Intersection. Truth and Reparations

• Author: Liane Jackson
• Pages: 9-10

Inter Alia

Intersection is

a column that

explores issues of

race, gender and law

across America’s

criminal and social

justice landscape.

Reparations is having a mo-

ment—400 years after the

U.S. slave trade began, 157

years following the Eman-

cipation Proclamation and 56 years

post-Jim Crow. Although state-sanc-

tioned discrimination is over, those who

support reparations say the compound-

ing damage remains from past atrocities

never redressed.

These days, whispering “repara-

tions” is no longer taboo. Some Dem-

ocratic presidential candidates openly

announced support of reparations for

black descendants of slaves; most others

agreed the issue should be studied. Cyn-

ics consider the tepid national dialogue

as pandering to the black base or an

esoteric exercise untethered to action—

but the fact that reparations is being

talked about at all shows, ultimately,

that an accounting for the dark legacy

of our nation’s original sin cannot easily

be swept under the rug.

So here we are in this moment,

propelled in large measure by journalist

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 devastating

deep-dive article “The Case for Rep-

arations” and anchored by decades

of quiet persistence by activists to at

least be heard.

40 acres and a mule

The idea of reparations is nothing new.

It began during Reconstruction, when

Gen. William T. Sherman’s “40 acres

and a mule” promise to an estimated

4 million emancipated slaves never

materialized. Instead, freedmen were

often plunged into indentured servitude,

sharecropping or other forms of forced

labor. Black Americans were subjected

to a de facto terrorist state, with regular

lynchings, Jim Crow, land and property

theft, mass incarceration, educational

and health inequality, redlining, labor

market discrimination and systemic

police brutality.

For almost three decades with no

success beginning in 1989, the late U.S.

Rep. John Conyers introduced H.R. 40,

a bill intended to establish a commis-

sion to study the legacies of chattel

slavery and investigate reparations pro-

posals. Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson

Lee reintroduced H.R. 40 in 2019, and

Cory Booker co-sponsored the bill in

the Senate.

But while Congress takes baby steps

toward considering whether it will vote

to even consider the idea of reparations,

some local governments are taking

matters into their own hands.

‘The Rosa Parks of reparations’

Reparations is a movement in need

of a hero, and Alderman Robin Rue

Simmons’ success story in Evanston,

Illinois, has become a beacon for civil

rights advocates eager to demonstrate

the feasibility of reparative justice in

practice. In 2019, Simmons spear-

headed an effort to earmark money

from taxes on recreational marijuana

sales to pay reparations to the city’s

black residents. During a December

town hall meeting on the issue at Evan-

ston’s First Church of God, one nation-

al activist called Simmons “the Rosa

Parks of reparations.”

Taxing marijuana proceeds is a

radical and symbiotic solution to the

problem of how reparations would be

funded, and activists hope it can be-

come a model replicated in other cities.

Simmons argued African Americans

should disproportionately benet from

INTERSECTION

Truth and

Reparations

Talk of reparations is being revived

around the country

BY LIANE JACKSON

edited by

LIANE JACKSON

liane.jackson@americanbar.org

Actor Danny Glover

was the keynote

speaker at the

December town hall

in Evanston, Illinois.

Photos by Liane Jackson/ABA Journal; Callie Lipkin/ABA Journal

ABA JOURNAL | APRIL–MAY 2020

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