Black Reparations in the United States, 2024: An Introduction

A BRIEF GLOBAL HISTORY OF REPARATIONS

Black people in the United States sought reparations during slavery and have been fighting for them, at least, since the Civil War. Today’s activism around reparations is not a new cause. Enslaved people were the first advocates for redress. They knew from direct experience the injustices imposed on them, and they understood the toll on their physical, emotional, and familial lives. They grasped the devastating impact on their financial futures and the financial futures of their progeny. They fully recognized and understood the dichotomy between their personhood and being subjected to commodification: their humanity became a backdrop against the monetization of the bodies and theft of their labor for the enrichment of others.

Contemporary debates on reparations can be informed by international evidence of other groups who sought and received redress for collective victimization. Apart from many cases in which defeated nations or peoples were made to pay tribute to the victors, those most relevant to the black American claim involve payments made to victims of atrocities. Those payments have been made either by the perpetrators or their successors or by a third party choosing to take responsibility for the act of compensation. One of the most noteworthy instances of this type involved Germany making payments to the victims of the Holocaust and the state of Israel.

On September 10, 1952, Israel and Germany signed a treaty (informally known as the Luxembourg Agreements) acknowledging “unspeakable criminal acts … perpetrated against the Jewish people during the National-Socialist régime of terror.” In Article 1 of this agreement, Germany agreed to pay 3 billion deutsche marks to Holocaust victims. They added another $1.4 billion to living survivors at the seventieth anniversary of this agreement in September 2022. This brought Germany’s “total compensation to more than 80 billion euros,” making it “the first time a defeated power paid compensation to civilians for wartime losses and suffering” (Grieshaber 2022).

Over the course of more than seventy years, not only have the direct victims who survived the Nazi’s extermination plan received compensation but so have their heirs and descendants. Financial compensation to the victims also has been accompanied by resources devoted to an educational campaign to ensure that this history is recorded, taught, and never forgotten; some of the funds support Holocaust education at museums and cultural centers worldwide.

Holding Germany accountable via international treaties is just one form of restitution. Yet it appears that even countries who were not the perpetrators of genocidal acts participated in holding Germany accountable. The United States, in particular, has actively supported compensation for Holocaust survivors and also led efforts, since World War II, to return and protect cultural relics and memorabilia.

In 2009, for example, the U.S. Department of State partnered with the prime minister of the Czech Republic and forty-four other European states and issued the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues through the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues. The purpose of this act is to support and protect “advanced age” survivors of the Holocaust, to “respect their personal dignity,” to “rectify the consequences of wrongful property seizures,” and to “develop measures to combat anti-Semitism” (U.S. Department of State 2009).

The declaration included special measures to preserve Jewish cultural property by making sure that “appropriate materials [are] available to scholars,” such as archival documents and other ephemera. The expectation to maintain these records at repositories, museums, and cultural societies was an important part of this declaration, along with the encouragement that states create “annual ceremonies of remembrance and commemoration” (U.S. Department of State 2009). American participation in the World Jewish Restitution Organization conferences clearly outline decades of support for Holocaust survivors and their heirs (WJRO 2020).

In part to reward Native Americans for their contribution to the war effort after World War II, Congress set up the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 to hear “Indian claims for any lands stolen from them since the creation of the USA in 1776” (Boxer 2009). However, actual reparations payments have been exceedingly modest. For example, according to CNN (2012), “In 2012, the United States finalized a $3.4 billion settlement with American Indians for mismanagement of their land and resources,” and according to Rebecca Hersher (2016), in 2016, “The U.S. government … agreed to pay a total of $492 million to 17 American Indian tribes for mismanaging natural resources and other tribal assets.”

A resolution by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI 2019) that urges Congress to authorize reparations for American Indians and Alaska Natives acknowledges that “various efforts have been made to settle American Indian and Alaska Native claims,” but argues “those efforts have been woefully inadequate.” Native American reparations claims are particularly relevant to black reparations in the United States; in both cases, the historical injustices to be addressed reach back from the present to the founding of the nation.

A more recent example of federal reparations in the United States is the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The U.S. government made $20,000 payments to Japanese Americans who had been compelled to undergo mass incarceration during World War II (National Archives 2017). Through this act, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice established the Office of Redress Administration, which oversaw, acknowledged, apologized for, and offered restitution for, as specified in the Civil Liberties Act, the “injustices of the evacuation, relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”

A yet more recent example of federal reparations provided by the United States is compensation to Marshall Islanders for sixty-seven U.S. nuclear bomb tests there from 1946 to 1958 (Brunnstrom and Martina 2023). According to the U.S. Department of the Interior (2007), Marshall Islands Nuclear Testing Compensation consisted of “a total of $1.5 billion in assistance from 2004 through 2023.”

Unlike the Japanese American or Marshall Islands examples, where the United States was blatantly culpable, there have been several instances where the national government paid reparations to victims when the U.S. government was not the perpetrator. These include the federal government’s payments to families who lost loved ones during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and $4.4 million payments to each American citizen held hostage in Iran from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981.

Precedents such as the U.S. reparations to Japanese American World War II internees, Marshall Islands nuclear testing compensation, and many other recent programs are of limited comparability to black reparations in the United States. In each of these cases, reparations went primarily, although not exclusively, to direct victims of an atrocity. In contrast, Native American reparations are particularly germane as a precedent for black reparations in the United States. Both cases represent injustices over long periods from the colonial era to the present.

Outside the United States, reparations have also become commonplace. For example, the South African parliament paid reparations to those who participated in the amnesty hearings sponsored by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Republic of South Africa 1995).² In an act first issued in 1993, those who suffered during apartheid or their relatives testified at public amnesty hearings. Those whose testimonies were confirmed received a (very modest) payment of US$3,910.

Acts of mass violence committed by other government regimes including the British during the Mau Mau Rebellion (1952–1960), the Philippines under Fernando Marcos (1965–1986), and Chile under General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), resulted in redress measures years later. In 2013, the British government paid out £19.9 million to 5,228 Kenyan Mau Mau survivors. However, many were dissatisfied with this form of compensation and sued again in 2016, asking also for restitution for false imprisonment, forced labor, and interruption to their right to an education. In 2023, Mau Mau veterans continued lobbying for compensation and demanded substantial additional compensation. It is not clear whether these demands will be met, even in part (Miriri and Ross 2023).

However, redress in the Philippines led to somewhat different results. To “right the wrongs of the past in the Philippines,” President Benigno Aquino signed a law in 2012 to provide $224 million in compensation to the thousands of people who suffered under the Marcos regime. This new human rights law was “the first of its kind in Asia.” Additionally, the law rolled back the Marcos martial law that had allowed for the practice of abduction of people “by government security forces.”

More than 1,600 people disappeared during Marcos’s rule (Desapaericidos, n.d.). Another thousand have vanished—presumably through government-sanctioned abductions—since the end of Marcos’s dictatorship, signifying the need for the 2012 law to put an end to the legacy of government engineered disappearances (BBC 2012, 2013).

The Chilean government modeled its plans for redress after South Africa and established a National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. After hearings and testimonies from more than thirty-five thousand people, two government commissions (one under Raúl Rettig and a second under Bishop Sergio Valech), reports confirmed 3,428 “cases of disappearance, killing, torture, and kidnapping.” Payments were about US$190 per month, and victims and their relatives received “free education, housing, and health benefits” (Associated Press 2004; USIP 1990).

A number of other countries undertook acts of restitution for human rights violations including Algeria’s payments of €310 million to fifty thousand Harkis, Algerian Muslims who fought with France during the Algerian war for independence in 1962 (Al-Awsat 2022), Canada’s payment of CA$2.8 billion to indigenous students forced to attend government funded residential schools (Canadian Press 2023), and Colombia’s payment of US$29 billion to over 7.6 million persons who suffered via state and nonstate violence during its civil war (RRVTS, n.d.). In the case of Colombia, the reparations program will likely grow substantially after the government pledged in 2023 to pay reparations to victims of exterminative violence against Patriotic Unity party members in the 1980s and 1990s (Taylor 2023).

Reparations paid to survivors of the German Holocaust, South African apartheid, or human rights abuses in Kenya, the Philippines, or Chile went to survivors relatively soon after the historical injustice had occurred. This temporal proximity between harm and attempted redress may make a reparations process appear more feasible. It should be born in mind, however, that injustices that Native Americans and black Americans suffered stretch hundreds of years into the past. Thus reparations to Native Americans may serve as a direct precedent for black reparations.

Is it, then, that reparations for slavery lack apparent feasibility, perhaps because the numbers of victims (the enslaved Africans and their black descendants) are simply too numerous? Historical precedent suggests that this is not the case. In at least forty-four countries or territories, including the United States, reparations for slavery have been paid as a matter of course, based on the number of the enslaved. Disconcertingly, however, in virtually all cases where slavery reparations have been paid, the compensation went to the former enslavers for the loss of their property, not to the formerly enslaved.³ That reparations have been forthcoming to any group of recipients except most of the black descendants of the enslaved anywhere in the world (the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America) suggests that racial considerations rather than questions of feasibility may explain the reluctance.⁴

The global context indicates the black American quest for redress, in principle, is neither unique nor exceptional.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BLACK REPARATIONS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

The first claims made by blacks in the United States took the form of lawsuits and involved persons who sued for freedom, not necessarily suing for compensation (reparations) for slavery. Although some enslaved people sought freedom, others wanted both liberty and compensation. For example, Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bet) filed a lawsuit for freedom in 1781 and won (Jones 2021). She did not seek monetary compensation.

However, eighteenth-century evidence attests to persons suing for both. Quock Walker (Spector 1968) filed a lawsuit in 1781 seeking both freedom and financial compensation for damages. Ten years later, in 1791, Nelly Mumpherd submitted a deposition in New York City to protect her freedom after a man named Henry Hurt tried to assault her. Hurt took money and Mumpherd’s freedom papers, and she knew too well the value of those papers. In defense of herself, Mumpherd brought Hurt to court. She won the case, protected her freedom, and received compensation for damages (Jones 2021).

Another black woman, this time an enslaved woman named Belinda Sutton (Royall House and Slave Quarters, n.d.) took her former enslaver Isaac Royall to court in 1783. After Royall, a British loyalist, fled to England, Sutton was left free but penniless. Decades after being brought to the United States, Sutton sued the state of Massachusetts for pensions for herself and her two children—and won (Berry and Gross 2020).

Perhaps the most successful effort to acquire personal restitution is represented by the legal case brought forward in 1870 by Henrietta Wood. Wood was a free black woman living in Ohio in 1853 when she was kidnapped by Zebulon Ward, sold into slavery, and held captive by Mississippi slaveholder Gerard Brandon until after the end of the Civil War. She sued her kidnapper for damages. In 1878, eight years after she filed the suit, the case finally went to trial. An all-male, all-white jury returned a decision in Wood’s favor with the largest settlement for enslavement to that date, $2,500. Still, Woods actually had sued Ward for $20,000 in damages, nearly ten times the amount she eventually was awarded (McDaniel 2019).

Giuliana Perrone (2024, this volume, issue 2) provides multiple examples of lawsuits involving enslaved persons who were freed through the wills of their deceased enslavers and often granted land or other assets. Nevertheless, they typically had to fight for their freedom and assets after relatives of the deceased contested the wills. Owner manumission seems to have been infrequent, and owner manumission coupled with some form of bequest even more rare. However, Perrone conceptualizes the bequests as voluntary reparations from enslavers and a deeper understanding of this form of atonement might lend support to contemporary calls for reparations.

All of these instances involve individual claims for restitution; they were not class action suits. More than two hundred years later, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann brought lawsuits against FleetBoston (now merged with Bank of America), Aetna, and New York Life for their history of complicity with slavery and slaveholding on behalf of a class of plaintiffs that included “millions of African-American slave descendants.”⁵

Farmer-Paellman’s lawsuits failed, as have all lawsuits on behalf of black American descendants of the enslaved. In rejecting these claims, judges have either invoked the principle of sovereign immunity or violation of statutes of limitations. Furthermore, when charges of complicity with slavery, including the buying and selling of human beings, are brought against private organizations or institutions, they are insulated to a degree by the fact their actions, at the time, were perfectly legal. This is without doubt immoral but legal under the laws of the land.

The first, and most significant, class action lawsuit directed at the federal government was brought by attorney Cornelius J. Jones in 1915 on behalf of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America (MRB&PA). The MRB&PA was an organization pursuing restitution for the formerly enslaved founded by Isaiah Dickerson and Callie House, the latter the most important figure in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black reparations movement.

The lawsuit sought damages in the amount of $68 million, the value of cotton taxes collected by the U.S. government between 1862 and 1868, an amount Jones argued was due to “the appellants because the cotton had been produced by them and their ancestors as a result of their ‘involuntary servitude.’”⁶ Faced with determined and vicious opposition from the national government directed with special ferocity at House, the lawsuit failed with the Supreme Court confirming the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia’s decision to deny on grounds of sovereign immunity (Booker Perry 2010).

The judicial route never has been propitious for collective black reparations.

The first major collective claim for restitution was embodied in the unfulfilled promise of forty acres land grants allotted to the freedmen and freedwomen at the end of the Civil War. As early as 1775, Thomas Paine suggested land distribution to the formerly enslaved, perhaps over-optimistically presuming that slavery would come to an end with the formation of the new republic. History confirms that his vision for land distribution never came to fruition.

Four million enslaved black people obtained freedom in 1865 and were left to fend for themselves. Some described freedom as being turned out like cattle. Many did not know where to go or how to negotiate their labor contracts, and economic stability was essential to their success. “One of the country’s earliest efforts to dramatically alter blacks’ economic condition” Darity and Mullen (2020, 2) explain, “was the federal government’s post–Civil War plan to give at least forty acres of abandoned and confiscated land as well as a mule to each formerly enslaved family of four (or ten acres per person).”

The first phase, outlined in General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, allocated 5.3 million acres of land, stretching from the sea islands of South Carolina to northern Florida bordered by the St. John’s River, to the freedmen and freedwomen. But only forty thousand freed people managed to take residence on four hundred thousand acres, less than 10 percent of the land specified in Sherman’s order, before being forced off the land under orders of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson (Darity and Mullen 2020, 158–59).

In 1883, on behalf of the all-black, two-thousand-member Indemnity Party he had formed, John Wayne Niles petitioned Congress for land to be distributed to the freedpeople and their descendants in the western territories. He successfully generated support from an Ohio senator, John Sherman, brother of General Sherman, to present the petition for slave reparations to the Senate, but subsequently the petition was tabled into oblivion (Darity 2021a).

Prior to the cotton tax lawsuit, Callie House (Berry 2005) brought forward a petition on behalf of her chartered MRB&PA for pensions for those who had been subjected to slavery. Her organization, founded in 1898, had a membership of three hundred thousand by 1900. Support was so strong and growing that House, seen as a threat to established interests particularly when the MRB&PA sued the federal government for $68 million, was prosecuted on trumped-up charges of mail fraud, sending her to prison, and effectively removing her from the movement (Booker Perry 2010).

Nevertheless, the movement did not die. Many of her disciples moved into the various branches of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1914, and continued the call for reparations for the formerly enslaved and their posterity. A charismatic and determined Garvey disciple, Queen Mother Audley Moore, brought a petition to the United Nations in 1957 seeking land and billions of dollars from the United States government as restitution to the freedpeople and their descendants (Mullen 2022b; see also Berry 2005, 237; Blain 2019).

At the time, the petition did not succeed—nor is it apparent that the United Nations had any leverage to make the United States pay reparations, in the first place—although nearly sixty years later, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on Peoples of African Descent explicitly called for reparations for black Americans.

Despite her pan-Africanist orientation, Moore’s focus for reparations was directed at the U.S. government’s obligation specifically to those black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. Hence, in 1963, she formed the Committee for Reparations for Descendants of U.S. Slaves. This effort evolved into the founding in 1968 of the Republic of New Afrika, an organization calling for the formation of a separate nation out of five states of the old Confederacy, peopled and controlled by black Americans (Blain 2019).

In 1969, James Forman seized the podium at New York City’s Riverside Church to issue the Black Manifesto, which called for white churches and synagogues to pay “$500 million … for the crimes religious institutions had visited upon black Americans in the United States” (Darity and Mullen 2020, 14; Riverside Church, n.d.; Berry 2005, 239). Ultimately, donations of $500,000 were forthcoming, only 0.1 percent of the total demanded. The funds were used to create several institutions, including Black Star Publications and the Black Economic Research Center, that have not survived.

The U.S. payments of restitution to Japanese Americans subjected to imprisonment during World War II was preceded by a report with recommendations from the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. After passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), with persistent pressure from Detroit-based activist “Reparations Ray” Jenkins, introduced legislation, soon to be labeled H.R. 40 as a nod to the unfulfilled promise of forty acres land grants, to create a similar commission to address the matter of black reparations.

Over the next thirty years, the bill’s text was repeatedly modified by the leadership of two allied organizations, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC).⁷ Curiously, the bill does not provide for any reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States. It only calls for the formation of a commission to investigate reparations, despite the fact that reparations have been studied at length in the extant literature since the bill was first introduced (see, among others, America 1990; Darity 2008; Craemer 2015).

Both organizations, avowedly pan-African, departed from Queen Mother Audley Moore’s particular emphasis on U.S. reparations going to black American descendants of U.S. slavery, instead seeking a more global, diasporic reach for compensation coming from the U.S. government.

In addition to lobbying for passage of H.R. 40 on the federal level, the reparations movement is presently devoting great attention to redress projects at the state and local levels. At the state level, California’s Reparations Task Force (2023) completed the second segment of its two-part report in June 2023. The state of Illinois now has activated an African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission, and New York’s State Assembly has passed legislation establishing its own commission. These are three states out of fifty, none of them located in the southeastern part of the nation.

A spiraling wave of cities and towns is now taking steps toward reparations. However, the total number of municipalities and townships on this path still is less than 150, a mere 0.1 percent of approximately 20,000 incorporated cities, towns, and villages across the country. In this volume, Olivia Reneau (2024, issue 3) details the nineteen municipalities that have passed reparations resolutions as of March 2023. Using a mixed-method analysis, Reneau codes the text of each municipality’s resolution to pull out themes around sources of injustice and evidence of disparity and then combines the coded data with quantitative data about the municipalities to uncover patterns in the types of reparations programs different municipalities support.

Also in this volume, Monique Newton and Matthew Nelsen (2024, issue 3) provide a case study of the Evanston, Illinois, reparations program. Implemented in 2021, Evanston began providing housing grants of $25,000 for black residents (up to a total of $10 million) as redress for past discriminatory housing policies. They explore in depth the tensions and conundrums that have arisen with this local initiative.

Prior to the recent surge in local reparations initiatives, there were three occasions of state level restitution for antiblack atrocities, the Rosewood, Florida, massacre of 1923, the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, from 1959 to 1964 to avoid desegregation, and police torture in Chicago in the 1970s and 1990s.

Indeed, in the case of the Florida legislature awarding payments to victims of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, the lawmakers consciously avoided using the term reparations. They agreed “to award direct cash payments to nine survivors of the event. Descendants of those survivors also received money, in the form of small cash sums and college scholarships” (Luckerson 2020). The Rosewood massacre apparently is the only one of upward of one hundred mass killings of blacks by white mobs between the Civil War and the 1950s for which any form of restitution has been made to the victims or their descendants.

After being ordered to desegregate on May 1, 1959, the school board in Prince Edward County, Virginia, chose to close public schools entirely; they were not reopened until 1964. White students were given a lifeline to private all-white academies via county tax credits and state vouchers. Large numbers of black students had to discontinue their education altogether (VMHC 2023). In 2005, the Virginia General Assembly finally established a reparations plan for the black students who were denied access to schooling:

Combining private donations from billionaire John Kluge with state funds, scholarships were offered to the victims of the shuttered school system to enable them to pursue higher education at this much later date. No compensation was offered for past years of lost schooling. Nor was compensation offered to offset the impact of the lost schooling on the affected students’ long-term prospects for employment and earnings. (Darity and Mullen 2020, 21)

Given that the beneficiaries of this plan were in their fifties, sixties, and even seventies, by 2005, very few were able to take advantage of the scholarships for study at state-supported institutions of higher education or vocational training.

For almost two decades between the 1970s and 1990s, Chicago officers under the leadership of Commander Jon Burge tortured 125 persons to extract confessions, many of whom were not guilty of any crime. In 2015, the city of Chicago committed to a “$5.5 million reparations package that included a formal apology from former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, financial compensation to survivors and their families, waived tuition to City Colleges, a mandatory Chicago Public Schools curriculum to educate students about police torture under Burge, and the creation of a permanent, public memorial” (Jaffe 2020).

The only component of the reparations package that remains unmet is the erection of the memorial. Critics of the plan have argued that it is incomplete because it was not only police under Burge’s authority who engaged in torture practices in Chicago. Elizabeth Davies, Jenn Jackson, and David Knight (2024, this volume, issue 3) take a deeper dive into the Chicago reparations initiative through interviews with local advocates as well as reparations recipients.

The notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment provides an example of court-recognized reparations. The intentional failure to inform the black men infected with syphilis of their illness and the intentional failure to provide them with treatment, even after effective drugs became available, provided a rationale for reparations persuasive to the courts.

In 1974, the NAACP filed a class action suit on behalf of the subjects of the horrific experiment, who had not been given the opportunity to extend informed consent. The favorable decision resulted in a $10 million settlement from the federal government given that the U.S. Public Health Service had conducted the experiment (Edwards, Berdie, and Welburn 2024).

In this volume, Linda Bilmes and Cornell Brooks (2024, issue 2) highlight, through a taxonomy of atrocity and redress, the vast number of times the U.S. federal government has compensated individuals for harms across multiple realms, such as environmental damages and vaccine injuries. They argue that this pattern of compensation should normalize reparations, setting precedents that should ease the path for reparations for black Americans.

REVIEW OF PLANS FOR BLACK REPARATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

In this section, we consider major plans put forward thus far to conduct black reparations in the United States. Among the many proposals for black reparations over the decades, we identify four that have been developed as relatively detailed and concrete. Any substantive plan must address at least four considerations: Who should be eligible to receive black reparations? How much is owed to the eligible recipients? How should compensation be made? Who is responsible for making compensation?

In the current volume, Kathryn Edwards, Lisa Berdie, and Jonathan Welburn (2024, issue 2) set the stage for this discussion by presenting case studies of past reparations policies that have succeeded yet fail to offer important insights into what features should be included in a reparations policy. A key takeaway from their study is that reparations should have a redress and atonement component to shift the power dynamics between perpetrator and victim. A second takeaway is that the design of the program should be victim led. Finally, the policy should be a “living” policy, open to adjustment and reevaluation as time goes on. In light of these lessons, we review four major reparations plans.

The four major plans we review are tRoy Brooks’s (2004) atonement model, the National African American Reparations Commission’s Preliminary 10-Point Program (NAARC 2015), William Darity and Kirsten Mullen’s (2020) federal program of black reparations, and the California Reparation Task Force’s (2023) proposals. The discussion of the plans is organized under separate subheadings discussing their differing specific goals, conceptualizations of providers, eligibility standards, modalities, administration of funds, and estimated per-recipient amounts (see table 1).

LOSSES TO BLACK AMERICANS FROM U.S. SLAVERY AND THE RACIAL WEALTH GAP

To complicate matters, some estimates of black losses due to slavery in the United States alone (1776–1865) exceed the racial wealth gap. The most recent Survey of Consumer Finances for 2022 (Aladangady et al. 2023) indicates the average black-white family wealth gap is $1.15 million. Given an average black family size of 3.4 persons and an average white household size of three persons, the average per capita wealth gap by race amounts to $393,519.

Three main estimation methods have been proposed to estimate losses due to U.S. slavery alone, the price-based method (Ransom and Sutch 1990; Neal 1990; Marketti 1990), the wage-based method (Craemer 2015; Craemer et al. 2023), and the land-based method (Darity 2008; Darity and Mullen 2020). They are cautious measures because they ignore colonial slavery from 1517, when the Spanish Crown authorized the importation of enslaved Africans to what is today Puerto Rico (Asiegbu 2020), to 1775, the year before the United States declared independence from Great Britain.

The price-based method was developed in the 1990s and documented in the groundbreaking volume edited by Richard America, The Wealth of Races (Ransom and Sutch 1990; Neal 1990; Marketti 1990). This approach treats the price of an enslaved person as the market signal of how much an enslaver expected to gain from owning that person. However, because the market price was established through negotiations between the seller and the buyer of human property and did not reflect the views of the enslaved, this price is likely to reflect the value of slavery only to the enslaver, not to the enslaved (Berry 2017).

Price-based estimates range from $17.4 billion (Ransom and Sutch 1990) to $1.4 trillion (Neal 1990), up to $4.7 trillion (Marketti 1990), all in 1983 dollars. Further compounded at 6 percent interest, this would represent $141.8 billion, $11.4 trillion, and $38.3 trillion in 2019 dollars respectively. Divided by forty-one million black descendants of the enslaved in the United States (Tamir 2022), this would amount to $3,458 (Ransom and Sutch 1990), $278,199 (Neal 1990), and $933,953 (Marketti 1990) per eligible recipient in 2019 dollars.

The wage-based estimation method (Craemer 2015; Craemer et al. 2023) uses U.S. Census (1975) records about the enslaved population measured every ten years from 1790 to 1860, and historical free-labor-market hourly wages from 1790 ($0.02) to 1860 ($0.08) provided by Lawrence Officer and Samuel Williamson (2019). It uses this information to estimate the enslaved population in each year from 1776 to 1860 and computes the number of hours per year that were available to enslavers by multiplying the annual slave population by twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year.

This amount is then multiplied by the tiny hourly wage rate in each year and compounded by either 3 percent interest (not making up for inflation) or 6 percent interest (the interest rate specified in the sales contract of Georgetown University when it sold 272 enslaved in 1838 to save the university from financial ruin). The resulting totals are at 3 percent interest $19.1 trillion in 2019 dollars, and at 6 percent interest $6.6 quadrillion. The corresponding per recipient payments would be $465,854 or $161 million in 2019 dollars respectively. This computational example illustrates the central role the interest rate plays in estimating losses over such long periods.

Alternatively, loss of freedom due to slavery in the United States can be calculated based on the reparations Japanese American World War II internees received in 1988. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided each surviving ex-internee $20,000 per person and an apology letter from the U.S. president (National Archives 2017). Internment lasted for three years, from 1942 to 1945, and did not involve slave labor. Hence reparations compensated for lost freedom implicitly was a rate of about $0.76 per hour in 1988 dollars.

The purchasing-power equivalent of that amount can be derived using Morgan Friedman’s (2019) inflation calculator, and the total hours available to enslavers can be multiplied by the hourly compensation for lost freedom. At only 3 percent interest, this would yield $35.8 trillion in 2019 dollars, and at 6 percent a staggering $17.4 quadrillion. This would work out at 3 percent interest to $874,139 per person and at 6 percent to $424 million per person for black Americans. What would still be missing is compensation for lost opportunities to accumulate capital, as well as pain and suffering (Swinton 1990).

The land-based estimation method calculates the current value of the forty acres (and a mule) promised to the freedmen and freedwomen. Land as restitution was the basis for Sojourner Truth’s demand for land redistribution (Araujo 2019). Businessman Dempsey Travis developed the proposal for a new Homestead Act in 1970 as a form of reparations based on the current land value of forty forty-acre plots (Allen 1998).

Darity (2008, 662) writes, “The unfulfilled promise of 40 acres per family … provides a means to gauge the magnitude of reparations owed to the descendants of those enslaved.” He estimates the price of land in 1865 at about $10 per acre (Mittal and Powell 2000) and notes that “an allocation of 40 acres to a family of four would imply 10 acres per person, hence a value of $100 per ex-slave in 1865.”

If we also take the total number of formerly enslaved persons who were emancipated at the close of the Civil War at four million persons, forty million acres of land valued at $400 million should have been distributed to them in 1865. Compounding this sum from 1865 at 6 percent interest to 2019 results in $3.156 trillion in 2019 dollars. However, white settler families were promised and given four times the amount, 160 acres, by the Homestead Act of 1862.¹⁴ Thus the raw estimate must be increased by a factor of four to $12.6 trillion with outlays of $307,921 for each of the estimated forty-one million eligible recipients (Tamir 2022).

However, missing from the ledger would be a host of post-slavery atrocities that could be put on the register as well: the costs in lives and property of the one hundred white terrorist massacres, black excess mortality due to disparities in the healthfulness of living conditions, discrimination in homeownership access and home equity, differential access to quality medical care, employment discrimination, unequal education, and the sheer indignity of segregation.

Laws and policies, ostensibly in place for the general social benefit, have been mobilized for one-sided gains for white Americans. Eminent domain and predatory tax laws have been used widely to expropriate black property and transfer it to white ownership and profit, particularly high-value coastal properties (Kahrl 2016, 2024).

Contract selling schemes produced by the denial of adequate credit to potential black homeowners under redlining conditions served as a mechanism for extraction of black income by white real estate brokers. More often than not, the brokers ultimately retained ownership of the properties and could resell them for another round of exploitation (Satter 2010; Coates 2014). In the aftermath of official redlining, the federal government’s program of guaranteed mortgage support in urban areas under the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was manipulated to produce sweeping numbers of foreclosures in black communities (Taylor 2019).

Related to recent federally funded and sanctioned discrimination against black Americans, Ann Pfau and her colleagues (2024, this volume, issue 2) embark on an ambitious archives-based analysis of the financial harms suffered by tenants and property owners displaced by local government agencies in the process of implementing urban renewal programs. These harms include inadequate reimbursement payments, lost business and rental income, and higher post-relocation housing costs. In the case of homeowners who became tenants, the authors estimate the present-day market values of individual properties and compare those estimates with the compensation received by displaced occupants. Their project is a roadmap for other communities looking to document and remedy the damages caused by urban renewal.

One difficulty with the enumeration and adding up strategy is the lack of sufficient data to provide a comprehensive calculation for each category (Darity, Mullen, and Slaughter 2022), particularly for loss of life and property during the course of mass killings and violent destruction of black communities. A second difficulty is the question of whether living descendants merit compensation for atrocities they did not experience directly, particularly the atrocity of slavery.

It is justifiable for living descendants to receive compensation for the intergenerational impact on their lives of the brutality imposed on their ancestors. Still, the current value of land not received by the freedmen and freedwomen does not encompass the full range of factors generating the contemporary racial wealth gap. Instead, one can go directly to the current disparity itself to compute the size of a reparations bill.

Distributed to every living black American descendant of an enslaved person in the United States, this amount should suffice to eliminate the intergenerational wealth effects of past atrocities, including the long-term effects of U.S. slavery. If roughly 85 percent of the nation’s black population of approximately forty-seven million persons consists of individuals who have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States (Tamir 2022), an estimated forty-one million black Americans would be due about $16.1 trillion.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field (2024, this volume, issue 2) argues that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow was not just lost income and wealth, but also lost time in the form of decreased life expectancies for black Americans. She empirically estimates the relationship between lifespan and measures of slavery and Jim Crow intensity for black Americans and argues that any reparations program should account for differences in lifespan between black and white Americans.

Wrigley-Field’s (2024) focus on the racial longevity gap provides an intriguing alternative to the racial wealth gap as a summary measure for computation of the size of the reparations bill. A rough and ready approach to estimation of the amount due for reparations using her concept follows: conservatively, use as a benchmark $10 million as the value of a statistical life.¹⁵

If the average black lifespan is seventy-one years, then the average value of a black year of life will be $140,845. If white longevity runs seventy-six years, the comparative loss in black longevity is five years. Five years multiplied by $140,845 yields a payout per eligible black recipient of $704,255. With an estimated forty-one million black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States, the total bill will come to about $29 trillion.

Using closing the black-white wealth gap as the goal post, Asher Dvir-Djerassi (2024, this volume, issue 3) uses counterfactual historic simulations to evaluate the ability of race-neutral baby bonds—wealth endowments bestowed at birth and financed through a progressive wealth tax—to close the wealth gap over time. Although race-neutral policies are by definition not reparations, they may be more politically feasible to enact and, therefore, important to study.

Dvir-Djerassi’s simulations demonstrate that race-neutral baby bonds cannot close the mean racial wealth gap over a reasonable time scale. They can, however, virtually close the median racial wealth gap if the wealth endowment is at least $50,000 for the lowest-wealth children and graduated downward at lower endowment amounts for higher wealth families.

However, Darity and Mullen (2021) argue that elimination of the mean racial wealth gap should be the target for any reparations program to properly embody the intergenerational legacy of past atrocities against black Americans. As Dvir-Dejrassi (2024) demonstrates, baby bonds would have to be redesigned to target equalization of wealth at the national mean to close the wealth gap under race-neutral arrangements.

HOW TO PAY THE DEBT

Who should be responsible for paying the debt? Darity and Mullen (2022) argue that only the federal government has the capacity to meet the task.

A suitable plan for reparations should have a payment scheme that is sufficient, at least, to eliminate the black-white disparity in wealth, minimize the inflation effect, and minimize any new immediate or deferred tax burden. That combination of objectives can only be achieved by the federal government, particularly because as sovereign currency issuer only the federal government can spend huge sums of money without being constrained by tax revenue—unlike states and localities. The barrier to additional federal spending is the inflation risk, which can be mitigated by spreading the payments out across several years—no more than a decade—and by giving recipients, at least in part, payments in the form of less liquid assets like trust accounts or annuities (Darity and Mullen 2020, 266–67).

In this volume, Trina Shanks and colleagues (2024, issue 3) argue that evidence from the structure of child development accounts shows that reparations payments can be delivered to eligible recipients of all ages (not just children) through structured savings plans with automatic enrollment that promote asset growth and considerable autonomy for the recipients. The contribution of their article is to demonstrate a practical delivery system for cash reparations payments.

The form of reparations that is most appropriate is direct payments to eligible recipients, though not necessarily solely cash transfers. Ultimately, individual recipients should have full authority over the use of the funds. This has been the case for payments to other communities subjected to collective victimization internationally. Conditions should be no different for black American reparations when the bill finally is paid. Any other route would be unwarranted paternalism and an insult to the recipient community.

THE FUTURE

What is the future of black reparations in the United States? Ultimately, it will have to be decided by legislative bodies, which, in turn, are heavily influenced by public opinion. Two articles in this volume, by Jesse Rhodes and colleagues (2024, issue 3) and by Kamri Hudgins and colleagues (2024, issue 3), investigate public opinion toward reparations. Rhodes and colleagues examine the historic trajectory of public opinion on reparations and present evidence on contemporary public opinion using four nationally representative surveys administered between 2021 and 2023. They find that in recent polls between 14 percent and 28 percent of white Americans support cash reparations, up from a tiny 4 percent in 2000 (Dawson and Popoff 2004). There appears to be momentum with regard to the least popular form of reparations—cash payments (but see Craemer 2009a, 2009b). The political feasibility of reparations programs will depend on how fast the momentum in favor of reparations can build. This is notoriously difficult to predict, but examples such as the relatively sudden public opinion swing from majority opposition to majority support for gay marriage suggest that public opinion can change on a dime.

Once white non-Hispanics cease in a few decades to represent the majority in the U.S. electorate, a federal black reparations program may become more electorally feasible. This depends on whether the black reparations movement manages to build meaningful coalitions with other historically excluded nonwhite groups for whom black reparations could serve as a political precedent.

On the other hand, controlling a majority of the electorate does not guarantee political power, as white reparations opponents, who are still likely to control a disproportionate share of U.S. resources continue to lobby for disenfranchising policies (restricting access to the franchise, gerrymandering, and so on). Thus a federal program may not become feasible even after white non-Hispanics have become a minority.

Will local and state examples like those in Detroit, Evanston, and California set the course for other regions to follow? Rhodes and colleagues (2024) contend that “reparations policies may have considerable prospects in states and communities where Democrats—backed by progressive and racially liberal public opinion—are politically dominant.” Will these local and state initiatives ultimately lead to federal legislation by example, or will they be treated as sufficient, removing the need, in many eyes, for federal action? If federal action is the next step, then how will public pressure effectively activate congressional action? We do not have the answers to these questions, but we can speculate on a few likely outcomes based on recent events.

State and local commissions and task forces on reparations are being formed and empaneled; this tendency is not dissipating. In addition to the local studies addressed in this volume, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently recommended $5 million payments to every eligible black American (Hersher 2016). This came on the heels of the California Reparations Task Force submitting its report to the State Assembly.

Additionally, the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, recently appointed a committee called the St. Paul Recovery Act Reparations Commission to examine racial injustices in the city. Once payouts begin, local and state initiatives will find that they are incapable, singly or collectively, to meet bills of $29 trillion, or even a “mere” $16.1 trillion. The amounts proposed in San Francisco and in the California Task Force’s report appear to be far beyond the ken of either their respective municipal or state resources.

States and localities may, finally, turn to the federal government, where they are likely to encounter substantial opposition; however, opposition may be susceptible to accurate information, as Hudgins and colleagues (2024) suggest in this volume. The authors use a representative survey of Detroiters in 2022 and a nonrepresentative national survey administered between 2020 and 2022 to examine attitudes toward reparations. They find a link between an awareness of racial inequality and support for reparations policies, suggesting that public education on racial disparities may increase the feasibility of a reparations program. Thus, education on existing racial disparities in intergenerational wealth, income, health, homeownership, and education may prove crucial to effecting a federal black reparations program.

A study undertaken by Michael Kraus and Chiyei Vinluan (2023) indicates that Asian American support for black reparations increases when Japanese American exposure to mass incarceration during World War II and their subsequent receipt of redress is invoked. This suggests that education about the record of restitution directed at one’s group may stimulate greater approval for “reparative economic justice” for others. Reparations have appeared prominently in political campaigns over the last few years, confirming the relevance of this issue on contemporary national policy platforms. Recent developments provide clues to future debates and possible outcomes. It is likely that the fight for reparations will continue to escalate.

Morally and economically equitable solutions may gather momentum even if they seem politically and fiscally less than feasible at a given moment. This was true for the abolition of slavery at the height of its profitability, and for the ban of de jure Jim Crow discrimination as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Whether black reparations will join these historical examples remains to be seen.