By William L. Anderson

Since the 1960s, when racial turmoil exploded in the United States, there have been reparations demands, with groups representing black Americans calling for massive wealth transfers from whites and other economically successful ethnic groups to account for black chattel slavery in the US and the policies of Jim Crow. For example, during their heyday in the 1960s, the Black Panthers in 1966 called for a number of measures, including reparations, to bring about what they saw as justice. They included:

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

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 slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities.

Nearly a half-century later, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic in which he chronicled more than a century of racial discrimination for American blacks, looking at the life of one man, Clyde Ross, who spent his early years in Mississippi, where lynchings were common and there was little legal protection for blacks:

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

When Ross moved to Chicago, he and his family had to deal with “redlining” and other discriminatory practices that made home ownership more difficult for blacks than whites. Coates writes:

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family........

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