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Jan 29, 2024 · We know how slavery’s impacts live on today.”. [49] In Dec. 2023, New York joined California and Illinois in considering statewide reparations. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago became the first American city to actually issue reparations payments: housing grants up to $25,000.
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To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, discussion questions, and ways to take action on the issue of whether the U.S. federal government should pay reparations to descendants of enslaved people, go to ProCon.org.
Reparations are payments (monetary and otherwise) given to a group that has suffered harm. For example, Japanese-Americans who were interned in the United States during World War II have received reparations.
Arguments for reparations for slavery date to at least Jan. 12, 1865, when President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Union General William T. Sherman met with 20 African American ministers in Savannah, Georgia. Stanton and Sherman asked 12 questions, including: “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.” Appointed spokesperson, Baptist minister, and former slave Garrison Frazier replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”
On Jan. 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 that authorized 400,000 acres of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida to be divided into forty-acre plots and given to newly freed slaves for their exclusive use. The land had been confiscated by the Union from white slaveholders during the Civil War. Because Sherman later gave orders for the Army to lend mules to the freedmen, the phrase “forty acres and a mule” became popular.
However, shortly after Vice President Andrew Johnson became president following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on Apr. 14, 1865, he worked to rescind the order and revert the land back to the white landowners. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had confiscated 850,000 acres of former Confederates’ land. By mid-1867, all but 75,000 acres had been returned to the Confederate owners.
Other efforts and arguments have been made to institute or deny reparations to descendants of slaves since the 1860s, and the issue remains divisive and hotly debated. An Oct. 2019 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found 29% of Americans overall approved of reparations. When separated by race, the poll showed 74% of black Americans, 44% of Hispanics, and 15% of white Americans were in favor of reparations.
•Slavery led to giant disparities in wealth that should be addressed with reparations.
•Slavery left African American communities at the mercy of the “slave health deficit,” which should be addressed with reparations.
•No one currently living is responsible for righting the wrongs committed by long dead slave owners.
•The idea of reparations is demeaning to African Americans and would further divide the country along race lines.
•Reparations would be too expensive and difficult to implement.
This article was published on January 20, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source. Go to ProCon.org to learn more.
Feb 26, 2016 · A reparation is an act of compensation for a person or group of people who have been wronged. Although this can include monetary payment, Shepherd says reparations for slavery can also mean creating programs to improve the social and political lives of people whose family members were slaves. Why do people support the reparation process?
Mar 31, 2022 · A recent petition in 2021 from the Jamaican government seeking up to £7bn in reparations for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade was dismissed by the British High Commission on this ...
Jun 19, 2019 · In 1994, Florida became the first state to pass a reparations law acknowledging a need to confront an eruption of racist violence that government officials failed to stop. The law set aside $2 ...
Nov 27, 2023 · Reparation. noun. the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. Now, learn even more about reparations in terms of politics ...
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Mar 21, 2019 · In arguing for reparations, Prof Hamilton says the impact of slavery continues to manifest in American society. "The material consequence is vivid with the racial wealth gap. Psychologically, the ...
