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The Case for Reparations

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Summary: “the case for reparations”.

Ta-Nehisi Coates , a national correspondent for The Atlantic , published the essay “The Case for Reparations” in that magazine’s June 2014 issue. It was widely acclaimed and, according to the Washington Post , set a record at the time for the most-viewed article in a single day on The Atlantic website. The essay earned Coates a George Polk Award for commentary in 2014.

In the essay, Coates examines the idea of the United States government paying reparations to African Americans for the harm they sustained due to slavery and subsequent discrimination. He argues it is necessary for three reasons: (1) the loss of free will and destruction of families, (2) the wealth stolen by white people from African Americans, and (3) a kind of spiritual closure for all Americans—what the author calls “America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence” (Part X). Of the three, the essay focuses most on the stolen wealth of African Americans.

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Coates begins with the story of a man named Clyde Ross , who was born in Mississippi in 1923. Ross’s family was victimized by the white establishment in that state: A mysterious case of “back taxes” materialized that crippled his family financially; a horse that Ross loved, which his parents gave him, was forcibly taken by whites for minimal compensation; Ross lost a chance to attend a better school because he could not ride the school bus that was available only to white children; and, because they were sharecroppers, the income Ross’s family earned on the cotton they grew depended entirely on the arbitrary price white landowners decided to pay each year.

After serving in the army and fighting in World War II, Ross moved north to Chicago in 1947. He got a steady job, raised a family with his wife, and enjoyed freedoms not available in the Jim Crow South. In 1961, however, when he and his wife wanted to buy a house, only a “contract sale” was available to them. Unlike a mortgage, in which one received a federally backed loan from a bank, contract buyers purchased a home directly from owners—all of whom in this case were white.

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Such arrangements were notorious in Chicago for the disadvantageous terms the buyers had. For starters, the purchase price would be wildly inflated. The owner of Ross’s house, for example, had purchased it half a year earlier for $12,000; Ross paid $27,500. African Americans did not have access to traditional mortgages because of “redlining”: Maps drawn up by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in which neighborhoods where African Americans lived—colored on the maps in red—were considered high risk and denied insurance. No bank would issue a mortgage without this insurance. Thus, African Americans were systematically excluded from the greatest means of producing wealth available to the middle class: home ownership . Coates focuses on the resulting “wealth gap” between whites and African Americans when advocating for reparations.

Coates argues that a tremendous transfer of wealth—he uses the word “plunder”—from African Americans to whites has taken place throughout American history. When slavery was legal, the economic value generated by slave labor went entirely to slave owners and the government. Much of this economic value was generated in cotton production during the 19th century: “In 1860, there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country” (Part IV). Profits from cotton were not confined to the South. The mills that processed the fibers and produced clothing were largely in the North. Beyond stolen labor, whites benefited financially from insurance policies on slaves, and the taxing and notarizing involved in slave sales.

After slavery ended, the plunder continued. In the Jim Crow South, black citizens lived largely outside the protection of the law. Whites could and did take their property at will through means that were shady at best, illegal at worst; the story of Clyde Ross testifies to this. Moreover, these robberies weren’t merely attributable to contemptible individuals. The federal government also aided in the creation of the wealth gap between blacks and whites. Many New Deal programs, often considered some of the most progressive in the nation’s history, explicitly excluded African Americans. Coates focuses on the FHA and the housing market, but he notes similar policies extended to programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the GI Bill.

Coates also argues that the loss of free will imposed on slaves and the destruction of their families warrants reparations. As slaves, African Americans could make no decisions about where or how they lived. Families were split up by selling individual members to owners who lived far way. “In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder” (Part IV). Not incidentally, this contributed to the economic gain of whites at the expense of blacks, since it was financially beneficial to use each slave’s labor where the most gain could be made.

Again, this continued after slavery ended. Jim Crow laws denied African Americans the full range of citizenship, and the lives of African Americans were in constant danger through lynching and other kinds of assault. What’s more, families could still be split up: One of Clyde Ross’s brothers was detained after having an epileptic seizure, sent to a Mississippi state prison called Parchman Farm, and never seen again. When the family went to take him home, they were told he died; when they asked for the body, they were told he had already been buried.

A third argument for reparations is that it could have a positive effect on the United States to come to terms with its full history, warts and all. Coates argues that “[t]o celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte” (Part IX). If Americans claim ownership of the celebrated aspects of their past like democratic institutions, they need to likewise take responsibility for the negative aspects. A model for such a national reckoning is that of West Germany paying reparations to Israel in the 1950s for the crimes committed in the Holocaust, an example of “how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name” (Part X). 

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Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

By The New Yorker

It’s not often that an article comes along that changes the world, but that’s exactly what happened with Ta-Nehisi Coates, five years ago, when he wrote “ The Case for Reparations ,” in The Atlantic . Reparations have been discussed since the end of the Civil War—in fact, there is a bill about reparations that’s been sitting in Congress for thirty years—but now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination are a subject of major discussion among the Democratic Presidential candidates. In a conversation recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick spoke with Coates, who this month published “ Conduction ,” a story in The New Yorker’s Fiction Issue. Subjects of the conversation included what forms reparations might take, which Democratic candidates seem most serious about the topic, and how the issue looks in 2019, a political moment very different from when “The Case for Reparations” was written.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Ta-Nehisi, for those who may not have read the article five years ago, what, exactly, is the case that you make for reparations—which is a word that’s been around for a long, long time?

The case I make for reparations is, virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. I think what has often been missing—this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014—that behind all of that oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued well into the period of, I would make the argument, around the time of the Fair Housing Act.

So what year is that?

That’s 1968. There are a lot of people who—

But you’re not saying that, between 1968 and 2019, everything is hunky-dory.

I’m not saying everything was hunky-dory at all! But if you were speaking to the most intellectually honest dubious person—because, you have to remember, what I’m battling is this idea that it ended in 1865.

With emancipation and the end of the war?

With the emancipation, yes, yes, yes. And the case I’m trying to make is, within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.

A lot of your article was about Chicago housing policy. It was a very technical analysis of housing policy. When people talked to me about the article—and I could tell they hadn’t read it—“So, Ta-Nehisi’s making a case for”—no, no, no, I said. First and foremost, it’s a dissection of a particular policy that’s emblematic of so many other policies.

Right, right. So, out of all of those policies of theft, I had to pick one. And that was really my goal. And the one I picked was housing, was our housing policy. Again, we have this notion that housing as it exists today sort of sprung up from black people coming north, maybe not finding the jobs that they wanted, and thus forming, you know, some sort of pathological culture, and white people, just being concerned citizens, fled to the suburbs. But beneath that was policy! The reason why black people were confined to those neighborhoods in the first place, and white people had access to neighborhoods further away, was because of political decisions. The government underwrote that, through F.H.A. loans, through the G.I. Bill. And that, in turn, caused the devaluing of black neighborhoods, and an inability to access credit, to even improve neighborhoods.

Now, your article starts with someone who lived through these racist policies, a man named Clyde Ross. Tell us the story of Clyde Ross. How did he react to the article?

So, Mr. Ross was living on the West Side of Chicago.

He started out in Mississippi.

Started out in Mississippi, in the nineteen-twenties, born in Mississippi under Jim Crow. His family lost their land, had their land basically stolen from them, had his horse stolen from him. He goes off, fights in World War II, comes back, like a lot of people, says, “I can’t live in Clarksdale[, Mississippi]—I just can’t be here. I’m gonna kill somebody or I’m gonna get killed.” Comes up to Chicago. In Chicago, all of the social conventions of Jim Crow are gone. You don’t have to move off the street because somebody white is walking by, doesn’t have to take his hat off or look down or anything like that, you know. Gets a job at Campbell’s Soup Company, and he wants the, you know, the last emblem of the American Dream—he wants homeownership. Couldn’t go to the bank and get a loan like everybody else.

And he was making a decent wage.

Read the author’s short story in the 2019 Fiction Issue.

Making a decent wage—enough that he could save some money, enough for a down payment. And obviously he has no knowledge—none of us really did, at that point—of what was actually happening, of why this was. No concept of federal policy, really. And so what he ends up with is basically a contract lender, which is a private lender who says, Hey, you give me the down payment, and you own the house. But what they actually did was they kept the deed for the house. And you had to pay off the house in its entirety in order to get the deed. Although you were effectively a renter, you had all of the lack of privilege that a renter has, and yet all the responsibilities that a buyer has. So, if something goes wrong in the house, you have to pay for that. And so these fees would just pile up on these people, and they would lose their houses, and you don’t get your down payment back. Clyde Ross is one of the few people who was able to actually keep his home.

There’s such a moving moment in the piece where he’s sitting with you and he admits, “We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” and felt that his ignorance had extended to his understanding of life in America, in Chicago, which had seemed, to use the phrase of the Great Migration, the Promised Land.

Right, right. And he felt like a sucker. And he felt stupid, just as anybody would. And I don’t think he knew, on the level, the extent to which the con actually went. And then living in a community of people—and this was somebody getting a piece—but living in a community of people who were being ripped off. And they couldn’t talk about it to each other because they wanted to maintain this sort of façade, or this front, that they owned their homes, not that somebody else actually held the deed. And so for a long time there was a great period of silence about it.

Did Mr. Ross react to your piece?

Yeah, he did.

What did he say?

He said reparations will never happen.

So, in the aftermath of the piece—piece comes out, fifteen thousand words in The Atlantic , tremendous interest in it. You said this about the piece, I think it was in the Washington Post . You said, “When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing.” What did you mean?

Well, I mean, it was a Dave Chappelle joke , you know? And what the joke was was, if black people got reparations, all the silly, dumb things that they would actually do.

You know, buy cars, buy rims, fancy clothes, as though other people don’t do those things. And once I started researching not just the fact of plunder but actually the history of the reparations fight, which literally goes back to the American Revolution—George Washington, when he dies, in his will, he leaves things to those who were enslaved. It wasn’t a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something you might actually owe them something. It really only became foreign after the Civil War and emancipation. And so this was quite a dignified idea, and actually an idea there was quite a bit of literature on. And the notion that it was somehow funnier, I thought, really, really diminished what was a serious, trenchant, and deeply, deeply perceptive idea.

If you visited Israel between the fifties and a certain time, you would see Mercedes-Benz taxis all over the country, and you’d wonder. This is not a particularly rich country, at least not yet. This was reparations—this was part of the reparations payment from Germany to Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Second World War. What do reparations look like now?

Right, because they gave them vouchers to buy German goods, right.

What’s being asked for? The rewriting of textbooks, the public discussion—what? In terms of policy, how do you look at it?

So first you need the actual crime documented. You need the official imprimatur of the state: they say this actually happened. I just think that’s a crucial, crucial first step. And the second reason you have a commission is to figure out how we pay it back. I think it’s crucial to tie reparations to specific acts—again, why you need a study. This is not ‘I checked black on my census, therefore’—I’ll give you an example of this. For instance, we have what I would almost call a pilot, less significant reparations program right now, actually running in Chicago. Jon Burge, who ran this terrible unit of police officers that tortured black people and sent a lot of innocent black people to jail over the course of I think twenty or so years. And then, once he was found out, in Chicago there was a reparations plan put together with victims, [who] were actually given reparations. But, in addition to that, crucial to that, they changed how they taught history. You had to actually teach Jon Burge. You had to actually teach people about what happened. So it wasn’t just the money. There was some sort of—I hesitate to say educational, but I guess that’s the word we’d use—the educational element to it. And I just think you can’t win this argument by trying to hide the ball. Not in the long term. And so I think both of those things are crucial.

As of this moment, in 2019, there are more than twenty Democratic Presidential candidates running. Eight of them have said they’ll support a bill to at least create a commission to study reparations. What do you make of that? Is it symbolic, or is it lip service, or is it just a way to secure the black vote? Or is it something much more serious than all that?

Uh, it’s probably in some measure all four of those things. It certainly is symbolic. Supporting a commission is not reparations in and of itself. It’s certainly lip service, from at least some of the candidates. I’m actually less sure about [this], in terms of the black vote—it may ultimately be true that this is something that folks rally around, but that’s never been my sense.

Are there candidates that you take more seriously than others when they talk about reparations?

Yeah, I think Elizabeth Warren is probably serious.

In what way?

I think she means it. I mean—I guess it will break a little news—after “The Case for Reparations” came out, she just asked me to come and talk one on one with her about it.

This is five years ago, when your piece came out in The Atlantic ?

Yeah, maybe it was a little later than that, but it was about the time. It was well before she declared anything about running for President.

And what was your conversation with Elizabeth Warren like?

She had read it. She was deeply serious, and she had questions. And it wasn’t, like, Will you do X, Y, and Z for me? It wasn’t, like, I’m trying to demonstrate I’m serious. I have not heard from her since, either, by the way.

Have you talked to any candidates about it?

You published your article five years ago. Barack Obama was President. We are now in a different time and place. How would you place the reparations discussion in this moment?

Yeah, I think people have stopped laughing, and that is really, really important. Does it mean reparations tomorrow? No, it doesn’t. Does it mean end of the fight? No, it doesn’t. But it’s a step, and I think that’s significant.

Now, what would you like to see the outcome of a conversation, or the American equivalent of a South African study into American history, be?

A policy for repair. I think what you need to do is you need to figure out what the exact axes of white supremacy are, and have been, and find out a policy to repair each of those. In other words, this is not just a mass payment. So take the area that I researched. The time I wrote the article—less every day—the time I wrote the article, there were living victims, and are living victims, who had been denied—

Who were on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago.

Yeah! All over this country. People who had been deprived, who had been discriminated against. Set up a claims office. Look at the census tracts. Are those people actually still living there? You know, maybe you can design some sort of investment through resources. Maybe you can have something at the individual level, maybe you can have something at the neighborhood level, and then you would go down the line. You would look at education. You would look at our criminal-justice policy. You would go down the line and address these specifically and directly.

Is your job to just break the glass on a subject, the way you did with reparations, or is it your job to then follow through the way a scholar would for years thereafter?

That’s a great question.

Do you feel your work here is done, and now I’m moving on to the next thing, as you have with any number of subjects? Or do you have to sustain it? Is that on you?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. I would like to be able to move on. But I recognize that’s not entirely up to me.

No. Not at all. I just feel like, if you write an article on reparations that has the effect that it actually does, which I didn’t expect, it’s very hard to say. I have to conclude that I clearly have something to say, and a way of saying it, that can affect things. So, if that’s the case, what is your responsibility now? What right have you to say, “I’m done talking about this”? “Because I feel like it.” I don’t know that you get to do that. I’m actually, I feel myself to be very, very grounded in the African-American struggle, even though I’m not. I don’t consider myself an activist. When I think about writing that article, I think about all the people before me who’ve been making the case for reparations from street corners—One Twenty-fifth, in Harlem—and couldn’t get access to an august publication like that. And I think about how I got access, and it strikes me that you owe folks something. You don’t get to just do what you want.

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Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis pp 183–191 Cite as

Epilogue: The Case for Reparations

• Malcolm McLaughlin  

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, America was swept by an unprecedented wave of urban racial violence. Black communities came under attack by rampaging white mobs in city after city, large and small, North and South. Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921), to name only half a dozen of the more severe episodes, all witnessed brutal racist outbursts. Over the course of this period, hundreds of black men, women, and children were killed, thousands were displaced, and millions of dollars worth of property— homes and businesses—were destroyed. These horrific urban attacks exposed how little meaningful protection the rule of law in white-dominated society offered black communities: white mobs were usually not restrained and, often, race riots were actively supported by the local police or National Guard. Against the background of a historic upsurge in lynching and the locking into place of Jim Crow segregation, the race riots of this era represented a further and brutal layer of white supremacist oppression.

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Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation , Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 102–119.

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Alberto B. Lopez, “Focusing the Reparations Debate Beyond 1865,” in Tennessee Law Review , 69, 3 (Spring 2002), pp. 653–676.

See Michael D’Orso, Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood , New York, Putnam and Co., 1996.

Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 , Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1982, pp. 1–7,45–70.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill, “Creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Lynching,” in Law and Equality , XXI, 2 (Summer 2003 ), pp. 263–311.

James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America , New York and Houndmills, Palgrave MacMillan, 2003, pp. 147–152.

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McLaughlin, M. (2005). Epilogue: The Case for Reparations. In: Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978646_9

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You are here, disrupting the timeline: a new take on "a case for reparations".

When The Atlantic published “ The Case for Reparations ” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014, the essay’s rich weave of storytelling, data, analysis, and history—delivered through masterful writing and innovative digital graphics—had a major impact on both academic and popular discourse on issues of race in America. The idea of, and justifications for, financial reparations as repayment for the slavery and historic economic oppression of Black Americans are now central to our national discussion of race.

Among the scholars who have been influenced by “Reparations” is Andrew Boge, a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies and a member of the Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. As a critical race theorist, he appreciates, and has studied and taught, the ideas in the essay. But there’s another way of understanding the work that fascinates him—its rhetorical power.

“Looking at ‘The Case for Reparations’ from a rhetorical level offers a new way of understanding the work,” Andrew says.

How did Coates so persuasively argue his case that it changed the world? How did he construct a piece of popular journalism in a way that reflects, as well as imagines, a new model of power and identity? How did he so significantly alter how race and racism manifest in popular discourse?

While studying the work in a seminar with Professor Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Andrew started to zero in on an intriguing answer to these questions—Coates’s use of time and chronology. He has a scholarly essay exploring the idea about ready for peer-review and publication.

Andrew points out that instead of using a linear chronology—starting with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and moving forward year by year—“Reparations” jumps back and forth through time. It is filled with events that relate to each other not through chronological proximity, but in ways that illuminate deeper connections and shared themes among those events. The effect is a holistic picture of racism in America that is considerably more difficult to refute or ignore than if it had been presented as discrete events isolated in time.

When Andrew learned of the opportunity to pitch a project and apply for a summer fellowship with UI Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio , he went for it and was accepted. During the summer of 2020, he worked with staff at the studio to begin creating a digital “timeline” of all the events in “Reparations.” Of course, it couldn’t just be a linear timeline—to accurately reflect the essay, he needed to present them digitally jumping around in time.

When finished, the resulting project—"Disrupting the Reparations Timeline”—will be an interactive website, where a user can explore the essay’s content event by event, through podcasts, imagery, and text. When one hits the “next” button, instead of moving to the next event in chronological order, the timeline might jump back a century, or forward a decade, to an event that is connected thematically. This format allows for many different narratives to emerge from within the overarching one articulated by Coates.

See "Disrupting the Timeline" in Action:

Andrew hopes the digital timeline can be a new tool for teaching “A Case for Reparations.” As he refines the project, he also hopes the timeline will develop to not just focus on Coates’ prose, but expand to think about the call for Black reparations more broadly through the lens of time.

“It uses time as a resource for having conversations about the essay,” he says.

Andrew Boge, from Johnston, Iowa, by way of Hastings College in Nebraska, studies under the doctoral supervision of Darrell Wanzer-Serrano and Jiyeon Kang, with an expected completion date of 2023. He was a 2019 Obermann Public Good Fellow .

The Case for Reparations

By ta-nehisi coates, the case for reparations summary and analysis of part i: “so that’s just one of my losses”.

The article begins with three epigraphs. The first is from the Bible, specifically Deuteronomy 15, in which God instructs the people of Israel to free Hebrew slaves after they have served them six years, and to support them financially upon their emancipation, in remembrance of when they were slaves in Egypt. Second comes a quote from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government , which talks about how after someone is done wrong by another, they have the right to “seek reparation.” Finally, Coates closes the section on epigraphs with a quote from an enslaved person, who says that their labor and suffering has given them the right to American soil, and that they are determined to have it.

Part One begins with the story of Clyde Ross , an African-American man born near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1923. Early on in his childhood, his family was fairly well-off, owning a decently-sized farm, and wanting for almost nothing—except the full protection of the law. Jim Crow Mississippi, however, did not provide that, lynching more Black people than any other state between 1882 and 1968 and systemically denying African-Americans access to basic sociopolitical rights. The Ross family was no exception, as Mississippi authorities accused the family of having back taxes while the Ross family had no effective way to respond. The state seized their assets, and forced them to turn to sharecropping.

This was not uncommon practice, and like many other Black children at the time, Ross lost the opportunity for a better education because of the family's lack of funds. When he was ten, a group of white men forced him to sell his horse, an exertion of power that was among the first of many losses the Rosses would see in the coming years. Sharecropping was a fundamentally dishonest practice, where landowners would often make bales of cotton disappear, or suddenly change the landowner/worker profit split, leaving families almost destitute. Ross was shaped by this deep injustice as he grew older, and left as soon as he could by way of the military draft. When he returned home from service, he decided to become one of six million African-Americans that left the South over the course of the 20th century in what is called the Great Migration. He moved to Chicago and was enjoying his time there, relative to Mississippi.

In 1961, he and his wife bought a home in a community in North Lawndale, which was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood at the time. It seemed promising, but soon the Ross family found out that to be untrue. The boiler burst, which normally would be a straightforward issue for a homeowner. Only Ross was not a homeowner, having bought the home “on contract,” a predatory scheme where sellers would buy houses, sell them to people far in excess of their worth, but keep the deed until the contract is paid in full, rather than turning the deed over to the “homeowner” and being paid by the bank (who is then paid by the homeowner). Not only did Ross not own the house, but he could not acquire equity and would have to forfeit the house, the down payment, and the monthly payments if he missed a single payment.

This practice targeted Black families specifically, and financing an actual mortgage was near impossible for African-American families at the time. The government also furthered housing inaccessibility for the Black community, particularly through the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages based on a grading scale, one which rated neighborhoods with Black people, regardless of social class or percentage, as a “D,” making them ineligible for FHA support in a process referred to as redlining.

This process resulted in the ruin of countless Black families and made predatory lenders millions. In the wake of this, neighborhoods like North Lawndale became worse and worse. Despite feeling embarrassed about being taken advantage of, Ross nevertheless joined the Contract Buyers League in 1968, an organization designed to fight back against contract sellers.

The group used a variety of strategies, like spreading information and going to court, to fight against the unfair contract system. But notably, their fight wasn’t only for equality: they were “charging society with a crime against their community….They were seeking reparations.”

All three of the epigraphs Coates includes have a deep connection to the African American population. The first, a quote from Deuteronomy, is important with the context that many African American slaves drew parallels between their experience and that of Hebrew slaves living in Egypt— Harriet Tubman, for example, was also referred to as "Moses" and several sorrow songs (songs written in slavery) refer to Egypt as a comparable place of bondage. John Locke's Two Treatises on Government is one of the foundational political theories of the United States, and Locke is probably the political theorist with the biggest influence on the founding fathers. Finally, the last quote is from a formerly enslaved person. Taken together, it is striking that all three of these influential sources have explicitly mentioned reparations in some form.

Clyde Ross's childhood in the Jim Crow South is unfortunately not very unique. Living in Mississippi at the time, Black families were constantly subject to all different forms of legal and social harassment and subjugation. Though Coates does not say so explicitly, it's extremely likely that the back taxes claimed by the government were a false charge by the government. Important to understanding this is to understand that this action was not a one-off: the government was deeply, deeply corrupt as well as invested in preventing Black people from advancing. Ross's father's lack of literacy itself is a symptom of a society that purposefully made it harder for certain people to succeed because of their race. Ross tries to escape this injustice by moving to the North, only to find that Northern racism simply takes a different shape.

Contract selling was a manifestation of this other form of racism. While lynching, for instance, was extremely rare in the North, policies like contract selling, which intentionally targeted Black people, were pervasive. Because the FHA made it almost impossible for Black people to get mortgages, countless Black families were forced to rely on speculators, and the majority of people who bought homes on contract had to take on additional debt and still lost the homes the majority of the time. This dynamic was made possible by the public and the private sector working together. As seen in the illustrations in Coates' article, redlining still has profound effects on the demographics of Chicago in the present day.

The Contract Buyers League 's choice to seek restitution for damages puts them squarely in the reparations conversation. Although reparations remain extremely controversial, at their heart is the simple belief that society owes a community something material, beyond just an apology, for injustices committed.

The Case for Reparations Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Case for Reparations is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What does Ta-Nehisi Coates argue about the roots of American wealth and democracy

One of the key elements to understanding Coates' arguments is that the problems he describes are systemic, meaning that they can be present in multiple facets of society and that it is a problem faced by the vast majority of a group. For example,...

Why does Coates devote so much time to the story of CLyde Ross? In what ways do Ross's experiences reflect the experience of black Americans more generally?

Clyde Ross's childhood in the Jim Crow South is unfortunately not very unique. Living in Mississippi at the time, Black families were constantly subject to all different forms of legal and social harassment and subjugation. Though Coates does not...

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations, Sources

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The Case for Reparations study guide contains a biography of Ta-Nehisi Coates, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits case for reparations, five years after landmark essay

Coates, who wrote famed Atlantic piece about financial recompense for descendants of slaves, to testify alongside Danny Glover

When Ta-Nehisi Coates’s watershed essay The Case for Reparations was published in June 2014, the idea of financial recompense for the descendants of slaves was thrust to the forefront of US public discourse.

Coates’s 15,000-word article in the Atlantic contended that nearly every institution tied to American history, public and private alike, plundered resources and wealth from African Americans. This “piracy” overwhelmingly enriched white Americans while bolstering racist institutions, enabling oppression to continue from the civil war’s conclusion until the present.

Now, five years after Coates’s essay was published, the first congressional hearing on reparations in a decade will take place today, on 19 June, or Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the US. Coates and the actor Danny Glover, who has long voiced support for reparations, are poised to testify at the House hearing.

While it had some detractors, Coates’s essay nonetheless helped reframe the perception of reparations, which had for decades been considered a bold but fringe idea that was sometimes the punchline of jokes.

The former Democratic congressman from Michigan, John Conyers, first introduced a bill that sought to establish a reparations commission, with the aim to simply explore what a program might entail, three decades ago in 1989.

The legislation was reintroduced every congressional session with little to no progress.

“John Conyers tried for years to get a bill,” said the veteran civil rights campaigner the Rev Jesse Jackson. “But there has been a refusal even to study it. It’s only if you study it then you can begin to approximate reality.”

Black families have an average net worth of $17,100, a tenth of the average accumulated wealth of white households, according to US government statistics . Economists routinely point to the legacy of slavery as a starting point to explain the wealth gap.

Although Coates’s essay sparked waves of adulation in the media, less than two years later, during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary race, the issue was completely absent from debates.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders ruled out a program of targeted reparations during the campaign. It had also been overlooked by America’s first African American president, Barack Obama.

But this year, in a hotly contested primary season that has seen more than 20 candidates seek the Democratic nomination for president ahead of the 2020 election, the issue has risen to the surface once again.

Several Democratic presidential candidates have voiced support for the idea of compensating descendants of slaves, though their ideas on how it should be done vary dramatically . Sanders has staunchly opposed race-focused programs . Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have supported universal initiatives to help close the wealth gap for lower- and middle-income Americans. Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro have discussed a taskforce to study possible race-specific reparations. Marianne Williamson has mentioned a $100bn fund to pay slaves’ descendants directly.

Jackson, who campaigned on the issue during his runs for president in 1984 and 1988, insisted that this in and of itself was a positive, if long overdue, step forward.

“There was never an attempt to repair the damage done to a people,” Jackson said. “Even 40 acres and a mule was just talk. Even then, the few who got it were driven off their property.”

The Texas Democratic representative Sheila Jackson Lee, the resolution’s new sponsor following Conyers’ resignation , introduced the measure again in 2019. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, said in February that she favors a reparations study.

Booker has also secured at least one dozen co-sponsors for his Senate reparations bill, which would launch a commission to study slavery’s impact on African Americans – and come up with possible ways to repay descendants, according to the Root .

Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congressional representative of New York, supported reparations in a discussion with Coates this year.

Following a request for comment, an assistant to Coates said he wasn’t adding any more interviews to his schedule. But in a recent interview with the New Yorker , he expressed optimism about how the dialogue on reparations has shifted.

“I think people have stopped laughing, and that is really, really important,” Coates said. “Does it mean reparations tomorrow? No, it doesn’t. Does it mean end of the fight? No, it doesn’t. But it’s a step, and I think that’s significant.”

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Responsibility for Historical Injustices: Reconceiving the Case for Reparations

2006, Social Science Research Network

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