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: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 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 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 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 communities 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.