Reparations debate: Mending the past, forging the future – By Peter Grier (CS Monitor) / June 16, 2023
Does the United States owe Black Americans compensation of some kind for the brutality of slavery and the lingering effects of segregation and other forms of racial discrimination?
That question has divided U.S. politics and public opinion since the end of the Civil War, when Gen. William Sherman authorized the distribution to formerly enslaved Black people of 400,000 acres of land seized from white slave owners, only to see his order rescinded by President Andrew Johnson.
Today, those in favor of reparations argue that slavery was the foundation of much of the nation’s antebellum wealth. By 1836, almost half of U.S. economic activity derived directly or indirectly from slave-produced cotton, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.” At emancipation, enslaved people represented the most valuable asset in America, “$3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined,” Mr. Coates told a House panel in 2019 testimony.
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