Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 19
III. Modern Calls for Reparations for Slavery
FROM LEGISLATION TO ACTIVISM
Over the past several years, the struggle for reparations
has received renewed national attention.
The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in
June 2019 on legislation — sponsored by Rep. Sheila
Jackson Lee (D–Texas) — that calls for the creation of a
commission to examine reparations for Black people to
remedy the harms of slavery and historic discrimination.1
Rep. Jackson Lee has continued the legislative struggle that
Rep. John Conyers embarked on when he first introduced
reparations legislation in 1989 and did so in every
congressional session until he retired in 2017.2
Sen. Cory Booker, then a Democratic presidential
candidate, introduced a Senate companion bill in 2019.
And other former Democratic presidential candidates— as
well as 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden — have
expressed support for studying reparations.3
Cities across the country are also considering reparations.
In Evanston, Illinois, the city council passed a resolution
in 2019 to pay reparations to the city’s Black population
through a sales tax on cannabis. The city has created a
reparations fund for the $10 million it plans to collect over
the course of a decade; this money will pay Black residents
who lived in the city from 1919 to 1969 — or their
descendants — $25,000 to buy a house. The city’s Black
residents, according to Evanston Alderman Rue Simmons,
made up more than 70 percent of local marijuana arrests
despite making up less than 17 percent of the population.4
It’s important to note, however, that the contemporary
reparations movement is the continuation of a long
struggle.
that the demand for reparations in the U.S. for unpaid
labor during the enslavement era and post-slavery
discrimination is not novel or new,” she wrote in a column
recounting the long struggle for reparations. “Although
there have been hills and valleys in national attention to
the issue, there has been no substantial period of time
when the call for redress was not passionately voiced.”5
The “first formal record” for reparations, Taifa noted,
took place in 1783 when Belinda Royall petitioned the
Massachusetts General Assembly to request a pension
from the estate of her former enslaver and ended up
receiving 15 pounds and 12 shillings.6
In the late 1890s, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief,
Bounty and Pension Association, founded by Callie House
and Rev. Isaiah Dickerson, called for “compensation for
slavery from federal agencies.”7 At one point, the group
had a membership that numbered in the hundreds of
thousands.8
“Queen Mother” Audley Moore played a central role
in leading and influencing the modern reparations
movement. Born in 1898, Moore was the president of
the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women when
she “presented a petition against genocide and for selfdetermination, land, and reparations to the United
Nations” in 1957 and 1959.9 She remained “active in every
major reparations movement until her death” in 1997.10
In 1987, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations
in America (N’COBRA) was founded “for the purpose
of broadening the base of support for the long-standing
reparations movement.”11
Nkechi Taifa is an attorney and longtime reparations
activist. “I feel it critical that the populace understands
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