More than 100 US political leaders, including Missouri’s governor, have ancestors who were slaveholders

MAKING AMENDS: From Belinda Royall to Cori Bush

The idea of paying reparations or making other amends for slavery and discrimination has a long history in the United States.

1783: A freedwoman named Belinda Royall asks the Massachusetts legislature for reparations and is granted a pension of 15 pounds, 12 shillings out of the estate of the man who had enslaved her.

1865: Months before the U.S. Civil War ends, federal legislation calls for land to be leased or sold in 40-acre parcels to people who had been enslaved, reminiscent of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s field order authorizing the redistribution of land confiscated from or abandoned by Confederates to the newly emancipated. But white Southerners abandoned little land, and Congress didn’t provide funds to buy land for freedmen.

1868: The 14th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866, is ratified by the states. It grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — including the formerly enslaved. It provides that they cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process, and that they are entitled to equal protection of the laws.

1878: Henrietta Wood wins $2,500 for lost wages and loss of freedom in a lawsuit she had brought in Ohio against an Ohio deputy sheriff who had engineered a kidnapping that led to her enslavement. Wood had been born into slavery in Kentucky, freed by a slaveholder who took her to Ohio, then lured back to Kentucky and enslaved again in 1853.

1890: At the urging of Nebraska businessman Walter Vaughan, a Democrat and the son of slaveholders, Republican U.S. Representative William J. Connell introduces a bill proposing the federal government provide pensions to those formerly enslaved. Although the bill fails, Vaughan keeps publicizing an idea that he sees primarily as a way to inject cash into the South’s struggling economy.

1898: U.S. Representative Jeremiah D. Botkin, a Kansas Democrat, introduces a bill to provide individuals who were formerly enslaved 40 acres of land and families 160 acres. The proposal, which also would have provided cash payments, fails to pass.

1915: Callie House, a formerly enslaved person inspired by a pamphlet produced by Nebraska businessman Walter Vaughan, works with attorney Cornelius Jones to sue the U.S. Treasury Department, arguing the federal government had benefited financially via taxes from the sale of cotton produced by the enslaved. The suit estimates the federal government had collected $68 million in taxes that should be returned to the formerly enslaved. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals dismisses the suit, saying the government cannot be sued without its permission.

1960: In a speech in Boston, Malcolm X declares the United States must “compensate us for the labor stolen from us,” calling for land.

1961: The term “affirmative action” is used in an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy instructing federal contractors to ensure that applicants are treated equally. While some point to affirmative action as a way to address the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, others note it does little for Black Americans who are unable to benefit from the concept in higher education and jobs.

1966: The 10 Point Program of the Black Panther Party includes: “We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for enslaved labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities.”

1968: The Republic of New Africa, a Black nationalist group, calls for $400 billion in reparations for slavery.

1969: James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee stands at the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York to demand that “white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism” pay $500 million in reparations to be spent on a land bank for Black farmers, publishing houses and TV networks to provide jobs and a voice for Black Americans, and other projects.

1972: Mayor Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, U.S. Representative Charles C. Diggs. Jr. of Michigan, and poet and playwright Amiri Baraka are among the organizers of a National Black Political Convention in Gary. More than 2,000 voting delegates adopt a final declaration that includes a call for a majority-Black commission to determine how to calculate and distribute reparations “in terms of land, capital and cash.”

1973: Yale law professor Boris Bittker, working with editor Toni Morrison, publishes “The Case for Black Reparations.”

1987: The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations, known as N’COBRA, is founded.

1989: Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and an African-American, first introduces House Resolution 40 — the figure refers to “40 acres and a mule” — proposing a federal commission to study reparations for slavery and its legacy. Conyers introduces H.R. 40 at every congressional session until his retirement in 2017, after which Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who is Black, continues to introduce the bill.

1993: A conference in Nigeria sponsored by an Organization of African Unity (OAU) reparations committee concludes the impact of slavery and the slave trade damaged lives “of contemporary Africans from Harlem to Harare” and economies worldwide. The final declaration urges the OAU — precursor to the African Union — to call for reparations that could take such forms as capital transfers and debt cancellation.

1994: Florida legislators authorize payments of $150,000 for each of the nine survivors of a 1923 attack by white people that killed at least six people and destroyed the Black community of Rosewood; a $500,000 pool of funds for their descendants; and individual $4,000 scholarships for the youngest generation of descendants of the victims.

2000: Randall Robinson, who had gained prominence as an anti-apartheid campaigner and a co-founder of the TransAfrica Forum think tank, publishes “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.” He argues that “the appeal here is not for affirmative action, but, rather, for just compensation as an entitlement for the many years of heinous U.S. government-empowered wrongs and the stolen labor of our forebears.”

2001: Conservative author David Horowitz places advertisements in U.S. college newspapers detailing “ten reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea – and racist too.” Among his points, he argues that the claim that all African-Americans suffer from the economic consequences of slavery and discrimination is “unsubstantiated” and that reparations have already been paid in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences in jobs and education.

2006: A faculty, student and administrator committee appointed by Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons releases a report detailing ties to slavery of several Brown founders and benefactors. The university later takes such steps as offering free tuition to graduate students in the field of education who pledge to serve in public schools in Providence and surrounding areas, and creating a $10 million permanent endowment to support education in Providence.

2007: State lawmakers in Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia formally apologize for slavery and, in the case of North Carolina and Virginia formally apologize for slavery and, in the case of North Carolina, for Jim Crow. Virginia was the first U.S. state to make such an apology.

2008: State lawmakers in New Jersey and Florida formally apologize for slavery.

2014: Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates publishes “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic.

2015: The president of Georgetown University creates a working group on the ties to slavery of the Catholic university, whose future had been secured by the sale in 1838 of 272 men, women and children who had worked on a Jesuit plantation. After the working group is formed, Jesuits vowed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the people the Catholic religious order owned and to promote racial reconciliation.

2019: Descendants of African American sharecroppers murdered in 1919 by a white mob in Elaine, Arkansas, gather in Elaine to commemorate the massacre and call for reparations, including the return of land that passed into white hands after the killings.

2020: The Denver Black Reparations Council gives its first grant to TeaLee’s Tea House and Bookstore, a Black-owned business, helping the owner stay in business after her husband died. The council is funded by Reparations Circle Denver, which fundraises among white people.

2021: The city council of Evanston, Illinois, votes 8-1 to begin distributing $400,000 to eligible Black residents through $25,000 grants for home repairs, down payments or mortgage payments in reparation for the lasting damage from decades of segregation and discriminatory practices.

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signs the Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program. It requires that five universities that profited from enslaved labor provide scholarships to the descendants of the enslaved.

2022: An Oklahoma judge rules the three known living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white mob murdered scores of Black Tulsans and razed much of a Black neighborhood, can proceed with a lawsuit seeking reparations. The suit seeks such remedies as a 99-year tax holiday for Tulsa residents who are descendants of victims of the massacre in the neighborhood of Greenwood. The judge also rules that six descendants of victims cannot seek reparations.

The deed to beachfront property in the city of Manhattan Beach, California, that had been taken in 1924 from Willa and Charles Bruce, an African-American couple, is returned to their heirs. What had been a Black resort in then-segregated Los Angeles County was taken by Manhattan Beach officials, ostensibly to build a park. Activists and politicians said the real motivation was racism. A state law in 2021 approved returning the land to the Bruces’ heirs.

Church leaders in Forsyth County, Georgia, after consultation with Black community members, establish a scholarship fund open to descendants of those Black families violently driven out of the county in 1912 after six Black men were accused in the assault of a white woman.

Harvard University announces it is setting aside $100 million for an endowment fund and other measures to close the educational, social and economic gaps that are legacies of slavery and racism.

Boston creates a Reparations Task Force to develop proposals to provide reparations to Black residents to make amends for slavery and racial discrimination.

2023: Final recommendations are approved by California’s governor-appointed Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The recommendations include suggested formulas to determine cash reparations and a call for state lawmakers, who will make the final decision on whether reparations should be made and if so what that would entail, to issue a formal apology for the state’s role in perpetuating discrimination against African Americans.

U.S. Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, introduces House Resolution 414, which says that the United States “has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.” It says economists have calculated that reparations to close the racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans would be, at a minimum, $14 trillion. — Donna Bryson, Reuters