Exploring the Grassroots Reparations Movement
What Might it Add Up To?
"Until the U.S. pays its moral debts to African-Americans, our country will never be whole," Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Personal Note: There has been a longer pause than usual between my posts the past 10 days as I joined my family and friends in Connecticut to celebrate the life of my mother, Joan Brigham, who died peacefully in late February at her home in Windsor at 92.
As she published her own book when she was 84 years old, a spiritual memoir, Invitation to Inner Light: To Love and Wisdom . . . an Essential Step for Personal and Planetary Peace, she was one of several inspirations to write my own book. Thank you for being a leading light in my life, Mom.
Bottom Line Upfront
Persistent Historical Advocacy: Despite being largely omitted from mainstream education, African Americans have continuously pushed for reparations since the Civil War—beginning with “40 Acres and a Mule” and extending through a long lineage of petitions, lawsuits, and legislative proposals that have been routinely ignored or suppressed by White political leaders.
Established Precedents: The U.S. has already issued reparations to other communities, including Japanese Americans interned during WWII and the Sioux tribes for stolen lands. These cases demonstrate that large-scale reparations are not unprecedented, though African Americans have yet to receive any type of restitution for slavery and systemic racism.
Local Reparations in Lieu of Federal Action: Although federal reparations remain politically unlikely due to widespread opposition (especially among White Americans), a growing number of cities, counties, universities, and religious institutions have launched localized efforts—often tied to specific historical harms, like redlining, police torture, or school closures.
Legal and Political Resistance: Even modest reparations programs—such as Evanston, Illinois’ $25,000 grants to Black residents harmed by redlining—have faced significant legal challenges from conservative groups invoking the 14th Amendment, reflecting broader tensions after recent Supreme Court decisions limiting race-conscious policies.
Corporate and Institutional Responsibility: Banks, insurance firms, universities, and faith-based organizations are being called to account for their historical roles in profiting from slavery and exclusion. Proposals include canceling debt, offering zero-interest loans, and directing investments into Black communities.
Emerging Frameworks for Local Efforts: Advocates argue that state and local reparations must include formal acknowledgment, material compensation, structural reform, and a commitment to future racial justice, without absolving the federal government of its ultimate responsibility.
Reparations as a Moral Imperative: While federal reparations remain distant, each local, institutional, or grassroots effort contributes to a broader reckoning. These acts of repair, though incremental, lay the foundation for a more just future by confronting the compounded debt owed from centuries of enslavement, segregation, and systemic exclusion.
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Introduction
This week I take a short break from a focus on Tr*mp’s intentionally chaotic takeover of the federal government (and well beyond) to concentrate on a topic that has never been popular in American culture: reparations for African Americans.
As I wrote in It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field,
The most fundamental counter to systemic racism would be reparations that provide restitution for the centuries of wrongs our nation has perpetrated upon African Americans. However, although I support reparations wholeheartedly, I am quite clear that given the extreme polarization of our politics today, reparations are unlikely to occur in my lifetime.
As recently as 2020, a national poll found that 63 percent of Americans do not believe in federal reparations. However, there is a chasm between African Americans (82 percent in favor) and Whites (75 percent against). For reparations to be considered seriously, tens of millions more Whites would need to support them.To be clear, African Americans have been advocating for reparations since the Civil War was drawing to a close. It started with “40 Acres and a Mule.” I had never heard of this term until seeing Spike Lee’s flick, Do the Right Thing, in the 1980s. 40 Acres and a Mule (known formally as Special Field Order #15) was issued in January 1865 but rescinded only three months later by President Andrew Johnson, just days after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. You can read more about that here: 40 Acres & a Mule.
When I learned about “40 Acres” (in my late 20s), I believed myself to be politically aware and with a working knowledge of U.S. history. But “40 Acres” didn’t get taught in my high school; I doubt it was taught in any high school that was majority-White (which most high schools were back then) through at least the 1980s.
What are reparations?
They are “policies, procedures and practices that seek to compensate, repair and restitute individuals or communities for exploitation, oppression, abuse and genocide.”[1]
Historical Efforts to Achieve Reparations
After the Johnson rescinded the field order, the fight for reparations, again, little to my knowledge, continued for over a century and a half after the Civil War’s final surrender. These efforts flew under the public radar, or, more accurately, were intentionally swept out of view. White leaders who received Blacks’ appeals for reparations ensured those petitions garnered minimal attention and attained no traction. It is worth a quick recounting of what some of those efforts were:
1870 – Sojourner Truth’s Petition: In 1870, Truth circulated a petition to pressure Congress to pass a land redistribution bill for ex-slaves as compensation for their role in building the country’s wealth. It never achieved significant traction.
1890 – An Ex-Enslaved Person’s Pension Bill: Prompted by a letter from Frederick Douglass about the lack of compensation for Blacks for centuries of slavery, a son of a former Alabama enslaver appealed to a U.S. Representative to introduce an ex-slave pension bill modeled after Civil War military service pensions.
Late 1890s-Early 1900s – National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association: Callie House, an ex-slave and laundress, partnered with Reverend Isaiah Dickerson to launch a new reparations campaign that built on the momentum generated from Connell’s legislation. They built their Pension Association to 300,000 members by the early 1900s, but White leaders actively organized opposition, eventually causing their efforts to die out.
1915 - $68 million lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department: Less than a decade later, Cornelius J. Jones filed a lawsuit against the department for reparations for ex-slaves based on tax receipts collected by the federal government on raw cotton over nearly eight decades (through the end of the Civil War). A federal appeals court dismissed the case, saying the federal government could not be sued without its consent.
The 1920s through 1990s – Queen Mother Audley Moore: Harlem-based activist Audley Moore (“Queen Mother”), an advocate for Black nationalism for three decades founded the Committee for Reparations for Descendants of U.S. Slaves and The Republic of New Africa in 1963 that demanded self-determination, land, and reparations for Blacks, which she continued to work on until she died in the mid-1990s at the age of 96.
The 1960s-2000s - H.R. 40 and Reparations Ray: Raymond Jenkins (aka Reparations Ray) devoted 50 years of his adult life to advocating for reparations for descendants of slavery, as essentially a one-person campaign from the 1960s until he died in 2009. U.S. Representative John Conyers introduced a reparations bill, House Resolution 40, based on Jenkins' work, in 1989, which has been reintroduced every year since.
The 2000s – African American Descendants’ Slave Litigation: Deadria C. Farmer-Paellmann (with other plaintiffs) pursued a case against 19 corporations that profited from the slave trade. The accused companies included Aetna, Fleet Boston (originally Providence Bank), JPMorgan Chase, New York Life Insurance, Lehman Brothers, and CSX. Their case was dismissed, and they did not have the funds to pursue appeals.
These examples give you only a glimpse of the efforts made.
Specific “Reparations” Successes for African Americans in the U.S.
It is not that some form of reparations has never been provided to Blacks as a group in the U.S., just not for their enslavement. Reparations have been awarded for explicit injustices in specific places, well after the fact.
White-on-Black Massacre - Rosewood, Florida. In 1923, a white vigilante mob of several hundred destroyed the Black town of Rosewood, lynching or killing numerous men and driving all 200 residents out permanently. Local police did nothing to prevent or quell the violence. In the 1980s, the Florida state legislature considered payment for historical wrongs. Instead of reparations, legislators characterized the offense as a “failure of the state to protect citizens’ land and property.” A bill was passed in 1994 to pay $2.1 million to distribute to living survivors and an educational fund for descendants: a $150,000 lump sum to each of the nine survivors; a $500K pool for their descendants; individual $4,000 scholarships for the latest generation of Rosewood family members.
Eugenics – North Carolina. “From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina’s eugenics program sterilized close to 7,600 men and women, making it impossible for them to reproduce or conceive.” In 2010, the state legislature finally set aside $10 million in reparations to pay out to living survivors of this despicable program, and initial checks were cut to survivors in 2014 at $20,000 apiece. The state’s 45-year program was touted during its tenure to solve illegitimacy and poverty in the state, with most women sterilized in the decades after World War II. The federal government-funded sterilization programs in 31 other states beyond North Carolina, targeting people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, and those with physical and mental disabilities.
Police Torture - City of Chicago – In 2015, Chicago’s City Council took responsibility for police torture committed by members of the Chicago Police Department against Black residents over two decades by establishing a $5.5 million fund to provide cash payments to 57 living survivors. “The Reparations Ordinance was drafted to provide redress to approximately 120 African American men and women subjected to racially-motivated torture, including electric shock, mock executions, suffocation, and beatings by now former Police Commander Jon Burge and his subordinates from 1972 through 1991.” The reparations package included priority access to counseling services and job training, free degree programs at the city’s colleges, and a commitment to building a public memorial to commemorate those tortured and current survivors.
Closing Desegregated Schools – Virginia. After the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Prince Edward County closed its public schools for several years because White parents refused to have Black children attend with their children. Finally, in 2005, a half-century later, Virginia matched a $1 million donation from a billionaire donor to provide up to $5,500 a year for any surviving resident who was denied an education for those years when schools were shut down.
White-on-Black Massacre - Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2001, Oklahoma’s governor signed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act to make amends for one of the worst white-on-Black massacres in American history. The Act created a college scholarship program covering tuition at an in-state college for more than 300 students from families with lower incomes. The act also authorized the creation of a memorial and an economic development authority to promote development in the Greenwood neighborhood where the massacre occurred. Advocates have continued to lobby since then for full reparations, culminating in “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument.”
The fight for reparations in every case took years, often decades. Each fight was tied to a specific event at a particular moment. None provided anything resembling full redress for the harms done. They did, however, set a precedent for African Americans to pursue similar types of settlements for other specific violent and egregiously harmful events.
Reparations Have Happened Here … for Sioux Indians and Japanese Americans
We must keep in mind that there is precedent for the federal government providing reparations for historical transgressions, both of which were determined (but in the first case, not paid out) within the last four decades for:
Sioux Indians: Compensation for Stolen Land. The Sioux Indians won a $105 million Supreme Court case in 1980 as compensation for 6,000 square miles of land illegally seized from them in the 1870s. Their lands included what is now referred to as the Black Hills of South Dakota and where the federal government established Mount Rushmore.[2] The Sioux never collected on the $105 million settlement because by accepting the money, they knew they would lose any right to demand the return of their land. As of 2019, the money sits in a Bureau of Indian Affairs account, continuing to collect interest, and is estimated now to be worth close to $1.5 billion.[3]
Reparations for the Internment of Japanese Americans. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered 77,000 Japanese American citizens and an additional 43,000 legal and illegal immigrants of Japanese descent to internment camps for more than three years during the last phase of World War II. Most of those interned had to liquidate their assets almost overnight at a fraction of their real value, with no hope of recovery after internment ended. Not until 1980 did Congress create a commission to investigate redress possibilities. Eight years later, in 1988, the Senate passed, and President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, providing $20,000 and an apology to each of the estimated 80,000 surviving victims, more than 40 years after the internment camps had been closed. The total reparations were approximately $1.6 billion.[4] [5]
If We Cannot Count on Federal Reparations, Can We Expect Any Reckoning?
At a moral level, then, it is hard to fathom how our federal government provided $20,000 apiece to Japanese Americans whom we imprisoned in detention camps for three years, but has never seriously considered compensation for the African Americans we enslaved for 246 years or any of their descendants.
Or for the grotesque apartheid systems we subjected them to for another century.
Or the comprehensive discrimination and exclusion from so many transformative programs during that same time (e.g., much of the New Deal legislation; the initial Social Security Act; the implementation of the G.I. Bill, etc.)
This is a massive debt we still owe.
Yet, efforts toward full, federal reparations will continue to be a very long and steep uphill climb, and likely will never happen. Why?
White Americans (and some African Americans) dismiss outright the idea of reparations for African Americans. A 2020 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 63% of Americans do not believe in federal reparations, although there is a chasm between African Americans (82% in favor) and whites (75% against). This poll result came before the January 2021 insurrection of the capital by thousands of white, violent ultra-right wingers.The segment of the White population that would potentially be sympathetic to reparations has grown incrementally over the past couple of decades.
For sure, the federal government must serve as the central focus for any actual, comprehensive reparations program, but it was far from the only perpetrator during slavery or afterward.[6]
Until the Civil War, every state in the Union allowed slavery at some point, just as for the next century, every state afterward participated in and directly supported the wholesale discrimination of Blacks.
Countless municipalities played central roles in passing and upholding racist laws for as long as they were in existence.
Some of our finest higher education institutions – think Ivy League – directly benefited in their early decades from riches generated not just from the slave-based economy but from slave-owning benefactors.
Private and public colleges and universities systematically excluded Blacks from enrolling for decades.
The profit-making of many corporations depended heavily on the labor of enslaved people, and countless industries and corporations after the Civil War directly discriminated against Blacks in their policies and practices for a century more. So did hundreds of corporations: insurance companies, railroads, banks, shipping companies, etc.
A Grassroots Trend Toward “Reparations”
Although it can never add up to the total debt we owe, an interesting trend is emerging that is worth watching in the meantime – whether the meantime is years or decades.
Several cities – and one state - announced a reparations process during 2020 (none of them focused on remedies for enslavement) – including Evanston, Illinois, Providence, Rhode Island, Burlington, Vermont, Asheville, North Carolina, and the state of California, all of them initiated through legislation.
Since then, larger cities have launched their own efforts: Boston, Kansas City, MO, Providence, RI, San Francisco (recommended paying qualified Black residents $5 million as compensation for generations of systemic racial discrimination), Sacramento, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.[7] Most of these get initiated as “reparations commissions” to study, research, and recommend redress.
We’re also seeing this at the county level—Fulton County (GA), Shelby County (TN), Alameda County (CA)— in medium-sized cities like St. Paul (MN) and St. Petersburg (FL), and towns like Northampton and Amherst (both, Massachusetts) and two communities near me: College Park and Greenbelt (Maryland).[8]
Evanston (IL) is one of the few that has moved to implementation, focusing on repairing the legacy of redlining of Black neighborhoods during the 20th century.[9] They have provided $25,000 grants to 193 Black residents ($5 million total) to help them buy or repair a home.
Evanston’s initiative, unsurprisingly, is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit from Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group, to terminate the program. The suit argues that “the program redistributes tax dollars based on race, … a brazen violation of the law,” saying it violates the 14th Amendment. That Amendment was written to guarantee the rights of millions of formerly enslaved African Americans.[10]
The suit follows a June 2023 Supreme Court decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. Conservative groups claim that the court’s narrow decision on college admissions applies broadly to any race-based and reparations programs.
It doesn’t apply broadly.
But this will need to be hashed out in courts, probably reaching the Supreme Court at some point.
In 2020, California became the first state to study and develop proposals for reparations.[11] In the Spring of 2022, the California reparations task force voted to provide reparations to Black Californians who can prove their direct lineage to their enslaved ancestors.[12] Then, in September 2024, Governor Newsom signed bills that not only provided a formal, bipartisan apology for the state’s role in slavery but also measures that would begin to address historic injustices faced by Black Californians. These measures included: addressing food and medical deserts; combating maternal health disparities; addressing employment discrimination, preschool access, and college and career financial aid.[13]
A grassroots effort in New Jersey has looked to initiate reparations through the state government, but has thus far been unsuccessful. As a result, they started the New Jersey Reparations Council in 2023 to develop recommendations they hope the governor and state legislature will eventually take up.[14]
Each successful initiative should expect pushback. In fact, in Tennessee in 2024, Republicans in the state senate passed a bill to ban local municipalities from using funds to study or disburse reparations to the descendants of formerly enslaved people.
A preemptive strike, clearly. Fortunately, Tennessee’s House of Representatives killed the bill that would have implemented a statewide ban on such initiatives.[15]
Over the last few years, we’ve seen racial reckonings in higher education:
To make amends for the 272 slaves it owned, then sold in the 1830s, Georgetown University issued a formal apology, promised preferential treatment for descendants of those slaves in university admissions, and began creating an institute to study slavery. [16]
Princeton Theological Seminary pledged $30 million in 2019 for reparations tied to its slave-owning history, similarly to Georgetown. [17]
Brown University established similar measures in the first decade of this century. [18]
And in churches:
In September 2020, 82% of the annual general convention of the diocese of Maryland’s Episcopal Church voted to create a $1 million seed fund as a commitment to reparations linked to slavery and systemic racism. The diocese covers 120 churches and 44,000 members across Maryland. The funds will benefit the Black community in Baltimore and elsewhere around the state.[19]
An organization of Catholic nuns in Louisiana convents has funded reparations for descendants of enslaved people who worked in the convents.[20]
An Episcopalian seminary in Virginia that employed enslaved workers put in place a $1.7 million reparations package.[21]
White church members from The Arlington Community Church in Berkeley, CA, created the Black Wealth Builders Fund in consultation with Black community leaders. They now provide zero-interest loans of $15,000-$20,000 to African American low- to moderate-income home buyers purchasing their first home.[22]
How About Corporations?
Angela Glover Blackwell and Michael McAfee argue that it is time for the financial industry to join the reckoning with racism. Given the financial industry’s role in systematically excluding African Americans from mainstream banking and gouging them systematically with unfair lending and mortgage processes, the time for reckoning, they argue, is now. Some of the older banks even played a crucial role in helping to finance the slave trade.
Blackwell and McAfee advocate that banks:
“Cancel consumer debt for black customers
Eliminate banking fees for black customers
Provide interest-free mortgages to black home buyers
Provide interest-free loans to black-owned businesses.”[23]
In this vein, in the summer of 2020, activists in Chicago called on JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) to provide $1 billion in grants and another $10 billion in loans to the Black community after investigating the scarcity of home loans JPMC had issued from 2012 to 2018.
Their research showed that out of $7.5 billion loaned to homeowners in Chicago over those seven years, less than 2% had gone to homeowners in Chicago’s black neighborhoods. They found that the “bank loaned nearly nine times more in a single majority-white community — Lake View on the North Side — than it did in all of the city’s majority-black neighborhoods combined.”[24] Activists recommend that the funds be directed toward assisting home buyers, seeding small business start-ups, and creating a Black-owned bank. The City Treasurer has created a scorecard to measure how well all major banks in the city go beyond the bare minimum called for in the 1977 federal Community Reinvestment Act. [25]
Comparable reckonings should be encouraged for insurance companies that date back to slavery times or that have actively participated in discriminating against their Black customers. Or legacy railroad companies that were involved in transporting cotton during slave-owning times. The lists could go on.
Reparations Principles for State & Local Governments
Since federal reparations are far beyond the horizon, Kyle Moore from the Economic Policy Institute argues for five principles that state and local governments should follow in implementing reparations. They should:
Acknowledge and apologize for the damage done
Include material redress to the beneficiaries
Specify what harms are being addressed and who will benefit
Not attempt to absolve the federal government of its responsibility to provide redress for its harm
Include structural change and a commitment to ongoing vigilance against future racial injustice[26]
Conclusion
It is a gross understatement to say reparations for African Americans are long overdue. Although the origin of reparations is the debt we owed when America emancipated Blacks from enslavement in 1863, the interest on that debt has compounded year over year. But the debt owed must also encompass the immoral crimes our White-led nation committed throughout a century of Jim Crow and the many wrongs that were never reversed or reconciled in the decades since.
While any genuine effort for federal reparations must stay on hold at least through the current presidential term, we White Americans must continue to push for reckonings, atonement, and reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism wherever and whenever that conversation and decisions can begin – with corporations, universities, faith-based organizations, municipalities, and so on.
Every authentic contribution made rigorously and resolutely can start to pave pathways toward a more just and more secure future for African Americans.
Let me close by sharing an excellent graphic from an equally excellent article published by the national nonprofit, Bridgespan, “Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations and Building a Culture of Racial Repair.” (Article Link.)
It provides examples of investments that should be made to move toward a federal program that narrows the Black-White wealth gap and articulates the four components of building a culture of racial repair (reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability, and redress). Each component provides examples of investments that should be made.
One Final Note:
None of the efforts above—and the future ones like it—come close to achieving reparations. This is why I devote the final four chapters of my book to transformative solutions across the domains of housing justice, economic justice, environmental justice, health equity, educational justice and criminal justice that in tandem would create platforms for essential racial justice in America, the types of which we have yet to see.
Footnotes
[1] https://news.illinois.edu/why-is-the-reparations-movement-gaining-momentum-in-the-u-s/.
[2] Fred Barbash and Peter Elkind, “Sioux Win $105 Million,” The Washington Post, July 1, 1980, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/07/01/sioux-win-105-million/a595cc88-36c6-49b9-be4f-6ea3c2a8fa06/.
[3] “Why the Sioux Are Refusing $1.3 Billion,” PBS News Hour, August 24, 2011, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/north_america-july-dec11-blackhills_08-23#.
[4] Irvin Molotsky, “Senate Votes to Compensate Japanese-American Internees, The New York Times, April 21, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/21/us/senate-votes-to-compensate-japanese-american-internees.html.
[5] “From Wrong To Right: A U.S. Apology For Japanese Internment,” Code Switch, August 9, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japanese-internment-redress.
[6] Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, “Why Japanese-Americans received reparations and African-Americans are still waiting,” The Conversation, July 17, 2019, https://theconversation.com/why-japanese-americans-received-reparations-and-african-americans-are-still-waiting-119580.
[7] Nigel Roberts, “10 Cities considering reparations to atone for slavery, structural racism,” BET, October 4, 2023, https://www.bet.com/article/5cuxzi/reparations-list-cities-considering-compensation-black-residents.
[8] https://www.newsnationnow.com/race-in-america/which-cities-considering-reparations/.
[9] “Reparations: Redressing Institutional Racism and Redlining, Evanston, Illinois<” City of Evanston, 2020, https://www.cityofevanston.org/home/showdocument?id=55311.
[10] Emmanuel Felton, “City sued for paying hundreds of Black residents $25,000 in reparations,” The Washington Post, June 4, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/04/evanston-reparations-lawsuit/.
[11] Kumasi Aaron, “The historic push for reparations in California: Where it stands and what’s next,” ABC 7 News, November 6, 2020, https://abc7news.com/reparations-gavin-newson-reparation-legislation-for-african-americans-california-makes-history/7709586/.
[12] “Economics in Brief: California Will Give Reparations to Descendants of Slaves,” Next City, Solcyre Burga April 1, 2022, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/economics-in-brief-california-will-give-reparations-to-descendants-of-slave.
[13] “Governor Newsom signs California Legislative Black Caucus priority bills, including a formal, bipartisan apology for the state’s role in slavery,” Office of the Governor, September 26, 2024, https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/26/governor-newsom-signs-california-legislative-black-caucus-priority-bills-including-a-formal-bipartisan-apology-for-the-states-role-in-slavery/.
[14] Isaiah Thompson, “A Push for Reparations in New Jersey,” Nonprofit Quarterly, November 8, 2023, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/a-push-for-reparations-in-new-jersey/.
[15] Aaliyah Wright and Brandon Tensley, “Black Residents Battle Against Tennessee GOP’s Effort to Ban Reparations,” Capital B, April 5, 2024, https://capitalbnews.org/tennessee-bill-reparations-study/.
[16] Saahil Desai, “The First Reparations Attempt at an American College Comes From Its Students,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/why-are-georgetown-students-paying-reparations/587443/. Also, “Georgetown University Makes Amends for Slavery, WNYC, September 2, 2016, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/georgetown-university-makes-amends-slavery.
[17] Harmeet Kaur, “A New Jersey religious college will set aside nearly $28 million for slavery reparations,” CNN, October 26, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/26/us/princeton-seminary-slavery-reparations-trnd/index.html.
[18] “Response of Brown University to the Report of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” Brown university, February 2007, http://brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/documents/SJ_response_to_the_report.pdf.
[19] Jonathan M. Pitts, “Maryland Episcopal Church commits $1 million to reparations seed fund,” The Washington Post, September 18, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/maryland-episcopal-church-commits-1-million-to-reparations-seed-fund/2020/09/18/bcabd4e6-f8fb-11ea-a275-1a2c2d36e1f1_story.html.
[20] Thai Jones, “Slavery reparations seem impossible. In many places, they’re already happening,” The Washington Post, January 31, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/slavery-reparations-seem-impossible-many-places-theyre-already-happening/.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Francis Nguyen, “A Bay Area Church Attempts Housing Reparations (Next City), December 22, 2022, https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/a-bay-area-church-attempts-housing-reparations.
[23] Angela Glover Blackwell and Michael McAfee, “Banks Should Face History and Pay Reparations, The New York Times, June 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/sunday/banks-reparations-racism-inequality.html.
[24] Linda Lutton, “Activists Want Billions In Reparations From Chase Bank For Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods,” WBEZ, June 15, 2020, https://www.wbez.org/stories/activists-want-billions-in-reparations-from-chase-bank-for-chicagos-black-neighborhoods/0cca1b18-c141-4630-92d0-96cdcdc77fa5.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Kyle K. Moore, “Five Principles For Making State And Local Reparations Plans Reparative,” Economic Policy Institute, February 15 2023, https://www.epi.org/blog/five-principles-for-making-state-and-local-reparations-plans-reparative/.