Amsterdam News Special Black History Month Reparations.

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Vol. 115 No. 8 | February 22, 2024 - February 28, 2024

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MAKING THE DREAM REAL: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF REPARATIONS IN AMERICA (See story on page 24)

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The Road to Reparations

by HERB BOYD Special to the AmNews When Michigan Rep. John Conyers (1929-2019) introduced HR 40 in 1988, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, reparations gained perhaps its most significant public recognition. This was by no means the first time the idea of retribution for formerly enslaved African Americans had been proposed or demanded. Belinda Royall, also known as Belinda Sutton, proposed the first recorded case of reparations in the U.S. in 1783 as a pension payment. She was enslaved by the Royalls in Massachusetts when she petitioned for three years of back pension. The petition was granted, though it has been disputed as a legiti-

mate challenge to bondage.

A little over a century later, in 1894, another Black woman, Callie House, along with the Rev. Isaiah Dickerson and other associates, began organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, which by 1897 was formally established. Her inspiration for reparations partly came from the failed promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule” at the close of the Civil War and from reading a pamphlet entitled “Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen,” then circulating in Black communities.

She and Rev. Dickerson traveled across the exslave states, announcing their plan for restitution for former Black captives, whose labor had been stolen from them, and recruiting followers.

“We are organizing ourselves as a race of people who feel they have been wronged,” House declared upon co-founding the organization. “The association collected dues to help finance the lobbying effort and a lawsuit that was filed on behalf of those once held in slavery,” Johnita Scott-Obadele wrote in “Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century.”

“Instead of addressing in even a token way the past and ongoing injustices and crimes against Black people,” Scott-Obadele continued, “the various governmental entities spent about twenty years observing and investigating, finding that the leaders had committed no crime. In 1916, mail fraud charges were brought against Mrs. House, and she was convicted and sent to jail.”

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The road to reparations Continued from page 25

A year before she was convicted, the first known reparations lawsuit, Johnson v. MacAdoo, was filed, according to Charles Ogletree (1952-2023) in his book “All Deliberate Speed.” “In Johnson, the plaintiff, Cornelius J. Johnson, sued the U.S. Department of Treasury, claiming the government’s taxation of raw cotton produced by slave labor constituted an unjust enrichment from the labor of African Americans. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him, concluding

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that the government was immune from suit on sovereign immunity grounds.”

In 1963, the indomitable Audley “Queen Mother” Moore (1898-1997) proposed reparations to members of the National Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Observance Committee (NEPCOC) conference in Philadelphia. She called on her audience to “demand reparations for the injuries inflicted upon them by the dominant white nation.” As Ogletree noted, “She was able to gather over one

million signatures from citizens supporting this demand; even more remarkably, she managed to present the signatures to President Kennedy, along with the demand.” She would continue to promote the crusade for reparations at the Black National Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972.

A dramatic event in the reparations movement occurred on May 4, 1969, when James Forman (1928-2005), former chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), interrupted worship at New York City’s Riverside Church with a largely white congregation and presented the Black Manifes-

to demanding $500 million from U.S. churches and synagogues for reparations. He said the money would support a southern land bank, four television networks, and a university. Many of the components of the manifesto had been determined weeks earlier in Detroit at the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC).

“Actually, BEDC received less than $300,000 in reparations by the summer of 1970,” Forman wrote in his book “The Making of Black Revolutionaries.” He said most of the money was funneled to other organizations, and “most of the funds they retained... were invested in a revolutionary publishing house called Black Star Publications.”

During the late 1960s, there was a proliferation of Black Nationalist formations, including the National Black United Front, the Republic of New Afrika, and the Black Workers Congress, each espousing some form of reparations. Several of the more prominent and militant organizations were founded in Detroit, where there was a coterie of passionate activists advocating for reparations: the Rev. JoAnn Watson (1951-2023) and Detroit activist Ray Jenkins (aka “Reparations Ray”) are among the most vocal leaders. It was often suggested that they created the groundswell that put reparations high on Congressman Conyers’s agenda. Of course, by the time the Michigan politician became fervently involved, other influences were at play, particularly the passing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 in support of Japanese Americans who were forced to live in internment camps.

Each surviving Japanese American internee was awarded $20,000 in compensation, with payments beginning in 1990. According to the legislation, their internment was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” as opposed to legitimate security reasons; more than 82,000 received redress checks. The success of Japanese Americans was a source of inspiration for many in the African American reparations movement, believing they were next in line for restitution.

Around the time Japanese Americans were celebrating their achievement, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparation in America (N’COBRA) was formed and held its first town meeting in Washington, D.C. by 1989.

“Members of the organization discussed a draft bill calling for reparations, prepared by Congressman John Conyers, with the congressman’s staff,” Scott-Obadele wrote. “The bill, titled “A Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African Americans Act” and assigned the number H.R. 3745, was first introduced in the House of Representatives in the 101st Congress, November 2, 1989.”

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(The National Archives image) It should be noted that this particular bill did not call for reparations. This is the bill that the Michigan congressman would issue and see tabled each year until his death.

By the 21st century, the reparations movement was hardly noticed, given the scourge of police brutality against Black Americans.

But among the stalwarts joining Conyers would be Randall Robinson (19412023) and his cohort at the TransAfrica Forum, most notably Danny Glover and Bill Fletcher. Robinson’s book “The Debt” gave the reparations movement the treatise it required to open up a new century of struggle and impetus. All it needed now was a living plaintiff to provide the ballast demanded by the court.

Once more, the able and astute Charles Ogletree was equal to the task, along with the highly proficient Johnnie Cochran (1937-2005).

The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 would be the gambit, especially with two elderly witnesses and sible that we still have two standards of victims of the incident ready to testify. justice in America: one for victims of doAs Ogletree put it in his book, “Despite mestic terror perpetrated by individuals compelling evidence that Black Tulsa and one for victims of domestic terror residents were entitled to receive repa- perpetrated by the state? Is it possible rations for their loss of life and property, that we still have different standards of their claims were largely ignored. All we justice depending on the race of the vicneeded were clients.” tims? If there can be no justice for the Ogletree’s team found 60 survivors of victims of the Tulsa Race Riot, there may the Tulsa Massacre who were willing to be little hope for justice in America.” sign onto a lawsuit. They all agreed that The Oklahoma lawsuit disappointed the incident could advance the case for Ogletree and his team, but other cities Jim Crow reparations. Buttressing the and states have waged their campaigns team was attorney Michael Hausfeld, on reparations and restorative compenwho successfully represented Holocaust sation. No matter the dismal outcome victims in lawsuits against Germany and in Tulsa, Ogletree envisioned a promother European nations. Assembling a ising new development in the struggle cadre of clients, forging a support com- for reparations, citing the dedication mittee of outstanding scholars and ac- of Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman. tivists, and an incomparable legal team She worked closely with former Mayor were to no avail. Judge James Ellison of Harold Washington and, by 2005, had the United States District Court for the introduced an ordinance ensuring that Northern District of Oklahoma denied corporations that do business in Chicago the plaintiffs’ claim, even as he validat- disclose their prior connection to slaved the appropriateness of the lawsuit. ery. Almost immediately, her ordinance “What can we say about courts that began to bear fruit when JPMorgan was admit that the state of Oklahoma and forced to admit that two banks affiliated the city of Tulsa helped to destroy an with them had served as banks to planentire community and kill its citizenry tations and thereby helped facilitate the but announce that the survivors cannot slave trade. seek legal redress?” Ogletree asked at Over the last several years there have the close of his chapter on reparations. been some astonishing breakthroughs.

“What can we say about laws that would In the fight for reparations and in part enable the perpetrators of atrocities to two of our series we will explore the escape liability by destroying evidence modern day struggle to turn the dream and denying legal remedies? Is it pos- of reparations into a reality.

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‘40 acres and a mule’: The state of Black reparations today

Still of Emmett Lewis from Netflix’s “Descendant,” directed by Margaret Brown. The film features descendants of enslaved Africans who survived the “Clotilda,” the last-known slave ship to arrive in the U.S. (Contributed by Chavonne Jones)

By ARIAMA C. LONG Amsterdam News Staff, Report for America Corps Member On nights when it’s quiet, do you ever contemplate the rapid heartbeat of a slave in the belly of a ship, the seconds before a Black child was shot by police, the stillness of a prison cell? Make their skin your skin and their fear your fear. The first bold step to repair is empathy. — Ariama C. Long The dream that generations of activists have fought for—to see the United States compensate the victims and descendants of slavery, racial violence, and discrimination—is closer than ever to becoming a reality. These dedicated reparations advocates have toiled for decades at local, state, and federal levels, protecting that promise like an Olympic torch relay runner, each one with the singular understanding that they might not directly see a reward themselves, but others well might. In a few municipalities across the country and in two major states, the race for reparations has already begun.

The activists and elected officials involved who spoke with the Amsterdam News unanimously agreed that acknowledging the harms done to enslaved Africans in the past, righting those continued wrongs in the present, and planning for the future is indeed a marathon and not a sprint.

As of now, New York is the second state in the nation to pass a law establishing a reparations commission that will research the state’s role in perpetuating slavery in the

U.S., study the years of racial discrimination after emancipation, and recommend whether there should be compensation to the descendants of those affected or not.

The law’s main sponsors, Queens Senator James Sanders and Elmont Assemblymember Michaelle C. Solages, have long championed reparations, first introducing the bill in 2017.

Sanders explained that reparation has been a personal passion project for him for the last 30 years, along with colleagues like former Brooklyn Assemblymember Charles Barron. Sanders comes from a military family, was a Marine himself, and is a descendant of American slaves.

“As the son of a sharecropper and my mother a domestic worker, my father from South Carolina, my mother from Alabama, this is legacy” said Sanders. “This is a quotient of back pay. This is a quotient of justice—not a theoretical exercise. This is an attempt to get justice for a lot of people.”

Setting the stage According to Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, founder of the National Black Cultural Information Trust and a reparationist specialist based in the Washington, D.C., area, talks about how reparations and their implementation are not new conversations by any means. She said that Belinda Sutton, an African-born woman who was enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr., petitioned Massachusetts courts for back pay during her time as a slave and won in 1783.

Sutton claimed a pension from the estate of the Royalls throughout her lifetime, and

renewed her claims whenever there were missed payments. Aiwuyor also noted that anti-slavery documents, like David Walker’s Appeal, published in 1829, might not have used the term “reparations” but had the same sentiment.

“I’m not sure when we started using that specific term, but I know that for the longest, we have been seeking the root, which is repair,” said Aiwuyor.

Reparations truly began in a period after the Civil War known as the Reconstruction Era. In fact, this time period is where the phrase “40 acres and a mule” comes from, according to a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) post. General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton spoke with Black ministers in Sa​​ vannah, Georgia, in 1865. The ministers, some free Black men born in slave states, and others who had been recently freed, believed in land redistribution as a way to build wealth. They came up with a government promise of 400,000 acres of land to newly freed slaves, to be governed by themselves in South Carolina; Skidaway Island in Georgia; Florida; and settlements in Texas under a special field order.

All the progress the U.S. made toward reparation ended abruptly when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and former President Andrew Johnson, a “sympathizer with the South,” overturned the special order.

“Slavers attempted to strip our ancestors of their humanity,” said Aiwuyor. “If you don’t believe that the people you are enslaving are actually people or human

beings, you can come to believe that you’re doing them a favor. People now feel like we want something for nothing as their descendants because they still do not view our ancestors as full human beings [who] were taken against their will and endured some of the worst crimes against humanity. The harms that they endured became continued [images] of slavery through law that continue to impact our communities.”

The modern-day struggle According to a report from the Brookings Institution, various Native American tribes have received land and money for being forcibly exiled from their lands, Japanese Americans were paid about $1.5 billion for being interned in camps during World War II, and the U.S. has joined Germany in doling out some reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. However, “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,” according to the Brookings report.

Even by the early 21st century, communities of color were still reeling from the effects of mass incarceration with the legacy of Jim Crow, inequitable sentencing, gun violence, police killings and brutality, displacement, and the fallout from the war on drugs.

It was around this time that a small number of U.S. elected officials started to formally apologize on behalf of their states for the role they played in slavery, such as

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Alabama’s Republican Governor Bob Riley and North Carolina’s Senate in 2007. In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.Res.194, which apologized for the enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans nationwide.

Progress has been made in a small historically Black community in Mobile, Alabama, known as Africatown (Plateau). It was founded by a contingent of Africans who were illegally kidnapped and enslaved

by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy whitemerchant in 1860 who owned a slave ship called the “Clotida,” which is the last known U.S. slave ship from the transatlantic slave trade. The 2019 film “Descendant” documents Africatown’s descendants in their search and historic discovery of the ship, as well as the legacy of the Meaher family.

In the field of study of folklorist Dr. Kern Jackson, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Alabama who co-wrote and co-produced “Descendant,” stories are a powerful tool that informs culture and heritage. Many of the elders from Africatown are “highly organized” and motivated by the stories they’ve told as a collective for the past six generations, Jackson said. For about 100 years, Africatown residents weren’t allowed to speak publicly about the existence of the slave ship, but kept the knowledge of it going as a family secret.

“That’s the biggest weapon,” said Jackson of the importance of passing down stories.

“How [else] do you fight a multinational corporation without financial resources?

How do you fight a political system where the mayor of your city has business interests on the opposite side of the environmental fight?”

Jackson believes reparations are less about “getting something” and more about figuring out ways to have a healthy participatory democracy. He views the current foot traffic in Mobile that coalesced around the “Clotilda” site, the Africatown Heritage House, and the new Africatown Welcome Center that opened in 2023, not as reparations but as “historical tourism” that can generate money for the state.

The fight goes local In 1994, Florida’s state legislature passed House Bill 591 in an attempt to atone for the Rosewood Massacre. The town of Rosewood was a small Black town with approximately 20 families who owned their homes and other property. In 1923, Fannie Taylor, a white woman, claimed that she had been attacked by an unidentified Black man. An angry white mob swiftly sought out Black men in the area, burned down several buildings, slaughtered animals, and chased Black residents into nearby swamps. About 143 survivors and descendants of the massacre received checks from the state in amounts close to $2,000 and had a scholarship fund established for them.

In 2017, then-Councilmember Robin Rue

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Simmons led the charge to pass the first tax-funded reparations program for Black Americans in Evanston, Illinois. Simmons is an Evanston native who experienced racial segregation in her city as a child, which motivated her to become a councilmember as an adult. She soon realized that the symptoms of racism and discrimination she was fighting against didn’t happen in isolation and had to be addressed more broadly. She was particularly inspired by journalist TaNehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” that was published in the Atlantic in 2014.

“I didn’t run on reparations. It was not part of my platform as a candidate. I had never even thought about local reparations

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ly about how to implement a reparations system locally.

In March 2022, Evanston became the first U.S. city to provide reparations to its Black residents, providing $400,000 to 16 eligible Black households and $25,000 toward housing assistance or a downpayment on a property.

“It took a couple of years to get to the payout process and that amount [allocated] because it was attainable and a real first step and one that could be measured,” said Simmons. The process also took that long because council members had to research and legislate for any legalities, penalties, or potential taxes that

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until my time as a local elected leader,” said Simmons. “I called into question, in 2019, that our city pass reparations legislation— one that would move beyond ceremony and a policy one that would be funded. And one that we could operationalize, implement, and begin to measure the outcomes so we could build on it.”

Simmons collaborated with the equity commission to make reparations recommendations before coming to her colleagues in the City Council and introducing a bill, presenting it as a “thoughtful action plan” rather than simply reparations. She spent four years working on getting the ball rolling before leaving politics to become the founder and executive director of FirstRepair, a not-for-profit organization that consults with other entities national-

would take away from a resident’s payout.

She hopes that every community can be inspired by Evanston to make the same repairs to the Black community.

The Black Lives Matter movement reinvigorated the call for reparations of earlier social justice and Civil Rights Movements.

Other cities and states were inspired to revisit the idea of reparations as a long-term solution to the nation’s racial injustices.

The city of Asheville, North Carolina, apologized for its role in slavery, and in June 2022, their City Council approved a budget of $2.1 million to fund reparations initiatives. In Detroit, Michigan, voters passed a ballot initiative in 2021 that established a 13-member Reparations Task Force that is working on recommendations for housing and economic development programs

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that will address historical discrimination against the Black community in Detroit.

“It was decided that for reparations, the people of Greenbelt (Maryland) would have to vote on whether or not there would be a commission. I personally did not expect it to pass and I was really surprised when it did,” said Brooklyn native Dr. Lois Rosado, 80, who sits on a 21-person reparations commission in Greenbelt.

The Greenbelt commission was established in 2021 when voters passed a referendum to review and discuss the issue of reparations for Black and Native Americans in Greenbelt under Mayor Colin Byrd.

Rosado was active in the Civil Rights movement and has a background as an educator. She said there were challenging months spent just finding commissioners to carry out the work. The Greenbelt commission is composed of both Black and white Greenbelt residents with professional backgrounds, such as lawyers and historians.

“I think there’s a problem when people just use the word reparations and [do] not consider the whole gambit,” said Rosado.

She defined reparations as transitional justice, an international legal standard that has five pillars: criminal prosecution to hold accountable those most responsible for any atrocities, truth commissions, addressing harms or reparations, memorialization of the enslaved, and institutional reform. She added that their commission is still in the research phase.

In Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza and the City Council established a reparations commission in 2022. In the same year, Mayor Michelle Wu and the City Council of Boston, Massachusetts, passed an ordinance to start a reparations task force.

New York City, for all its “forward-thinking,” has struggled to establish its own reparations task force, even with powerhouse reparations activists, such as December 12th Movement founder Viola Plummer, leading the charge. In June 2023, Brooklyn Councilmember Farah Louis, who chairs the landmarks committee, introduced a reparations task force bill (Intro 1082) that was partially withdrawn, edited, and reintroduced. Louis’s office said the bill is still active and will be introduced again this year as a package with similar bills on the books. During a reparations session at the annual New York State Association of Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislators (NYSABPRHAL) caucus in Albany, Louis spoke about how “difficult” the journey has been to an auditorium of attendees. “I’m happy that we’re having this conversation and I look forward to seeing the commission on the state side as well as the city side move forward so we can accomplish the goal,” said Louis.

New York City’s Chief Equity Officer and Commissioner Sideya Sherman, See BLACK REPARATIONS TODAY on page 30

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Black reparations today Continued from page 29

who operates in the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice, said the office is also glad to see state and local efforts towards reparations. “The painful legacy of slavery and disenfranchisement of African Americans, perpetuated by both government and private institutions, is a stain on our shared history,” said Sherman. “From a persistent racial wealth gap to health disparities and other inequities, the consequences of slavery have spanned generations. This comes at a significant economic, social, and moral cost to our society, threatening the great promise of our country.”

In 2020, California was the first state to pass legislation (Assembly Bill 3121) to create a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans. The bill was sponsored by then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber from San Diego, and inspired by the conversations about slavery and structural racism that sprang up after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020.

After months of listening sessions statewide and engaging experts, the nine-member task force produced a final report of more than 1,000 pages, referred to as the California Reparations Report. It details the state’s role in slavery, propagating state-sanctioned discrimination and “racial terror” against Black Americans, standards for reparations and who qualifies, and recommendations for policies that the state can implement, such as the California Racial Justice Act of 2020 (RJA).

So far in California, there’s been only minimal movement in actually doling out justice.

For example, Charles and Willa Bruce bought an old beachfront in Los Angeles in 1912 that they called Bruce’s Beach. The couple owned a beachfront hotel that catered to Black travelers and families during the segregation era. Los Angeles County officials forcibly removed and stole land from the Bruces in 1924. After years of campaigning by the family and supporters, the city finally returned the land to descendants of the family in June 2022.

Expanding the fight Areva Martin, a national civil rights attorney and lead counsel for Palm Springs Section 14 Survivors in San Francisco, became engaged in a reparations effort when California started its reparation commision and is excited for New York to follow suit. Section 14 is an area of downtown Palm Springs that used to be predominantly Black and Latino in the late 1950s and 1960s. The city and land developers demolished it with little warning and no compensation for residents.

“One of the areas that became very, very contentious for California was who should qualify for reparations,” Martin said about one of the stumbling blocks the commission faced. “This whole fight over whether you must be a descendant of a slave in the U.S. versus a Black person

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Americans,” said Booker in a statement.“Many of our foundational domestic policies that gave rise to the middle class systematically excluded Black people, depriving them of opportunities and the ability to build generational wealth.”

from the Caribbean—it’s an age-old dispute.”

This dispute is often attributed to intraracial conflict within the African Diaspora, a term that generally refers to various African nationalities and the descendants of peoples from Africa throughout the Americas, Caribbean, and Latin countries as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A Black person can have “multiple ancestries with lineages from Africa, Europe, Asia, and Native America.”

Although some experiences are shared among global Black communities, there can still be stark differences within Blackness in culture, socioeconomic status, language, food, religion, political affiliation, hair type, and skin color, to name a few. With these differences, conflict over what being Black means in the U.S. and who deserves reparations have cropped up time and again.

The California report estimated that up to 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California in 1852, but the task force decided that eligibility for reparations would be “based on lineage, determined by an individual being a Black descendant of a chattel enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person living in Blacks To Ask U.S. For "Reparations" New York Amsterdam News (1962-); Jun 23, 1973; the U.S. prior to the end of the 19th Century.” ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News Several commissioners were opposed to the ex- pg. A2 clusion of Caribbean people and their descendants born in America, said Martin.

Martin suspects that will be a much larger sticking point in places with larger Caribbean demographics, like New York, but that shouldn’t derail the conversation about reparations. She said those kinds of objections only crop up when it comes to reparatory justice for Black people.

“I say to folks who ask those questions, and they’re very legitimate questions, let’s not let the details get in the way of the bigger principle, because at the end of the day in this country, we have had to figure out thorny questions about who we gets paid,” said Martin.

The national agenda On the federal level, reparations advocates have also moved the needle, if only a bit.

In Texas, U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced H.R.40 in 2021, which establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans and would research slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the U.S. from 1619 to the present.

According to Aiwuyor, Raymond “Reparations Ray” Jenkins, co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’Cobra), was a driving force behind getting his then-congressmember, John Conyers Jr., to introduce the original H.R. 40 reparations bill in Detroit in 1989. Conyers reintroduced the bill every year until he retired in 2017.

New Jersey U.S. Senator Cory Booker, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced S.40, the Senate companion to H.R. 40.

“Our nation must grapple with our dark history of slavery and the continued oppression of African

Booker added that he applauded efforts at the state level to study the enduring impact of slavery and reparation proposals. The independent New Jersey Reparations Council, which was convened by the New Jersey

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(AmNews Archives June 23, 1973)

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Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) last year, called New Jersey the “slave state of the North.”

When the state was established as a colony, it “incentivized” enslavers to take up residence there by promising them 150 acres of land and additional land for each enslaved person they brought in. The state went on to pass slave codes reflective of laws in southern states.

Although New Jersey hasn’t sanctioned the council yet or passed a bill on reparations, the group is dedicated to exploring reparations in education, history, economic justice, public safety, and health equity. They are currently holding public sessions and plan on putting out their own report

by Juneteenth 2025.

“When we launched this council, we were thinking about answering a fundamental question: What does it take to make Black people free in New Jersey?” said Jean Pierre Brutus, the convenor representing the NJISJ. NJISJ also leads the Say The Word: Reparations campaign as a grassroots way of de-stigmatizing language about the issue. Brutus found that many electeds and members of the public were uncomfortable with even saying the term. “The idea is that we can’t get away from the solution,” said Brutus. “We want to help normalize the phrase so that it’s not scary. There’s nothing scary about the term reparations.”

The future of New York State’s commission Sanders, the sponsor behind New York State’s reparations commission bill, said a selection process is underway to choose who will be on the commission. The state reparations commission has six months after its commissioners are chosen to begin meeting. A year after their first meeting, they are expected to produce a report containing recommendations. Sanders said the plan isn’t to directly follow in California’s footsteps, but to create a “New York model” of reparations that caters to the state’s communities.

Many in the reparations field locally and nationwide have hope for what New York will do next. At least one historian who spoke to the Amsterdam News noted that Governor Kathy Hochul already signed an executive order to create the New York State Commission on African American History, on March 9, 2022.

Brooklyn Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman is an avid reparationist. Her grandmother’s parents were sharecroppers and she said it was definitely a struggle among col-

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leagues to get the reparations commission bill passed. She anticipates even more controversy and infighting as the process continues, but is committed to getting it done.

Zinerman’s idea is to expedite the process, first by choosing commissioners from the established African American History commission, since they have already been vetted by the state. Her nomination for commissioner is civil rights lawyer Esmeralda Simmons.

Speaking about her dream reparations list, Zinerman said there are quite a few outcomes she would advocate for. “We would have to secure housing [and] healthcare, and [ensure that] everyone gets access to higher education,” she said. “The [most important] thing that we would need is to have a set of laws that would truly protect us from racism so we can live in peace. The only thing our ancestors asked for was to be left alone. We wanted the abuse to stop.”

Other reparationists are simply glad for any discernible movement forward, regardless of any future backlash.

“I think we’re going to see more and more reparations commissions and task forces created around the country,” said Aiwuyor. “Everytime we get a new one, that emboldens another group of people to create more.”

Trevor Smith, 30, co-founder and executive director of the BLIS Collective, believes in the importance of the commission’s research and data to inform policy decisions, as well as educate the public. He feels that younger generations of reparations activists are tired of “lip service” after the groundswell of racial reckoning in 2020 and are bringing new energy to the movement on a local level, especially, he said, at a time when Black history is being “weaponized” and taken out of schools.

“Despite all of that, the conversation of reparations in New York is moving forward,” said Smith.

“I’m really looking forward to see what the commission does and as a New Yorker, I’m just proud.

This is how we come together as a country to actually move toward the ideals of democracy.”

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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CEO of Parents Supporting Parents NY Tanesha Grant at a reparations session in Albany during Caucus Weekend. (Ariama C. Long photos)

Senator James Sanders leads a reparations discussion in Albany at the 53rd legislative conference.

Assemblymember Michaelle C. Solages (left), who is assembly deputy majority leader, and Councilmember Farah Louis (right) at a public reparations discussion in Albany.

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In the future, when we have reparations…

By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO Amsterdam News Staff Keep your self respect, your manly pride Get yourself in gear Keep your stride Never mind your fears Brighter days will soon be here Take it from me, someday we’ll all be free, yeah —From “Someday We’ll All Be Free” by Donny Hathaway It’s a bright, beautiful morning. It’s Tuesday, June 5, in the year 2050.

Your grandchildren come crawling into your bed. They’ve woken you up from that dream you were having—that fuzzy remembrance you have of the time before reparations had been achieved.

It was only after a series of marches, a few decrees passed in local towns, directives passed in several states, and then–– after the mass “Reparations2Repair March on Washington” of 2032––that the president signed the Black Freedmen’s Justice Act of 2036. Descendants of U.S. enslaved African Americans were finally compensated for the enslavement of their ancestors and the added century and a half-plus of segregation and discrimination successive members of their family were forced to live through.

Before she signed the Black Freedmen’s Justice Act, the president issued a formal apology to all of the nation’s African descendants: “Historically, this nation has not been kind to you. Historically, U.S. laws have excluded, belittled, and, although the U.S. brought you here, the U.S. never welcomed you.

“With the signing of the Black Freedmen’s Justice Act, I want to formally welcome you and give you the keys to the home—the nation—you built. The Black Freedmen’s Justice Act is today’s reparations for the United States’ sin of enslavement. Now, we can be better.”

“In the year 2050,” promises Georgia State University Professor Akinyele Umoja, “reparations look like Black communities who have life chances that are the same as anybody else’s. It’s where Black people have quality health care. Where we can apply to and attend any educational institution in this country based upon merit, and have the same human capacities as anybody else coming from our communities.

“In 2050, we can create policies that are beneficial to our life chances. We can have safety in our communities. We will live the same as everyone else: We don’t have to live in fear.”

Getting to 2050 from 2024 will take time, strategic thinking, and imagination. It will mean carving out a vision of reparations. It will mean envisioning a Black life that’s different from today’s.

A community with a better quality of life When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” about how to wage a campaign for change, he noted that “…there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.” The road to reparations is being shaped today by activists and legislators who occasionally don’t agree on priorities but have the same objective: reparative justice.

“I think you have to call them historical reparations for transatlantic slavery,” said Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé, a social Reparations for Blacks idea gains in the House

work professor at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. “They are an opportunity to rethink the world, to rethink democracy, to rethink reparations, to rethink justice, to rethink rights, and to rethink peace.

“When you talk about historical reparations, you realize that liberal democracy, for example, has not lived up to its promises. The vast majority of people of African descent live on the margins of liberal states, so it’s also a way of thinking about justice, because social justice has not been enough to include people of African descent, and that’s why we talk about racial justice.”

A Black community with social and racial

Walker, Jesse H New York Amsterdam News (1962-); Nov 3, 1990; ProQuest Historical (AmNews ArchivesNewspapers: Nov. 3, 1990) New York Amsterdam News pg. 61

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

justice is a community that has access to quality education, safe and healthy homes, sufficient employment, nutritious food, and quality health care.

The effort to establish reparations and build this model of a just future for Black people is developing throughout the world.

This past December, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill to establish a Commission to Study Reparations and Racial Justice.

The commission will look at the era of African enslavement in the state of New York, research the harms that were caused, and “recommend remedies and reparations.”

In 2020, California became the first state to set up a “Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (Reparations Task Force),” which came up with a report that looked at the idea of restorative justice as it has played out nationally and internationally in several communities over the last few decades.

This past November, the African Union and Caribbean nations declared they would form a united front to push Europeans toward “addressing historical injustices and injurious crimes committed against Africans and people of African descent, through transatlantic enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid, and to addressing the inequities present in the international economic and political orders.”

Almost every nation with a Black population is examining its past and looking at its current structure to see if, with changes, life could be better.

The cry for financial reparations for African enslavement, colonialism, and racism has been the loudest. But calls for apologies, commemorations, and tributes to the centuries of Black people who were victimized are equally salient. In each case, the reparations call leads in a direct path toward appreciating the humanity of Africans and their descendants.

In a future where African Americans finally have reparatory justice The impulse toward reparations, for that future where African Americans finally have reparatory justice, has always been present in Black culture. “One of the things that I’ve always thought is that the music in the Black traditions has always represented resistance,” said Drew University Professor of Composition/Theory Trevor Weston. “And resistance, not in the way that people always think of resistance, which is protest…although there is also protest music. But, you know, as soon as Africans were brought here, they resisted the way they were being treated and affected by slavery. There was a huge concern by slave owners to have Africans forget their Africanness.”

But Black people used Black music––and it’s distinctiveness––as a form of resistance, Weston says: “It’s not anger. Resistance ...is

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nities have also been proposed in cities like St. Paul, MN; St. Louis, MO; Providence, RI; Boston, MA; Tullahassee, OK; Berkeley, CA; and Asheville, NC. One of the more popular ideas for reparations is cash payments to individuals or to Black communities. The U.S. government has in the past spent funds to compensate other ethnic groups for overt injustices. With the creation of the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act of 1950, the U.S. paid $88,570,000 for the reclamation of Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations. In 1971, the government settled the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act by paying Indigenous Alaskans $1 billion and transferring 44 million acres of land back to 200 local villages. In 1988, Japanese Americans who were forcibly interned during World War II received an apology and $1.2 billion ($20,000 a person) with the signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The only cash payments for African enslavement in the U.S. were granted to enslavers with the establishment of the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act of April 16, 1862. Congress paid the enslavers up to $300 for each Black person freed because the government acknowledged they were losing a vital asset.

The value of Black lives for others has regularly been seen in the United States. In the future, reparations will be an acknowledgment of Black value for all of us.

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(Thais Silva illustration)

not necessarily an anger thing. It’s more of a reaction, a reaffirmation. And when you reaffirm who you are, when people think that you should be something else, I think that’s the issue. There’s something in reaffirming your core beliefs that will act as a form of resistance.”

In the future, when we have reparations, being Black or of African descent won’t be an act of defiance; it will be normal.

The United States government has yet to create a federal commission for reparations, but in the absence of a national plan of action, local cities and some states are devising programs to begin to confront the injustice.

In the future, reparations could take the form of housing subsidies similar to the “Reparations Restorative Housing program” passed in Evanston, Illinois in 2019.

That program is designed to begin to make amends for city zoning ordinances which created decades of housing discrimination.

Evanston’s City Council endorsed this program which grants housing subsidies to Black Evanston residents or their direct descendants who lived in the city at any point between 1919 and 1969. Evanston’s program is being paid for with the tax funds collected from sales of recreational marijuana.

Addressing homeownership inequities has become a preferred reparations tool for other cities as well. Housing and infrastructure investments in long-neglected commu-

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