It’s Not Just About Slavery: The Modern Case for Reparations

Key Takeaways:

• “40 acres and a mule” broke.
• Reparations cover harm beyond slavery.
• Cities act where Congress stalls.

The story of reparations in the United States begins with a short-lived promise. In January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which redistributed confiscated Confederate land to newly freed Black families. Each household was to receive 40 acres of coastal land, and some would also be given surplus Army mules.

Roughly 40,000 freed people briefly farmed this land, but the promise collapsed after President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and returned the land to its former White owners. This reversal forced formerly enslaved families back into dependency and sharecropping, and it remains one of the most glaring broken promises in U.S. history. 

“Forty acres and a mule” has since become shorthand for the reparations owed but never delivered.

Modern Reparations Movement

The modern reparations movement traces back to Queen Mother Audley Moore, who in 1957, petitioned the United Nations for land, billions in compensation, and support for African Americans who sought to emigrate to Africa.

In 1987, activists formed the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) to unify local efforts, followed in 2015 by the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARCtoto link U.S. and Caribbean movements.

For years, mainstream politics dismissed reparations, but in 2014 writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reignited debate with his essay “The Case for Reparations.” Interest surged again after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when protests over racial injustice pushed corporations, universities, and city governments to take reparations more seriously than ever before.

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Why Reparations Now?
Critics often argue: “I never owned slaves, and you were never enslaved.” But advocates emphasize that reparations address not just slavery, but also centuries of systemic harm that followed.

As Mickey Dean, founder of the Kansas City Reparations Coalition, explained in a recent presentation, “The period of enslavement is the first stage in the demand for reparations.” He cited the unpaid value of chattel slavery — estimated at $50 trillion in today’s dollars — as the foundation of America’s racial wealth gap.

However, Dean says reparations isn’t just about unpaid debt from slavery. The second phase of reparations speaks to the Jim Crow era and subsequent federal policies that built White wealth while excluding Black people. Examples include:

• The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 246 million acres of land — nearly all to White settlers. Today, 93 million Americans descend from beneficiaries of this program.
  
• Sharecropping and convict leasing re-enslaved Black people in the post-Civil War South through cycles of debt and forced labor.
  
• The Social Security Act initially and intentionally excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Those were jobs held by 80% of Black workers.
  
• The GI Bill after WWII fueled suburban growth, but redlining and banking discrimination blocked Black veterans from accessing most of its benefits.

“These policies let White families accumulate and pass down wealth while Black families were left with nothing,” Dean noted. “That’s why we’re talking about reparations not just for slavery, but for everything that’s happened since.”

Defining Reparations

Advocates stress that reparations are not ordinary public policy. As Dean put it: Affirmative Action isn’t reparations, nor are other public programs, even if they disproportionately help Black people.

Under Dean’s definition, “if it’s not exclusively for Black people and not controlled by Black people, it’s not reparations.”

Reparations can take many forms:

• Direct payments or cash transfers
• Land grants or housing funds
• Community development trusts
• Tax relief
• Scholarships and free education
• Healthcare access

Cities like Evanston, Illinois, have already implemented programs. Evanston initially gave $25,000 housing grants to individuals who had faced housing discrimination, or their descendants. The funds could be used for down payments on homes or for home improvements. Eventually the program was expanded to allow eligible Black families to use the funds however they chose.

From Congress to Local Commissions

On the federal level, Congressman John Conyers introduced HR 40 every year from 1989 until his retirement in 2017. In 2021, the bill finally passed out of committee, but Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, a Black congressman from South Carolina, never brought it to the floor.

They feared it would cost Democrats the Midterm Elections — but they lost anyway. Although he was pushed, President Biden declined to issue an executive order to establish a federal reparations commission.

President Obama also never took action on a reparations bill of any kind.

Meanwhile, local efforts are gaining ground. Dozens of cities and states, including California, Evanston, and now Kansas City.

Looking Forward

Whether through direct payments, land, or targeted investments, one truth is clear — the question is no longer whether reparations deserve a place in America’s conversation, but when and how the nation will finally act.