Panel OKs slavery redress measure
Jackson Lee-led effort gets first vote in House
WASHINGTON — Thirty-yearold legislation that could lead to reparations for slavery received a vote for the first time on Wednesday night as a House committee advanced the measure, now championed by U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston.
The bill — titled HR 40 in a nod to the broken post-Civil War promise of 40 acres and a mule to Black Americans who were enslaved — would establish a 13-member panel to propose to Congress ways to redress the wrongs of slavery, as well as subsequent racial and economic discrimination and their lingering effects.
The legislation’s aim goes be
yond payments, Jackson Lee said. Its goal is to “bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African Americans and to make America a better place.”
“To merely focus on finance is an empty gesture,” she said. “We’re asking people to understand the pain, the violence, the brutality … of what we went through. And of course we’re asking for harmony, reconciliation, reason — to come together as Americans.”
The vote, 25-17, is the latest sign that the concept of reparations for slavery is gaining momentum — especially among Democrats — as the U.S. continues to grapple with systemic racism highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent slayings of Black Americans including Daunte Wright and former Houston resident George Floyd.
Republicans opposed the legislation, saying the findings of the committee it established are a foregone conclusion. U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said reparations would “take money from people who were never involved in the evil of slavery and give it to people who were never subject to the evil of slavery.”
The bill was first proposed in 1989 by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. Jackson Lee has led the effort since he retired in 2017. In 2019, the proposal received its first-ever hearing in the judiciary committee, but the panel did not take a vote on it then.
Now the proposal has the backing of key Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Still, it’s unclear how far it may go, as Republicans and some Democrats oppose it. Jackson Lee said she is confident it will get a vote on the floor of the House.
The bill calls for the commission to study not just the enslavement of some 4 million Africans and their descendants in the U.S., but also the decades of discrimination against Black Americans that followed, including in housing, education, and labor. The commission would also weigh the “lingering negative effects … on living African Americans and on society in the United States.”
The panel would have a year to propose “appropriate remedies,” as well as ways to “advance racial healing, understanding, and transformation.”
While the scale of the undertaking the bill proposes would be new, there is precedent for reparations in the U.S. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation authorizing $20,000 each to more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.
There are differing views on what reparations for Black Americans might look like. William A. Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University who has written a book on reparations, has estimated it would take at least $10 trillion to close the wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans.
“If this is about the full ramifications on Black wealth, about the destruction of entire businesses or neighborhoods, or the deprivation and loss of land, then we are talking about numbers that are far beyond the reach of what are relatively small programmatic initiatives,” Darity told the New York Times.
The Biden White House, meanwhile, has framed some of its earliest priorities as aimed at tackling systemic racism.
The president’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan includes proposals designed to boost communities of color, including replacing lead pipes more common in those communities, bolstering neighborhoods most prone to flooding against severe weather and investing in research and development at historically black colleges.