Slavery reparations may be the single most divisive idea in American politics. Advocates have spent decades calling on the U.S. government to assess how such a policy could be implemented and to enact a law that might offer financial restitution to the descendants of enslaved people. But minds are made up — according to a recent Associated Press poll, 74 percent of African Americans now favor reparation payments, while 85 percent of whites oppose them — and Congress seems unlikely to take up the matter. A 30-year-old bill that would study the issue, H.R. 40, has never reached a vote. Hearings this past June brought Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danny Glover and other leading proponents to Capitol Hill, and every Democratic presidential candidate except Mike Bloomberg has backed at least studying the idea. The public remains unmoved.
Yet, for some African Americans, reparations are within reach. In the past few years, several groups have found success pursuing restitution at the local level, instead of awaiting aid that the federal government is disinclined to give. New policies in Chicago and at Georgetown University suggest a specific set of conditions that could lead to action: an institution culpable in the past and still in existence; a discrete and identifiable population able to show that they or their ancestors suffered harm; and a community to fight on the claimants’ behalf. At the local level, activists have more immediate access to institutional pressure points, while decision-makers are often less shielded from criticism and thus more likely to yield.
That class of organizations can include cities and schools, as well as churches, the military and even corporations. Thus far, reparations payments from such institutions — whether realized or promised — have totaled in the tens of millions of dollars. And it could be just the beginning. All politics is local; for now, so are reparations.
The two institutions leading the way took very different approaches. In 2015, Chicago enacted a reparations ordinance covering hundreds of African Americans tortured by police from the 1970s to the 1990s. The law calls for $5.5 million in financial compensation, as well as hundreds of thousands more for a public memorial, and a range of assistance related to health, education and emotional well-being. Then, last spring, students at Georgetown University voted to create a fund that would raise $400,000 annually to benefit the descendants of almost 300 enslaved people sold by the college in the 1830s.