President Biden, the time for national reparations is now

When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a bill late last year to form a state task force to study slavery reparations, advocates won a hard-fought battle they had lost at the national level just four years earlier.

This victory in New York, following previous wins in Illinois and California, signals the future for reparative justice for the historic and ongoing harms of slavery may trickle up to, rather than down from, Washington. 

Reparations have been debated since the end of the Civil War, but many track the most recent national fight to Raymond Jenkins, a Detroit real estate broker known to his fellow advocates as “Reparations Ray.” 

Jenkins convinced Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that a study of slavery reparations was needed and that the U.S. Congress was the right body to take it up. As one activist put it to me, for a book coming out this month: “There’s a commission to find out if there are aliens in outer space, there’s a commission to find out if there’s life on Mars, there’s a commission to find out if dogs have four paws....This country stands up commissions all the time.” 

Starting in 1989, Conyers sponsored House Resolution 40 — so called to commemorate the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule to formerly enslaved people — to create a commission to study reparations, including financial and non-financial forms. And each session of Congress, a growing coalition of organizations, led by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the National African American Reparations Commission, backed the bill. 

One longtime activist for HR 40 said that the commission strategy was “a way in which we could talk about the issue [of reparations] and reel in support without people actually having to say ‘I support reparations.’” But many in Congress remained unconvinced. So Conyers reintroduced the bill each successive session without successful passage. 

Despite its repeated failures, momentum slowly grew for a national study. By the turn of the century, the idea of a reparations commission had accumulated support in Congress and was backed for the first time by the Democratic Party in its 2000 platform.  

Nevertheless, activists found little help from Democrats in the White House.  

One HR 40 coalition leader recalled: “We were always told that during the eight years President Obama was in office, the word from House leadership was that there would be no discussion of HR 40 and reparations because it would be an embarrassment to the President.” Another said: “We did push for an executive order…We thought that [President Obama] would do it in his last two years, and he just refused to do it.” 

Congress remained the best path forward. 

After Conyers’s retirement from Congress in 2017, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) took up sponsorship of the updated resolution to create a commission to “Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The revised resolution now sought remedies to the problem, not merely a study. 

By 2020, the multi-racial coalition had grown to 350 organizations; while some in the movement thought its moment had arrived, opposition remained. That year, one poll showed just 20 percent of Americans supported reparatory action that involved cash payments to descendants of slavery. Though over 80 percent of African Americans voiced support, another poll from a year later showed that two-thirds of Americans overall opposed financial reparations, including 90 percent of Republicans. 

The murder of George Floyd that spring seemed to change everything.  

The nationwide protests that ensued to oppose police violence were a “groundswell” that “turned the clock,” according to one reparations advocate. Polling at the time showed three-quarters of Americans supported peaceful protests against police violence, including a small majority of Republicans. Joe Biden said in a Gettysburg speech: “I give you my word. If I’m elected president, I will marshal the ingenuity and goodwill of this nation to turn division into unity and bring us together.” 

When his representatives met with those of his opponent for the nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, to hash out the differences between the two candidates — the so-called 2020 Unity Task Force — they produced a report that in fact endorsed HR 40. And, after Biden and Kamala Harris won the election and assembled a team to advise on transition planning, several had supported reparations in the past, including Mehrsa Baradaran and Lisa Cook. 

Signs looked promising that 30 years of advocacy would finally pay off. 

Though they maintained a focus on Congress, advocates indicated that if they could get to the president-elect and his top advisers, maybe an executive order would happen on Day 1. Television personality Judge Greg Mathis shared a proposal for a reparations commission with the transition team, according to one activist, but interest seemed weak. Another reparations leader said “we had people at the table,” but the transition was “really being non-responsive.” Another met with the Biden-Harris transition team, but they’d only been given a minute and a half to make their case. 

When the 2020 transition ended, there had been no executive order to create an HR 40 commission (though there was a racial justice order signed on day one by the new president). One leading activist said it was a “great let down, great disappointment” and that it left advocates for HR 40 “feeling used, not honored.” Another activist agreed, saying that “we know from history that a lot of people depend on the Black vote who don’t necessarily turn around and reciprocate once they get in office.” 

President Biden is campaigning again, seeking out those very votes. While New York state has created a reparations task force, there’s much less national action to speak of. And, while the HR 40 bill moved out of committee in 2021, it remains stalled. 

It seems unlikely that Biden will now move to create a reparations commission, but the opportunity remains open to fulfill his promise from 2020 to address racial justice and heal the nation. Following the lead of the states is one way for the president to do this, especially having just recognized the Juneteenth holiday. Yet, after the Oklahoma state supreme court just rejected the claims for compensation made by survivors of the Tulsa massacres 100 years ago, it is national action that is now needed. 

Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at City University of New York, John Jay College and Grad Center, and is the author of “Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency.”