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The concept of reparations, which is compensation for injuries against a nation or people, was not a twentieth-century phenomenon among African Americans. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Callie House, a former slave from Tennessee, emerged as a leader in the movement to petition the U.S. government for pensions and reparations for African Americans formally held in involuntary servitude. Traversing the South, she organized the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association to build a reparation movement among former slaves. This movement met its demise after the U.S. attorney general charged House with using the mail to defraud people. Arrested in 1916 and later convicted, she was given a one-year prison term in 1917.

SNCC executive secretary James Forman issued the “Black Manifesto” insisting on reparations for African Americans (Fisk University).

The death of House’s movement did not terminate the call for redress for the inequities wrought by American slavery and Jim Crow laws, however. Reparations to blacks was a subject of debate in the early 1960s, when James Forman, executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, issued his “Black Manifesto” to white churches, Jewish synagogues, and racist institutions. Near the end of the 1960s, remediation to Japanese Americans revived African Americans’ demands to receive reparations for enslavement. In 1989 U.S. Representative John Conyers, an African American Michigan Democrat, introduced HR 40 to the House of Representatives; the bill would establish the Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African Americans. It failed to pass then and in every session of Congress since it was first introduced. However, in 1994 the state of Florida allocated $2 million to nine black survivors of the 1923 Rosewood race riot. In addition, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 recommended that survivors and their descendants be paid reparations. In 2000 Randall Robinson argued in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks that the United States owes major reparations to the descendants of slaves. Two years later, attorneys filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Deadria Farmer Paellmann against Fleet Boston Financial, the CSX Railroad firm, and Aetna Insurance Company, seeking reparations for the descendants of slaves in America. The suit charged the companies with conspiracy, human rights violations, unjust enrichment from their corporate predecessors’ roles in the slave trade, and conversion of the value of the slaves’ labor into profit. The concept of reparations, which had its beginnings in the nineteenth century to indemnify the descendants of American slaves, continues into the twenty-first century.

Linda T. Wynn

President Johnson ignored [Resurrection City] and Congress closed its governmental coffers.