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

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 ​​Savannah, 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 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 Simmons led the charge to pass the first tax-funded reparations program for Black Americans in Evanston, Ill. 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 Ta-Nehisi 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 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 nationally 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 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 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, R.I., 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, Mass., 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, who operates in the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice, said the office is also glad to see state and local efforts toward 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 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 the U.S. prior to the end of the 19th Century.” Several commissioners were opposed to the exclusion 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 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.” 

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 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 colleagues 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.”

Ariama C. Long photos

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.