![]() ![]() While Black Americans account for roughly 13 percent of the American population, they hold about 4 percent of America’s wealth. White households hold roughly 10 times more wealth than Black ones, similar to the gap in 1968. Research has found that the gap between white and Black Americans has not narrowed in recent decades. In recent years, reparations have often been discussed alongside the racial wealth gap, or the difference between wealth held by white Americans compared to that of other races. Leffler / Library of Congress Experts disagree on what reparations should look like A procession of protesters carrying signs for equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing and an end to bias in Washington, D.C., on Aug. and 75 percent in southern states who worked in these occupations,” according to policy think tank the Brookings Institution.Įxperts argue that such omissions from federal policy have not been fully corrected and have been magnified by widening health, education, employment and housing disparities, as well as a lack of access to capital.Ĭollectively, these historical and current disadvantages have led reparations proponents to argue that while slavery is where denials of wealth and equal rights began, the cumulative effects of both slavery and systematic federal denials of opportunity that followed continue to impact the descendants of enslaved people in the present. "The schools they were able to attend and houses they were able to buy were less valuable because they were black institutions and neighborhoods, respectively, in an economy that valued whiteness."Įxcluding domestic and farm workers from Social Security legislation effectively shut out 60 percent of Black people “across the U.S. "There were far fewer places they could attend school or purchase housing," Davis wrote. Under the GI Bill, for example, “mortgage and school tuition benefits extended to black soldiers were devalued due to state endorsed and enforced segregation,” law professor Adrienne Davis argued in a pro-reparations human rights brief published in 2000. In the 1930s and 1940s, Black Americans also continued to be denied opportunities to build wealth under federal programs that benefited white families and communities. A bus station in Durham, N.C., in May 1940. Discrimination was further entrenched through laws regulating every facet of Black life, including housing restrictions, legal segregation and racially motivated terrorism and lynchings. Darity recently co-authored a book on reparations with folklorist Kirsten Mullen titled “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”ĭarity added that calls for reparations are a “specific claim that is connected to the failure to provide the ancestors of today's living descendants who were deprived of the 40-acre land grants that they were promised.”Īfter the war and during the Reconstruction era, Black Southerners made political, social and economic progress, but these gains were quickly overturned. “Black families received no assets from the federal government while large numbers of white families received substantial assets as a starting point for building wealth in the United States” under the act, said William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University. For instance, the federal government passed the Homestead Act in 1862, granting 160-acre plots to applicants. Their demands received resistance from the federal government, which accused prominent pension supporters of fraud and ignored pension bills brought up in Congress.īut as the federal government denied land and resources to formerly enslaved people, it created new pathways for land ownership for white Americans. Dorothea Lange / Library of CongressĪfter the Civil War, formerly enslaved men and women also argued that their unpaid labor while in bondage entitled them to pensions. Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress A cotton sharecropper in Greene County, Ga., in July 1937. Cotton sharecroppers in Greene County, Ga., in June 1937. The majority of the land was returned to white landowners. Following President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, however, the order granting “40 acres and a mule” was swiftly rescinded by new President Andrew Johnson. Sherman ordered that land confiscated from Confederate landowners be divided up into 40-acre portions and distributed to newly emancipated Black families. ![]()
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