Theses . 4157. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/4157

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Expert Commentary

Reparations for slavery and racial segregation in America: 7 papers to know

Reparations have been a topic of national discussion since the end of the Civil War. These seven studies can help inform the debate moving forward.

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by Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource July 1, 2020

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The term ‘reparation’ has its origin in Latin, but reached the English language through Old French. There are a number of meanings or shades of meaning associated with this concept. Its line of development is through one of the meanings of Modern English ‘repair’: to restore to good condition, after damage or wear; to set right, or make amends for (loss, wrong, error). This has come from the Latin reparare via Old French reparer . The Late Latin noun reparatio , from the verb reparare , gives rise, via Old French réparation , to Modern English ‘reparation’: the act, or instance of making amends; compensation. – Kimani Nehusi , “ The Meaning of Reparation ,” presented at the 1993 Birmingham Preparatory Reparation Conference.

Uprisings across America since the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody have refocused national media attention on a range of structural inequalities that make Black men 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men; that have historically tanked the value of Black-owned homes; and that have left Black families with about one-tenth the wealth of white families on average, research shows.

Reparations have been part of the national discussion on structural racial inequality since the end of the Civil War. Last spring, several candidates on the Democratic campaign trail for the presidential nomination indicated support for reparations. Presumptive nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden supports studying reparations. President Donald Trump told The Hill last June that reparations were “a very unusual thing,” and that he doesn’t “see it happening.”

Reparations typically refer to federal financial compensation to descendants of U.S. slaves, to provide some measure of “repair” for slavery — and for economic and social segregation, which was legal until the civil rights acts of the 1960s. In a reported essay last week in the New York Times Magazine , Nikole Hannah-Jones delves into academic work detailing the persistent wealth gap between Black and white people in America, stemming from slavery and segregation. She concludes that “the country must finally take seriously what it owes,” to Black Americans.

Here, we feature seven more studies to know on the topic of reparations. These peer-reviewed papers typically address one of two questions: If reparations were to happen, what should the value of reparations be and for which atrocities? And, what has stalled reparation movements in the past?

Since the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865 — except for people convicted of a crime — there have been but a handful of reparations settlements for white violence against Black Americans. Descendants of the 1923 Rosewood racial massacre in Florida, for example, received reparations in 1994 in the form of free state college.

It’s unsettled as to what a federal reparations program might look like. Do reparations mean direct payments to descendants of slaves? Do they mean some billions or trillions of dollars toward government programs aimed at advancing Black wealth? For 30 years, the late Rep. John Conyers of Michigan tried to get Congress to pass a bill to study reparations. But federal legislation for reparations has never come close to happening, so the particulars of a national reparations program have never been hashed out. If federal reparations ever do come to pass, they “must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap,” writes Hannah-Jones, who in May won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for leading the New York Times Magazine’s “ The 1619 Project ,” which explored the legacy of slavery in America.

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, by contrast, argues against cash payments in his 2014 Atlantic essay, “ The Impossibility of Reparations .” Frum writes, “The government of the United States could trace the genealogy of every white family and send a massive bill to the descendants of every slaveholder and every slumlord who did business from 1619 through 1968. It could redistribute that money in a princely lump sum. But that money won’t change unhealthy dietary patterns, or enhance language skills, or teach the habits on which thriving communities are built.”

Americans are divided along racial lines as to whether there should be federal reparations for slavery and segregation. A 2019 Associated Press poll found 15% of white Americans support cash payments, compared with nearly three-quarters of Black Americans. Other recent polls report similar findings .

The studies featured here can help inform the conversation on reparations moving forward — specifically, on considering monetary amounts, why reparations movements have stalled and what a national reparations program might look like. We’ll keep covering what the research says about reparations. If you’re a scholar studying reparations, let us know about your work.

Keep reading to learn more.

From billions to quadrillions: How much for reparations?

Such costs can be found in sociopolitical and economic calculations for the uncompensated and stolen Black labor, the loss of property, the loss of homespace and heritage, forcible rape, lynching, the loss of opportunity, and continued systems and practices of racial capitalism and racial domination. These costs, then, also underscore a myriad of debts the United States owes and that a reparations framework is meant to collect. – Marcus Anthony Hunter , “ Seven Billion Reasons for Reparations .” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, June 2019.

In March 1865, one month before his assassination, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Savings Bank. The federal government created the bank to encourage ex-slaves to save money. White bank leaders traveled the country promoting Freedmen’s in Black communities, promising the bank was a safe place to save. By early 1874, Freedmen’s had 34 branches with $3.3 million in deposits from Black customers, or about $73 million in today’s dollars, according to Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Freedmen’s was also on the verge of failure. Trouble began in 1870, when Congress allowed the bank to start making mortgage and business loans. Most were given to white customers, “an important paradox,” Hunter writes. Half of Freedmen’s 34 branches had large deficits by 1872, due to bad loans that weren’t being repaid. The bank survived a run on deposits that year after rumor spread that money Black people had deposited was being used to finance political campaigns for white politicians. When white officials left the bank, they were replaced by Black employees, “inexperienced in the area of banking and unable to shoulder the burden of restructuring a complex and fragile financial institution,” Hunter writes.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a prominent and trusted Black leader, was put in charge in March 1874. But it was too late for the bank. Congress liquidated Freedmen’s in June. Many Black depositors never got their money back. A quarter century after the bank closed, Congress had repaid 62% of deposits — not depositors. Black people lost trust in banking institutions post-Freedmen’s, according to Hunter, especially banks run by white people.

“Despite professed good intentions, racism was still at play,” Hunter writes. “By lending the money of Black depositors to whites with little to no stake in the bank, the risks inherent in lending and loan repayment were not evenly distributed.” Hunter finds the $3.3 million in deposits at Freedmen’s end, as a share of gross domestic product at the time, comes to about $7.5 billion as a share of GDP today.

Hunter concludes that the fate of Freedmen’s represents but a single episode in American history where black people suffered real financial losses because of actions white people took. The $7.5 billion is money that can be “accounted for and put on the table,” he writes, suggesting that “such funds could be allocated in ways that would go a long way toward addressing issues of intergenerational wealth, access to and affordability of homeownership and higher education, and Black entrepreneurship.”

The decision whether to base reparations on the full amount of the debt, or only part of it, using what estimation method, and, crucially, at what interest rate, is not up to us as researchers, but up to negotiations between the parties involved, the federal government on one hand, and the African American descendant community on the other. – Thomas Craemer , Trevor Smith , Brianna Harrison , Trevon Logan , Wesley Bellamy and William Darity Jr. , “ Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved .” The Review of Black Political Economy , June 2020.

The authors describe several ways to calculate reparations for the 41 million Black people in America, “a rough estimate of current descendants of the enslaved in the United States.” They focus on the gap in net worth between black individuals and white individuals as a reparations yardstick. The gap is about $352,000 on average by their calculation of 2016 U.S. Census data, and “can be viewed as embodying all of the effects of past atrocities: colonial slavery, U.S. slavery, post–Civil War massacres, Jim Crow discrimination, New Deal discrimination, segregation during World War II, post-War discrimination, and post-Civil Rights discrimination.”

Their first reparation calculation is based on land, specifically the “ 40 acres and a mule ” derived from a January 1865 order Union General William Tecumseh Sherman developed in consultation with Black religious leaders from Savannah, Georgia. Some 40,000 former slaves did get land, about 400,000 acres in total, until President Andrew Johnson overturned Sherman’s order that fall. The land was returned to its original plantation owners. Based on a price of $10 per acre in 1865, the authors estimate the value of those 400,000 acres at about $3 trillion in today’s dollars. That comes to roughly $73,000 per descendent of the enslaved. The authors note that the Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres to white settlers, four times the amount promised to ex-slaves. If former slaves had been promised 160 acres, it would equate to about $291,000 per descendent today, failing to cover the wealth gap.

Price-based estimation is another way researchers have calculated reparations in other academic work. The authors note this type of estimation is biased toward the slave owner. It’s based on the value of slave labor — what slave owners gained — rather than what slaves lost. The authors prefer a wage-based estimation of slaves’ billable hours using historical data on what free laborers earned from 1776 to 1860. There were about 423,000 slaves in the U.S. in 1776, and 4 million by 1860.

The authors acknowledge that even if Black people had been free laborers, racism might have depressed their wages, but offer that “discrimination cannot be legitimately used to reduce present value reparations estimates because racial discrimination itself is a historical injustice worthy of compensation.”

They include all 24 hours of a slave’s day as billable in their analysis — double the 12 average daylight working hours. This is because time a slave spent not working wasn’t “free time” in the modern sense. “Nonworking hours were not negotiated between free agents, they were determined based on the owner’s self-interest alone and for the owner’s exclusive benefit,” the authors write.

At a 3% compounded interest rate, the authors’ tally for unpaid slave wages comes to $18.6 trillion — about $454,000 per descendent — outpacing the wealth gap even after subtracting the average per-person debt for all Americans of about $57,000. Compound interest means the authors add 3% to each year of wages never paid to the enslaved, then carry over the total each year. In 1776, for example, slaves worked about 3.7 million hours, according to the authors. At the prevailing wage of two cents an hour, that’s about $64 million unpaid. Adding 3% interest brings the total unpaid for 1776 to about $66 million. The next year, unpaid wages amounted to about $73 million. The authors add the $66 million from 1776 to the $73 million from 1777, then add 3% on top of that — and so on through 1860, the last year for which there were reliable estimates of the size of the slave population.

“It should be mentioned that an interest rate of only 3% is extremely conservative and fails to correct for inflation,” the authors write. At 6% interest, the authors find that “the numbers explode” — to $6.2 quadrillion, or about $151 million per descendent. One trillion has 12 zeroes; one quadrillion has 15.

3 analyses of why reparations efforts have stalled

Ask nearly anyone on the street to define genocide, and you will hear that it is an extermination of a group of people that involves the killing of large number of people. Certainly this would in fact be genocide, but the legal definition of genocide is much more general than that and, in fact, does not actually require that anyone die. Genocide denotes an attempt to prevent a group from exercising an ability to maintain a cultural identity rather than a necessary process of losing one’s biological existence. – Allan Cooper , “ From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse .” Journal of Black Studies , June 2012.

Reparations scholarship often calculates and frames reparations as wages unpaid, or as compensation for liberty taken. As a debt owed, in other words. Same goes for influential popular works — such as the 2001 book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks by Randall Robinson , though the 2014 Atlantic essay “ The Case for Reparations ” by Ta-Nehisi Coates broadened the reparations debate beyond debt.

Allan Cooper, a political science professor at North Carolina Central University, offers that the debt framing has failed to hold water legally, with courts dismissing numerous lawsuits filed since 1915 seeking damages.

(University of Pennsylvania constitutional scholar Mary Frances Berry details that seminal 1915 case in “ Taking the United States to Court: Callie House and the 1915 Cotton Tax Reparations Litigation ,” published in the Journal of African American History in 2018.)

Cooper explains, “U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the descendants of slaves have yet to demonstrate ‘standing’ (they have not demonstrated that the defendants personally injured them) and that these descendants have taken too long to file their claims.”

But there’s another framing that could be more legally persuasive, according to Cooper: slavery as genocide. The idea of American slavery as genocide is not new , but Cooper puts a fine point on it from a legal perspective, based on the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention . The convention codified genocide as an international crime following the genocide of Jewish people by Nazi Germany during World War II. The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including, “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Cooper poses the question of whether a party that committed genocide before the UN convention could be held liable for damages. He points to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which, in the early 2000s, dismissed a claim for $2 billion against the German government from the Herero people in Southern Africa, some 65,000 of whom Germany killed from 1904 to 1907. The court, however, didn’t specifically rule on Germany’s claim that it could not be prosecuted for an act committed before the act became criminal, according to Cooper.

The federal government has already determined, implicitly, that the Jim Crow era of segregation and violence against Black Americans — from roughly the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — was genocidal. The U.S. Senate didn’t ratify the U.N. Genocide Convention for nearly four decades because of objections from racist senators like Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. “These opponents repeatedly claimed that ratification would threaten Jim Crow laws and undermine states’ rights,” Cooper writes. The Senate ratified the convention in 1986, with reservations — namely that lynching, race riots and segregation did not fall under the Senate’s definition of genocide.

“Certainly opponents of the Genocide Convention would not have expended the time and labor to argue against ratification if they did not seriously believe that the Jim Crow policies of the United States constituted a case of genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention,” Cooper writes.

In addition to potential legal standing under international law, framing reparations as compensation for genocide during slavery and the Jim Crow era, rather than as a debt owed, “poses a much more powerful ethical argument,” Cooper writes. “Up until now, the fundamental justification for reparations has been economic: African Americans are owed a debt. Reducing slavery to a cost-benefit analysis connotes that the inherent indignity of being a slave is merely a matter of unfair compensation for labor performed. If this was all it was, then the entire working class of America could demand reparations for their lack of fair pay. But slavery was about much more than economic hardship; slavery related to an assault on the humanity and dignity of African Americans.”

Following the Civil War, Southern whites were in a position to initiate repair with those formerly enslaved. However, they failed to do so; the opportunity was squandered. The possibility for deepening the bond between fellow Americans went deeply awry. – Jeffrey Prager , “ Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations .” Political Psychology , June 2017.

UCLA sociologist Jeffrey Prager draws parallels between personal psychological development and white psychological resistance to reparations for Black Americans.

He writes that “reparation is an essential feature of individual development.” Specifically, the phase of psychological development in which a child grows up and becomes less egocentric and has a “need to make amends to the mother for his or her self-centeredness.” The development completes when the mother forgives the child, according to Prager. The psychoanalytical parallel he makes is that white people, broadly speaking, are like the child — except the child remains self-centered. Black society, therefore, has no opportunity to repair, or to forgive.

“Though they are in every other respect dominant, whites continue to possess an emotionally immature relationship to African Americans,” Prager writes. “In failing to acknowledge or act upon any reparative impulse, whites refuse to concede their omnipotent and self-centered conception of themselves or to accept an external reality where they do not occupy its voracious center.”

Movements that seek reparations against racial injustices must confront historic narratives of events and patterns of repression. These injustices are often legitimated through official narratives that discredit and vilify racial groups. – Chris Messer , Thomas Shriver and Krystal Beamon , “ Official Frames and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921: The Struggle for Reparations .” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , December 2017.

The authors examine how narratives from the news media and government officials can thwart reparations campaigns. They analyzed 124 contemporaneous news articles and 42 government documents about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when a white mob destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood called Greenwood in Tulsa. They also looked at how victims framed the riot based on news reports from The Tulsa World starting in 1997, when Oklahoma established a commission to examine the riot. That creation of the commission revived local news coverage of the riot and the push for reparations.

Messer is an associate professor of psychology at Colorado State University-Pueblo. Shriver is a sociology professor at North Carolina State University. Beamon is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington.

News reports published on May 31, 1921, claimed a Black man, Dick Rowland, assaulted a white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator the day prior. The commonly accepted story now is that Rowland slipped and grabbed Page’s hand. But, that spring evening, hundreds of white Tulsans gathered at the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Further news coverage and government accounts around the time of the Tulsa riot blamed the appearance of small groups of armed Black men at the courthouse for the white mob that subsequently looted, committed arson and murder, and dropped bombs from planes onto Greenwood.

“In the decades following the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, white history books either glossed over the event or attempted to further bolster the official framing of the riot,” the authors write. “Indeed, some history texts suggested that whites had essentially ‘saved’ the Greenwood district from further destruction, protecting its residents and paying for reconstruction of the neighborhood.”

That official framing shifted following scholarly analyses in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly following the 2001 report the Oklahoma government commissioned to detail the facts of the riot — and to capture the voices of victims. Despite these accounts, victims or descendants of victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre never received reparations.

“Our findings have particular relevance for reparations cases, where white elites attempt to defend and legitimate the historic repression in order to avoid culpability,” the authors conclude.

‘Baby bonds’ and direct payments: Reparations in practice

Rather than a race-neutral America, the ideal should be a race-fair America. For that to occur the transmission of racial economic advantage or disadvantage across generations would have to cease. – Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. , “ Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America ?” The Review of Black Political Economy , October 2010.

The authors address the Black-white wealth gap exacerbated by centuries of explicit and implicit oppression, and by the main way that American families acquire intergenerational wealth: inheritance.

“These intra-familial transfers, the primary source of wealth for most Americans with positive net worth, are transfers of blatant non-merit resources,” write Hamilton and Darity Jr. Hamilton is a public affairs professor at The Ohio State University and Darity Jr. is a public policy professor at Duke University. “Why do blacks have vastly less resources to transfer to the next generation?”

For starters, the authors point to the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, along with centuries of Black Americans being systematically barred from loans to buy land, as well as Black property destruction at the hands of white mobs, like in 1921 in Tulsa.

Hamilton and Darity Jr. note that “85% of black and Latino households have a net worth below the median white household,” meaning most, but not all, white households are wealthier than most Black and Latino households. They propose a “baby bond” program that would focus on growing wealth for children in low-income families, regardless of race or ethnicity.

The plan would center on an average $20,000 trust established for every child born into families whose net worth falls below the national median. The authors propose that the trust could go up to $60,000 for families in the lowest wealth quartile. The money would grow at about 2% per year in federally managed accounts, with kids gaining access to their trusts at age 18. Hamilton and Darity Jr. estimate an average yearly cost of about $60 billion. They acknowledge their math doesn’t take into account that baby bonds might incentivize families with low incomes to have more children, but neither does their analysis account for cost savings from federal programs that aim to help Americans with low income that might no longer be necessary.

It’s important to note that Hamilton and Darity Jr. wrote this paper when Barack Obama was president. Many academic researchers and media commentators at the time were talking about a “post-racial” America — an America in which race was no longer a predominant driver of economic and social inequality. As has recently been laid bare, following the killing of George Floyd and subsequent civil rights protest movement , the idea that America had entered a post-racial era was fiction .

Should each eligible African-American receive a check and a letter of apology from the government much like Japanese-Americans received for their internment during World War II? Should there be a trust fund from which eligible African-Americans could apply for business or homebuyer’s grants? Or should every eligible African-American be guaranteed tuition paid in full for college? – William Darity Jr. , Bidisha Lahiri and Dania Frank , “ Reparations for African-Americans as a Transfer Problem: A Cautionary Tale .” Review of Development Economics , April 2010.

The authors explore several hypothetical reparations schemes involving direct payments. Notably, they find a program that incentivizes Black people to spend reparation dollars on goods and services produced by non-Black people would, in fact, increase income for non-Black people while potentially decreasing Black income.

“Both of these results run counter to the goal of closing the racial income gap,” the authors write. Darity Jr. is the Duke public policy professor. Lahiri is an economist at Oklahoma State University and Frank is an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The underlying structural issue, which the authors point out throughout the paper, is that Black people are not proportionately represented as owners or major stakeholders of companies that produce goods and services. (More recent research shows Black-owned small businesses have been shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic at nearly double the rate of overall small business closures.) The takeaway is that any reparations program needs be designed with a holistic approach that considers not only payments themselves, but where that money is likely to be spent, if the goal is to close the income gap.

“We find that reparations payments that provide incentives for Blacks to use the payment toward purchases of goods and services produced by non-Blacks might expand the income gap,” the authors conclude. “Also a reparations payment in the absence of productive capacity owned by Blacks is found to have no final positive impact on black income.”

About The Author

Clark Merrefield

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The Case Against Reparations for Slavery

For true racial justice, let's promote the rule of law, deregulate the labor market, and embrace the charter school movement.

In the most recent issue of  The Atlantic ,  Ta-Nehisi Coates  has created a minor sensation with his impassioned article “ The Case for Reparations .” Coates pulls no punches. Notwithstanding his earlier doubts on the topic, his current position is crystal clear: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” From the point of view of a libertarian who has  written against black reparations  in the past, I shall assess the strengths and weaknesses of his position before turning to his proposed system of reparations.

The Sins of the Past

Coates writes with an urgency that carries his reader. He is at his best when he describes the various outrages of the American past in ways that are immediately accessible to all readers, regardless of race, sex, age, class, or national origin. Ironically, much of his narrative assumes a libertarian premise, even though Coates’s politics are anything but. The central libertarian principle is that every individual has rights against the rest of the world, to whom he or she owes correlative duties. Most vividly, the fundamental obligations are these: refrain from the use or threat of force; refrain from the use of false words to achieve private advantage; and keep your promises to others, just as you expect them to keep their promises to you.

The first and most powerful corollary to these bedrock assumptions is that no individual should ever be made into the slave of another. That position was well understood in ancient Rome, which developed extensive rules governing the institution of slavery. These rules were all creatures of the positive law, i.e. rules handed down by the sovereign. But at the same time, the Romans well understood that this body of positive law was in hopeless conflict with the natural law by which all men and women were free persons with the full capacity to make the decisions to govern their own lives. Thus Justinian’s Institutes  states categorically: “Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, by which one man is made the property of another, contrary to natural right.” No one should ever sugarcoat slavery in America by arguing that it was justified by the moral code of its time. The truth is that slavery always rested on an assertion of naked sovereign power against those persons who, upon capture, were not capable of resisting its demands.

Coates spends an enormous amount of time detailing the brutality of slavery. He then covers the inhumane conditions under Jim Crow that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Sometimes he goes too far. It was not “Mississippi” that killed Emmett Till in 1955; it was a small band of unidentified hooligans whose despicable actions show why the control of violence is always the first task of any decent state. Nor was it just the illicit use of force that defined Jim Crow; it was the systematic disregard of elementary contractual rights that reinforced this vicious form of racial subjugation.

Coates recounts the plight of one Ruth Wells, who had worked to pay off her contract to purchase a home “only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge.” That deliberate breach of contract is in flat violation of libertarian norms. Coates’s ability to pile instance upon instance leaves the shell-shocked reader gasping for breath, because it is a vivid reminder of just how bad things were. One does not have to believe in reparations to recall with horror the sins of the past.

The Folly of Reparations

Considering the evidence Coates presence,a simple question arises: What should be done in response to the many wrongs of the distant and not so distant past? It is here that Coates falters. He is right that slave owners before the Civil War and the champions of Jim Crow afterwards exploited the black persons who lived under these regimes. Coates observes: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all the productive capacity of the United States put together.” The tempting conclusion is that African Americans today should recoup the wealth that has, Coates argues, worked its way down to the current generation of Americans.

Sadly, however, Coates fails to note that those resources were largely consumed by the miscreants who extracted them from the backs of slaves. At most a small sliver of wealth was passed down by inheritance for a generation or two. But none of it was shared gratuitously with the rest of the nation. Both slavery and Jim Crow  hurt  the rest of the population by preventing them from doing business with black workers who held productive jobs. As a general matter, virtually all the wealth that exists in the United States today has been created by the ingenuity of a dizzying array of inventors, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and countless others. No fund of wealth survives the demise of slavery and Jim Crow.

Coates also suffers from acute tunnel vision.  He ignores the contributions of people of all races who fought fiercely against the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. The civil rights movement of the middle of the last century could not have prevailed if white citizens had not supported it. Indeed, many people of all races gave civil rights their passionate all, much like the abolitionists of the century before. Nor does he pay much attention to the extensive affirmative action programs, both public and private, that have gained traction in the post–Civil Rights period.

What Is the Remedy?

Coates is most evasive when discussing a proposed system of reparations. He notes quite properly that “broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” These are indeed fair questions, and yet at no point does he attempt to answer them. He endorses John Conyers proposal to form a Congressional committee to seek out “appropriate remedies” for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation, but offers few clues about its mission.

Nor are there easy analogies at hand. One possibility is to try to design some system based on the model of reparations for the  internment program  of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. But there, the payments were made to specific persons who were direct victims of wrong by the government. No program that seeks to remedy the wrongs of the past 350 years could hope to duplicate that level of precision.

Nor is the analysis of black reparations informed, as Coates suggests, by comparison to the decision of the German government to pay reparations to Israel in 1952 for the unspeakable sins of the Holocaust. Those payments of course could do nothing for the millions of individuals who lost their lives, but they did help the newly-founded Israel to gain strength in the first decade of its life. But the differences between these two cases overwhelm the similarities. Death by lynching in the South deserves emphatic condemnation. But let’s keep the numbers in perspective. We know that “nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were  lynched in the United States  between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.” The Holocaust took nearly  1,700 times  as many lives in a four-year period. For that wrong, the payment to a new state was a sensible if incomplete remedy. But to whom should the payments be made here?

Rather than speaking of reparations, we should consider the many constructive steps that could, and should, be taken right now as part of our ongoing social commitments to black Americans. It is striking that Coates makes no mention of the charter school movement, which is working overtime to give less fortunate children of all races opportunities that would be otherwise denied to them. Nor does he ask how to remove the barriers to entry that progressive legislation has placed in the path of minority workers, including such statutes as the antidiscrimination laws and minimum wage laws that Coates presumably supports. These laws make it more difficult for African Americans to get jobs in today’s labor market. Deregulation, by contrast, knocks down barriers to entry instead of erecting them in the name of greater racial or economic justice. Coates should embrace the libertarian principles that explain the injustices of racism to forge a new set of forward-looking policies.

Instead of considering these prescriptions, Coates  doubles-down on policies with a track-record of failure: What we need, he says, is “a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.” This misguided solution, which resonates with the Obama administration, ignores the economic decline of African Americans and other disadvantaged persons since the president took office. That situation can only be reversed if writers like Coates grasp the intimate connection between the wrongs that they skillfully expose and the remedies that they inartfully promote.

Killings, beatings, rapes, and double-dealing are all wrongs within a libertarian framework. Enforcing the rule of law, voluntary help, and the removal of barriers to entry to the marketplace are libertarian remedies for such wrongs. Once our policymakers and public intellectuals realize this fact, we will come one step closer to undoing the sins of the American past. Confessions of collective guilt and national apologies just won’t cut it. 

View the discussion thread.

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Slavery isn’t just a Southern story. The North benefited from stolen labor.

“The Stolen Wealth of Slavery” traces the financial profits from enslaved labor, which fueled the rise of Northern banking institutions – some of which still exist.  

• By Barbara Spindel Contributor

April 25, 2024

In the years leading up to the Civil War, some of the biggest enslavers in the United States were not Southern plantation owners, as one might expect, but Wall Street bankers. Northern capitalists like James Brown and his brothers provided lines of credit to clients in the South, who offered their plantations – and the enslaved men, women, and children forced to work on them – as collateral. After the Panic of 1837, bankers like the Browns assumed legal possession of these “assets” when planters defaulted on their loans.

Investigative journalist David Montero untangles the economic ties binding the Browns and other Northern business owners to the slaveholders of the South in “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations.” In his searing and meticulous account, the author argues that slavery has been wrongly perceived as a primarily Southern story. While slavery was centered in the South, Montero observes that much of the wealth it created flowed north. 

Those who benefited most from the system of bondage were the men who owned the brokering firms, ships, insurance companies, and banks that turned commodities like cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar into profits. These enterprises, Montero writes, were “at great physical distance from enslaved people themselves yet directly profiting from that enslavement.” 

The author isn’t merely interested in establishing the North’s complicity. Rather, he demonstrates that, in what he calls “the largest money-laundering operation in American history,” Northern business leaders used wealth with roots in slavery to finance legitimate industries. That wealth, he writes, became “the foundations of America’s industrial revolution, a sweeping phase of modernization deeply connected to, though seemingly untouched by, slavery’s chain.” Montero counters the myth that the fortunes created from stolen labor were destroyed during the Civil War.

Because some of the corporate entities seeded with profits from slavery still exist, the book makes a compelling argument for providing some form of restitution to Black communities. The Browns, for instance, who ended up in possession of hundreds of enslaved people, founded corporations that live on as the multibillion-dollar investment banks Alex. Brown and Brown Brothers Harriman.  

The book’s final chapters cover the movement for reparations. Montero profiles activists like attorney Deadria Farmer- Paellmann, who has brought suit against companies with proven links to slavery. Farmer-Paellmann, Montero writes, has “tied corporations to the enormous wealth gap that afflicts African Americans today, arguing that the stolen Black labor that made corporations rich was wealth deprived to Black people and their descendants for generations.” 

To date, JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the only American company that has offered any type of restitution for profiting from slavery: In the mid-19th century, the bank held 13,000 Black people as collateral for loans. In 2005, it pledged $5 million in scholarship money for Black students.

Some of Montero’s claims seem overstated, for instance, calling the 19th-century corporate directors of Wall Street “the most active white nationalists of their era, or of any era, in the history of the United States.” Still, at a time when most Americans oppose reparations, “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery” has undeniable force. It has the potential to change minds both about the historical damage that’s been done and about the role corporations can play in repairing it.

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No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery Argumentative Essay

Introduction, why there should be no paying of reparations to blacks, works cited.

Although more than a century has passed since the government abolished slavery, still its effects are evident in the contemporary America, because of the demand from a section of the American society to give reparations to blacks for the atrocities their ancestors suffered.

Slavery was a practice that was allowed by the law of the historical southern United States, from the time that the Britons colonized America in the 17 th century, until the time of the civil war of 1861-1865, when the practice started diminishing. Although most black slaves suffered under the hands of their white masters, they played a crucial role of making the U.S. to be what it is today, because of their active role in the building of major U.S. cities, and even the white house.

Due to the extreme suffering that the black slaves went through, and the fact that, the U.S. government took a very long time to apologize to the Black community; there has been numerous campaigns to compensate the surviving families of victims of slavery. Generally, reparations campaigns are majorly based on the assumption that, the nonblack taxpayers should pay the blacks a certain amount of compensations, them being the primary heirs of the wealth that their ancestors acquired during slavery.

Yes, no one can deny that black slaves suffered under the tyrannical rule of their white masters, and it is purely wrong that the U.S. government took a very long time to apologize and offer help to then slaves, to ease their suffering. However, why should the present white taxpayers pay for the atrocities committed by their ancestors, some of whom they do not even know? Further, the present America is a mixed race society; hence, tracing the descendants of the black slaves is very challenging activity.

On the other hand, it will be so unfair to impose the burden of paying reparations to one section of the American society, while forgetting that, its only small portion of the historical whites who had slaves; hence, what of those families that never had slaves. (Olson Para. 2-14) Considering these, although every individual acknowledges that slavery made many Blacks to suffer, the government should not offer any reparations to African-Americans, to compensate for the suffering “their” ancestors suffered.

Frankly speaking, most activities of slavery were morally degrading, violated numerous human rights, and caused extreme suffering to the slaves. Therefore, to some extent the claim of paying some reparations to the surviving families of African-American ancestors is correct. However, one thing that most proponents of the Reparation campaign forget is that, slavery was a historical activity that was lawful, and majority of those who the tyrannical treatment of white masters are survived by families of mixed races (whites included).

Therefore, one critical question that most proponents have failed to provide solutions to is; who will the government compensate for the suffering of the historical black community. Historically, not all whites promoted the practice, as there was a group of whites who opposed the practice, for example, the Abolitionists and the Union Army members. Most members of these two groups also suffered under the tyrannical rule of the white masters.

Hence, it will be so unfair to make their generation pay for a practice that their ancestors struggled and lost their lives fighting to be abolished. On the other hand, one thing that most proponents of reparation assume is that, it is only the blacks who lost their lands; hence, the tendency of most of them proposing that, the government should give African-American tracks of lands as compensation.

In making this assumption, most supporters of reparation tend to forge that, the historical slavery injustices were also done to whites, more so those who lived in the fertile Southeastern sections of the colonial U.S. Considering this, allocating some portions of land, will be like repeating what the white oppressors did during the slavery period, because some white families resettled ion their ancestry land.

Further, it is important fro individual to note that, some perpetrators of the practice were blacks themselves (more so the freed slaves) after the civil war; hence, paying a certain portion of the American society will mean that, the government is paying those who promoted the practice, rather than the real suffers (Horowitz 1-2).

In addition to difficulties of identifying the real sufferers of the slavery, there is no practical evidence that links slavery with the current problems that the African-Americans face. Most supporters of the reparation ideology assume that, the current problems facing African-Americans are a result of the historical injustices that individuals in this community faced during the slave trade period.

Yes, this might be right because of the practical evidence of how much African-Americans have struggles to be where they are social, economically, and politically. However, it has been more than a decade since the abolishment of slave trade, and many blacks have rose to high levels of political and economic power, regardless of what their ancestors went through.

Considering this, why should a community endowed with all the necessary resources to better their lives blame their suffering on a practice that ceased to exist over one hundred and fifty years ago? Take for example the West Indian Blacks; this group has endeavored to promote its economic wellbeing, and their efforts have gained good fruits, as most West Indians earn almost the same incomes as their white counterparts.

On the other hand, since the adoption on the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, the American government has dedicated numerous funds to those it considers the disadvantages in the society (where the black community are the majority).

Most of these funds are in form of college bursaries, welfare benefits, and economic stimulus packages (Block 56-68). Therefore, the economic assumption largely lacks a base of expression hence, for fairness purposes; there should no compensations to the black community.

On the other hand, considering the fact that, Reparations are likely to favor certain groups within the American society, this can be very detrimental to the peaceful coexistence of the American people.

That is, considering the fact that, most reparation funds should come from the white taxpayer community, likelihoods of racism increasing are high, as this may make one group to feel oppressed of forced to suffer for mistakes they never committed. One thing that most supporters of the reparation ideology forget to acknowledge is that, some whites and some members of the black community came to the U.S. after slavery had long been abolished (Munford 413-432).

Due to this, one question that always arises is that; which group of whites should pay or contribute to the reparation kitty, and how can it be identified? Therefore promoting this like an ideology can greatly endanger the nature of relationships that exist between the entire American community; hence, the need to do away completely with the reparation ideology.

In conclusion, because of the numerous negative effects associated with the reparation ideology for individuals to accept that, it is not a good idea to give reparations to blacks, as this may lead to more wars between different ethnic groups that make the American continent.

The future of this debate depends on the acceptance of the entire American society to face the real facts about reparation, and accepting the fact that, although it’s a good way of compensating for those who suffered under the tyrannical rule of slave masters, majority of the sufferers are dead and the American community has become more multiracial. Therefore, paying certain communities can be very suicidal, as it is likely to disturb the peace America enjoys.

To deal with the issue appropriately, it is important for the government to formulate restorative justice policies that will promote love, peace, and development in the U.S. Yes it is so hard to reconcile and make all American Groups to be at par, economically, socially, and politically; however, if the government can offer its citizenry enough economic stimulating programs, likelihoods of the gap that exists between the whites and blacks is likely to reduce.

Dwelling in the history of injustice, is as equal as starting racial wars between Americans; hence, the government should instead formulate programs that are acceptable by all Americans. This can be of great help in mending the damaged relationships that exist between different groups of different ethnic backgrounds that make the American continent (Walker 382-390).

Block, Walter. On reparations to Blacks fro slavery. Human Rights Review. 2002. Web.

Horowitz, David. Ten reasons why reparations fro blacks is a bad idea fro blacks and racists too. Front Page Magazine, 2001. Web.

Munford, Clarence. A black perspective for the 21 st century . New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1996. Web.

Olson, Walter. Reparations, R.I.P . T he Street Journal Autumn. 2008. Web.

Walker, Margaret. Restorative and reparations . Journal of Social Philosophy, 37.3 (2006): 377-395. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, March 10). No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery. https://ivypanda.com/essays/no-reparations-for-blacks-for-the-injustice-of-slavery/

"No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery." IvyPanda , 10 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/no-reparations-for-blacks-for-the-injustice-of-slavery/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery'. 10 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery." March 10, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/no-reparations-for-blacks-for-the-injustice-of-slavery/.

1. IvyPanda . "No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery." March 10, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/no-reparations-for-blacks-for-the-injustice-of-slavery/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery." March 10, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/no-reparations-for-blacks-for-the-injustice-of-slavery/.

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Portugal's government rejects paying reparations for colonial, slavery legacy

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Hundreds of helmeted police muscled their way into a central plaza of the University of California at Los Angeles early on Thursday to dismantle a pro-Palestinian protest camp attacked the previous night by pro-Israel supporters.

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Portugal debate over colonial and slavery role resurfaces

T he Portuguese government has said it has no plans to pay reparations for the country's role in transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

The previously dormant debate about the country's role in the slave trade and other colonial-era abuses roared back into life last week after its President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, suggested it should make amends for such "crimes".

But the right-of-centre government - dominated by a party that Mr de Sousa once led - dismissed the idea, while the far-right Chega party is to seek a vote in parliament condemning the president and his comments, which it said "undoubtedly represent a betrayal of the Portuguese people and its History".

It was in a wide-ranging conversation with foreign correspondents that the president was asked whether reparations were due for the slave trade, during which Portuguese ships took millions of people from Africa, mainly to Brazil, where they were forced to work on plantations.

In his response, he did not mention slavery, but said Portugal should take "full responsibility" for its past, citing massacres and looting as abuses for which it could "pay the costs".

Brazil's Minister of Racial Equality, Anielle Franco, demanded "concrete actions" to match these words.

However, on 25 April, at celebrations in Lisbon to mark the 50th anniversary of the coup that ended decades of dictatorship, Mr de Sousa did not return to the subject at an event attended by presidents of the former colonies whose path to independence was eased by the 1974 Revolution. In their own speeches, they described the date as a symbol of freedom; none mentioned reparations.

The government, meanwhile, only issued its statement on Saturday, after the president had expanded on his earlier comments by arguing that development aid and debt forgiveness could help make amends for the colonial past.

Portugal, he said, had an "obligation" to "lead" on this, warning it to avoid the fate of "other countries that... have lost the capacity for dialogue and understanding with their former colonies".

In a terse statement, the government said it "follows the same line" as its predecessors on reparations: "There was and is no process or programme of specific actions for this purpose."

In fact, the minister of culture in the previous, Socialist government had been looking into returning looted items. And the current minister, among whose past roles were director of a national museum whose collection includes items from former colonies, has backed the idea in the past.

Anti-racist groups and far-left parties that have long campaigned on these issues have returned to the fray in recent days. But Portugal's conservative president is making the running.

As he reminded foreign correspondents last week, under the dictatorship his father was governor of Mozambique and then the last minister for the colonies, so Mr de Sousa is well placed to discredit voices on the right who say that colonialism was not so bad, after all.

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Portuguese government rejects president’s suggestion of slavery reparations

President advocated ‘paying the costs’ of colonial-era crimes but government says focus is on deepening international cooperation

The Portuguese government has dismissed suggestions from the country’s president that it should “pay the costs” for slavery and other colonial-era crimes, saying it has no plans for reparations and will instead focus on deepening international cooperation “based on the reconciliation of brotherly peoples”.

Campaigners have long appealed to Portugal to address its legacy as the European country with the longest historical involvement in the slave trade. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, nearly 6 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic on Portuguese vessels.

Those who survived the voyage were enslaved and forced to toil on plantations in the Americas, mostly in Brazil, while Portugal and its institutions profited from their labour.

Last Tuesday, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said the country “takes full responsibility” for the wrongs of the past, and that the country’s crimes, including colonial massacres, had costs.

“We have to pay the costs,” he said. “Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there goods that were looted and not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.”

On Saturday, Rebelo de Sousa said reparations could be made by cancelling the debts of former colonies or introducing credit lines, financial packages or special cooperation programmes. “We cannot put this under the carpet or in a drawer,” he said. “We have an obligation to pilot, to lead this process [of reparations].”

He said the country had to take “responsibility for the bad and good of what happened in the empire and draw consequences”.

Portugal’s new, centre-right coalition government said in a statement to the Portuguese news agency Lusa that it wanted to “deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on the reconciliation of brotherly peoples”.

But it said it had “no process or programme of specific actions” for paying reparations, noting that this line had been followed by previous governments.

It called relations with former colonies “truly excellent” and cited cooperation in areas such as education, language, culture and health, in addition to financial, budgetary and economic cooperation.

The remarks came one year after Rebelo de Sousa said Portugal should apologise and “assume responsibility” for its role in the transatlantic slave trade – although he stopped short of providing concrete details or a full apology.

His latest comments elicited strong criticism from rightwing and far-right parties. Paulo Núncio, the leader of the parliamentary bench of the CDS-Partido Popular, the junior partner in the Democratic Alliance government coalition, said his party “does not need to revisit colonial legacies, reparation duties, which seem imported from outside”.

André Ventura, the leader of the far-right Chega party, went further, calling the president’s behaviour “a betrayal of the country”.

The UN human rights chief last week added his voice to the African and Caribbean countries calling for amends to be made over slavery and colonisation.

“On reparations, we must finally enter a new era,” the high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said at a UN forum on people of African descent. “Governments must step up to show true leadership with genuine commitments to move swiftly from words to action that will adequately address the wrongs of the past.”

Portugal’s colonial era lasted more than five centuries, with Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and some territories in Asia subject to Portuguese rule.

Decolonisation of the African countries and the end of empire in Africa happened months after Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” on 25 April 1974 toppled the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe and ushered in democracy.

Between the 15th and 19th centuries at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped into slavery and forcibly transported long distances by mainly European ships and merchants. European leaders for the most part have sought to steer clear of meaningfully addressing the call for reparations.

When the government of the Netherlands apologised for its role in the transatlantic slave trade in 2022, it said a €200m (£172m) fund to address this past would not be used to compensate descendants but instead spent on initiatives such as education and addressing the present-day impacts of slavery.

Reuters contributed to this report

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Undergrad Fellowship Opportunities at Slavery North

Fellowship Opportunity: UMass Amherst Undergrad Honors

Originally posted on Slavery North , April 24, 2024 · By Dr. Charmaine Nelson

Slavery North Undergraduate Honors Student Research Fellowships

About Slavery North Founded in 2022, Slavery North is a one-of-a kind academic and cultural destination where scholars, thinkers, artists, and cultural producers build community and produce research and cultural outcomes that transform our understanding of the neglected histories of Transatlantic Slavery in Canada and the US North. Slavery North seeks to advance social justice by recuperating and interrogating the complex histories of Transatlantic Slavery and European colonization of the Americas, thereby recovering and centering the cultures, experiences, lives, and resistance of enslaved peoples in Canada and the US North. At the heart of Slavery North is a fellowship program that will welcome national and international students, artists, and scholars, providing them with the space, funding, time, and community to produce transformative research outcomes.

Job Summary Slavery North fellowships are open to UMass Amherst Humanities and Fine Arts Honors students who are writing a thesis or major research paper or creating a major research project. The fellows will actively participate in both the scholarly and social environment of the center. Honors student fellows, with support of Slavery North leadership, will conduct their independent research and create original research/works in one or more of the five mandate areas of Slavery North which include: 1) Canadian Slavery, (2) slavery in the US North, (3) the comparative study of slavery in Canada, the US North, and other northern or temperate regions, (4) the study of the inter-connectedness of slavery in Canada and the US North with Caribbean Slavery, and (5) Black-Indigenous relations in Canadian Slavery or US North Slavery. Furthermore, the research must center on the enslaved and/or adopt an anti-colonial, de-colonial, post-colonial, and/or anti-racist methodology/approach which challenges the nature of European and Euro-American imperialism and colonialism and interrogates the racist logic of the institution of Transatlantic Slavery.

Essential Functions

• Self-directed research and production of original works with the support of Slavery North leadership in one or more of the five core mandate areas of Slavery North as described above.
• Actively participate in the life of Slavery North including working in our shared office space, attending and contributing to Slavery North and relevant UMass Amherst and regional activities.
• Contribute to a culture of conversation, support, and the sharing of ideas, resources, and knowledge.
• Present at least one public paper, exhibition, or workshop on your research project while in residence.
• Provide suitable biographical information for use on Slavery North website and in promotional and outreach materials.

Other Functions Performs other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure) Be enrolled in a UMass Amherst Honors program with a thesis or major research project component in the Humanities or Fine Arts.

Additional Details Honors Student fellows must credit Slavery North Initiative-UMass Amherst in all outcomes derived from their appointment.

All successful fellows will be hired and paid through the Umass student payroll system and are subject to all terms, conditions, and policies of student employment at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This will require a completed I-9 form indicating one is eligible to work in the United States. International students who may be studying on an F-1 visa are eligible, however this appointment will count as a 20 hour per week work obligation and not allow for further employment during periods classes are in session.

Work Schedule Flexible. Honors Student fellows are expected to work in the shared office and actively contribute to the Slavery North community.

Salary Information This is a maximum two-semester non-benefitted fellowship. Fellowships will be awarded according to the following schedule: Rate: $20/hour x 20 hours per week x 16 weeks = $6,400.00 per semester

Fall Semester: beginning September 3, 2024 Spring Semester: beginning January 30, 2025 *Successful applicants may be offered one or both semesters.

Special Instructions to Applicants Please submit the following materials for consideration by June 24, 2024 (Eastern Daylight Time) to:  @email Applications will not be considered complete until all materials are received.

1. Current CV (maximum 3 pages) which addresses education/training, related course work, work experience, awards, scholarships, and grants, event/exhibition/conference organization and participation, extracurricular activities, other creative outcomes, and relevant community contributions and engagement.

2. Project Statement (Maximum 5 pages): Applicants must demonstrate that their entire thesis or creative production, or a significant part thereof, focuses on at least one of the Slavery North Mandate Areas. The project statement must be written in full sentence form and include the following areas:

     a. Page 1: Project Summary (avoid jargon and write for non-specialist audience)

     b. Pages 2-4: Objectives; Context; Importance and Originality; Literature Review; Theoretical and Methodological Approach; Archival or Primary Sources; Impact and Outcomes.

     c. Page 5: Timeline (point form); indicate desired semester(s) for appointment (maximum 2) and plan to complete all or a significant portion of your research.

3. Photographs, Weblinks, or Writing Sample: Five photographs of completed artworks or creative output OR film stills OR link to applicant’s website OR writing sample (maximum 12 pages).

UMass Amherst is committed to a policy of equal opportunity without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, age, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, disability, military status, or genetic information in employment, admission to and participation in academic programs, activities, and services, and the selection of vendors who provide services or products to the University. To fulfill that policy, UMass Amherst is further committed to a program of affirmative action to eliminate or mitigate artificial barriers and to increase opportunities for the recruitment and advancement of qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and covered veterans. It is the policy of the UMass Amherst to comply with the applicable federal and state statutes, rules, and regulations concerning equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Advertised:  Apr 24 2024 Eastern Daylight Time Applications close:  June 24 2024 Eastern Daylight Time

Questions can be directed to:   @email

W301 South College 150 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-9172 [email protected]