From Here to Equality, Second Edition: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century

By William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469671215

William A. Darity Jr.

William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR FROM HERE TO EQUALITY

A timely and vital contribution to national discussions about reparations. . . . [Darity and Mullen] force readers to confront how anti-Black racism has impeded and continues to impede the financial well-being of African Americans and provide a blueprint for addressing these injustices.—Black Perspectives

A worthwhile compendium on an extremely important topic.

—Library Journal

This book underscores slavery’s deleterious impact on descendants of America’s four million enslaved persons emancipated in 1865. . . . [The authors] propose that Congress institute reparations for Black persons who can document that they had at least one enslaved ancestor in the United States after the formation of the republic. . . . Part history, part economics, and part advocacy, this book will appeal to a broad readership.—CHOICE

"An extraordinary accomplishment and a brilliant and provocative contribution to the current debate on reparations. From Here to Equality provides a genuinely novel and thoughtful solution that will propel this evolving, international political movement."—CRAIG STEVEN WILDER, PhD, author of Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

"Darity and Mullen have written a vital intellectual history and a roadmap for these times. Tragically, the nation continues to bequeath its original sin to yet another generation with a persistent unpaid debt and unearned privileges. The issue of reparations for African Americans has been long debated but not often enough seriously considered. This book is a glimmering exception. From Here to Equality is tautly written, fiercely argued, and passionately committed to the spirit and letter of freedom."—TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM, PhD, author of Thick: And Other Essays

"A powerful study of the long arc of injustice in America, From Here to Equality offers clear remedies for problems that fester in our nation because of slavery’s legacies. This beautifully written book is a game-changer, required reading for all who wish to understand the historical and contemporary reparations movement."—DAINA RAMEY BERRY, PhD, author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Here is a book the United States profoundly needs—one that places black Americans’ press for reparations within the context of a terse, honest account of our nation’s past. Bringing together well-known stories and willfully forgotten ones, Darity and Mullen present an altogether fresh vision of how we came to our present moment and of what should be done to drain the American abscess and heal. Reading the book leaves one inspired—no small feat considering the unflinching attention given to the most painful details of American history. A landmark work sure to inform national and international conversations in the decades to come.—PAUL FARMER, MD, Harvard University

"Against the contextual framework of the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow laws that arose from the abysmal failure of Reconstruction, From Here to Equality provides a compelling argument for Black reparations. This astonishing work by Darity and Mullen provides a cogent analysis of the various equations that are formulae for reparations proposals while tackling some of the movement’s most difficult and complex questions, like the issue of eligibility. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the movement and especially for those who are offended by the idea of Black reparations. Ultimately, this book dares us to take that step that will bring us closer to a serious reckoning with this nation’s greatest sin." —JOHN TATEISHI, author of Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations

Argued powerfully with quiet passion, this compelling case for reparations rests on a deep historical account of missed chances to remedy slavery, Jim Crow, and deep discrimination, and thus to overcome profound barriers to economic equality. Focusing on the immense racial wealth gap, the book’s detailed program demands attention and adjudication.—IRA KATZNELSON, PhD, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in America

Darity and Mullen present—with brilliant erudition—evidence that will catalyze the coming transformation of American moral values. —EUGENE RICHARDSON, MD, PhD, chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice

From Here to Equality

From Here to Equality

REPARATIONS FOR BLACK AMERICANS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

SECOND EDITION

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHORS

WILLIAM A. DARITY JR. AND A. KIRSTEN MULLEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2020 William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

Preface © 2022 William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Richard Hendel

Set in Utopia and TheSans by codeMantra, Inc.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Frontispiece: Memorial Corridor at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama. Photograph by Soniakapadia.

ISBN 978-1-4696-7120-8 (pbk. alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-7121-5 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

Names: Darity, William A., Jr., 1953– author. | Mullen, A. Kirsten (Andrea Kirsten), author.

Title: From here to equality : reparations for black Americans in the twenty-first century / William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046675 | ISBN 9781469654973 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469654980 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Reparations. | African Americans—Civil rights—History. | Income distribution—United States—History. | Slavery—United States—History. | Race discrimination—United States—History. | United States—Race relations—History.

Classification: LCC E185.89.R45 D37 2020 | DDC 323.1196/073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046675

To our sons, Aden and William—members of the fifth generation born since slavery was outlawed—and to our ancestors we have identified who were born enslaved and lived to see emancipation: Rachel King, Jane and Isaac Mullen, and Sallie Mullen (wife of Granville Spangler); Jennie Davenport; Nelson Strange, Letty Flippo Hart, Uriah Wise and Hannah Strange Berry Wise, Walker Taliaferro and Patsy Williams Taliaferro, and Rev. Walker Taliaferro; Millis Mitchell and Emily Williams Mitchell; Isham (Isom) Davenport and Annie Cotton Davenport; Tony Cooper and Bama Cooper and Jerry Battle and Charlotte Jenkins Battle; Harry Carloss and Betty Thompson Carloss and Nicholas Leach and Lucinda Pride Leach; and Nelson and Mahala Daugherty, Alfred and Phyllis Rhodes, Emanuel Darity and Caroline Rhodes, Andrew and Lynn Dardie, Logan Jesse Darity, and Robert Boddie and Lucy Mitchell Boddie

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: Standing at the Crossroads

PART 1

1: A Political History of America’s Black Reparations Movement

2: Myths of Racial Equality

PART 2

3: Who Reaped the Fruits of Slavery?

4: Roads Not Taken in the Early Years of the Republic

PART 3

5: Alternatives to War and Slavery

6: Race and Racism during the Civil War

PART 4

7: Rehearsals for Freedom

8: Radicals and Rebels

9: Seven Mystic Years (1866–1873)

PART 5

10: Sins of the Sons and Daughters

11: Beyond Jim Crow

PART 6

12: Criticisms and Responses

13: A Program of Black Reparations

With Gratitude

Appendixes

Notes

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

In the first chapter of this book, we provide a condensed overview of the history of the movement for black reparations in the United States. Our survey spans the period from the formation of the republic to the 2019 phase of the Democratic Party campaign for the presidential nomination. Then-candidates Marianne Williamson, Julian Castro, and Tom Steyer all explicitly endorsed African American reparations. Williamson’s willingness to take an affirmative stand on the issue was especially courageous. In addition, she was the only candidate to offer any specifics, calling for a maximum fund of $500 billion, albeit a sum far below the minimum we propose in the pages that follow.

Most of the remaining Democratic Party candidates took the more cautious step of expressing support for H.R. 40, legislation that would establish a commission to develop proposals for African American reparations deliverable to Congress. Unfortunately, as we argue below, H.R. 40 actually is a barrier rather than a path to true reparations.

Regardless, this round of interest in black American reparations appears more sustained than any point since the Reconstruction era. While the nation has not arrived at a political majority that approves of black reparations, there has been a marked growth in public and political support for it. In 2000, a national survey of 1,300 adults revealed that 59 percent of African Americans—but only 4 percent of white Americans—supported monetary compensation to African Americans whose ancestors were slaves.¹ By September 2019, a survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center found that black support had risen to 74 percent and white support to 15 percent for payment of reparations for slavery and racial discrimination in this country by making cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people.² Furthermore, a nationwide poll of 1,000 Americans taken in early 2021—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the international outcry over the police murder of George Floyd—points to an even greater proportion of Americans who now approve of cash payments as reparations to the descendants of slaves. Eighty-six percent of black respondents and close to 30 percent of whites endorsed such monetary payments. The same survey indicates that more than 55 percent of all Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine and close to 40 percent of those between the ages of thirty and fifty-four now agree the nation should pay black reparations.³

Notably, when the survey question has been worded to indicate that reparations will be funded by the U.S. taxpayer or with taxpayer money, both black and white support tends to be lower. In two surveys taken roughly a year apart that invoked financing of payments via taxes, the share of blacks in favor of reparations registered at 50 and 60 percent, respectively, and the share of whites registered at 10 and 12 percent, respectively.⁴ Evidently, invocation of taxpayer money leads respondents to visualize funds being taken out of their personal pockets and being placed in someone else’s pocket.

Of course, the propagandistic phrase taxpayer money tends to have the effect of stifling any new, substantial federal expenditure. In the final chapter of this book, where we outline our plan for reparations, we present a plan structured to avoid tax increases. We argue that the core issue with any major new federal spending initiative is whether it will have a significant inflationary effect, and we propose a design that will not result in a marked increase in prices and corresponding fall in the purchasing power of money.

While most reports on public opinion toward black American reparations emphasize the still substantial opposition, a shift in white support from 4 in 100 persons to 30 in 100 is a dramatic change. The trajectory is positive. Whether this support can be nurtured and sustained remains to be seen, but it does look like there is a much greater opportunity for redress than has been present at any previous point in our own lifetimes.

It is imperative that a plan for black American reparations be done correctly. Providing only partial redress for a debt 157 years overdue will be a disastrous lost opportunity. It may foreclose any possibility of ever doing it the right way.

What is the right way?

Four pillars constitute an effective plan for black American reparations: a strategy for determining eligibility, standards for dictating the amount to be paid, identification of the party responsible for making payment, and a plan stipulating the form in which payments will be made.

Who Should Receive Black Reparations?

Our premise in From Here to Equality is black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States are the community meriting reparations from the U.S. government. Their ancestors were captives—coerced, involuntary immigrants to the United States—and their ancestors were promised and denied forty-acre land grants as restitution. This forsaken promise is the basis for the debt owed to all subsequent descendants.

In conjunction with the provision of 160-acre land grants to 1.5 million white families, including new European immigrants, under the Homestead Act, the federal government made clear its intention to advantage white Americans and simultaneously deny black Americans the material foundation for full citizenship. The federal government created the basis for the racial wealth gap and maintained it with subsequent policies, including the New Deal and the GI Bill in the twentieth century.⁵ Today’s black-white wealth gap is estimated to be $840,900 per household based on data from the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).⁶

Moreover, as we observe in the introduction to this book, black American descendants of U.S. slavery have had to bear the burden of three phases of American racial injustice: slavery, American apartheid (Jim Crow), and the combined effects of present-day discrimination and the deprecation of black lives. This is the community owed reparations.

We utilize two criteria for eligibility we first introduced in print nearly two decades ago.⁷ The first criterion is a lineage standard: individuals must demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States. The second criterion is an identity standard: individuals must demonstrate on a legal document that they have self-identified as black, Negro, Afro-American, or African American at least twelve years before the enactment of an African American reparations plan or legislation enabling a study commission for African American reparations.

How Much Should Be Paid?

There are two potential approaches to calculating the appropriate amount due to a victimized community as restitution for grievous injustices. One approach is to enumerate the atrocities, assign dollar values to each, and then add them up. This strategy requires having an all-inclusive record of the harms and a method for assigning a cost to each category of harm. Given the suppression of a complete historical record of the injuries imposed on black American descendants of chattel slavery, this first approach is unrealistic and unsatisfactory.

An alternative is to identify a summary measure that captures the economic impact of the harms. We conclude in this book that the racial wealth disparity "is the best single indicator of the cumulative impact of white racism over time." Indeed, this differential establishes the minimum, or baseline, amount for the monetary bill for black reparations. Adjusting for the difference in black and white household sizes, the black-white disparity per individual is roughly $350,000. An equal payment to each of approximately 40 million black descendants of the 4 million persons emancipated in 1865 will require a total of at least $14 trillion.⁸

Note that we use the conventional average, or mean gap, to arrive at our calculation. Frequently, researchers and pundits examining racial wealth inequality focus on the median gap—the difference in wealth between black and white households at the middle of each group’s wealth distribution. At $164,100 in 2019, that difference was much smaller than the mean gap. The rationale is the median level of net worth better captures the more typical experience of members of each group because the median, unlike the mean, is unaffected by outlier values at either the upper or the lower ends of the distributions.

We argue instead that, when examining racial wealth inequality, the mean gap is the more salient measure of the disparity for two reasons: The first is the intense degree of concentration of wealth in the United States. White households with a net worth in excess of the white median—those with a net worth above that of the middle household in the white distribution—possess 97 percent of white-owned wealth. Targeting the median gap excludes from consideration an overwhelming share of white wealth.⁹ The second reason the mean gap is the more significant measure is that the huge concentration of wealth at the upper end of the distribution is not exclusively due to the presence of a handful of white billionaires. One-quarter of all white households—in contrast to only 4 percent of all black households—have a net worth in excess of $1 million.¹⁰

Furthermore, even though the dollar value of the disparity becomes explosively large at the upper end of the wealth distributions, significant relative differences in wealth exist at all points along the income distribution. For example, the Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the poorest white households, those in the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s income distribution, have a higher median level of wealth than all black households taken together. White households’ net worth is ten times that of black households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution.¹¹ Finally, the level of wealth held by members of the white working class consistently is two to three times higher than the level of wealth held by members of the black professional-managerial class. Racial wealth inequality is far from a mere product of class inequality.¹²

Who Should Pay?

We argue that the federal government must pay the debt because it is both the capable and the culpable party. Only the federal government has the financial wherewithal to meet a bill of at least $14 trillion. That capacity is evident in the substantial expenditures made to cope with the Great Recession in 2007–9 and the pandemic without any significant increase in taxes.

The combined budgets of all state and local governments in the United States amount to under $3.5 trillion. To reach the $14 trillion threshold these governments would have to devote all of their resources for more than four years to a fund for reparations, neglecting all normal services owed to their constituents—an impossibility.

Some individuals have advocated the creation of a private superfund to service the sum due to black American descendants of U.S. slavery. However, if private donors were to contribute $1 billion to a fund for reparations on a monthly basis, it would take more than a millennium for the fund to reach $14 trillion. Only the federal government has the ability to finance the sum necessary for black reparations.

In addition to capability, the federal government also has the responsibility for monetary redress as the culpable party. Federal practices, both action and inaction, built the racial wealth gap in the United States. In an article we prepared for the Economist, we emphasized four phases of American asset-building and asset-destroying policies that produced the chasm in wealth between black and white Americans: the Wagon Train period, the Blood Lust period, the Picket Fence period, and the Freeway period.¹³

The Wagon Train period refers to the phase of federal asset-building via land allocation, primarily during the late nineteenth century, under the Homestead Act of 1862. At the same time, the federal government forsook black Americans, depriving them of the conditions for full citizenship rights. Black families never received the promised forty acres, but white families received land grants four times as large in the western territories, while the nation completed its colonial settler project.

The Blood Lust period refers to the nearly 100 massacres by white terrorists that took place nationwide from the end of the Civil War to World War II during which black lives were taken and—directly relevant for the extension of the racial wealth gap—black-owned property was seized and appropriated by the mobsters. The Picket Fence period refers to the shift in the twentieth century from federal asset-building via land distribution to promotion of homeownership, executed in a highly discriminatory manner, disproportionately building white wealth at the expense of black wealth development.

Finally, the Freeway period refers to the federally funded construction of the interstate system primarily during the 1950s and 1960s when highways systematically were run through black neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Kansas City, Missouri; Charlotte and Durham, North Carolina; St. Paul, Minnesota; Miami, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, and Orlando, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina; Los Angeles, California; Camden, New Jersey; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As we observe in this book, the choice of location for an interstate highway led to the destruction of black business districts and stable black communities.

The nation’s formerly enslaved and their progeny consistently have been refused access to the monetary requirements enabling full citizenship in the United States. The refusal crystallizes in America’s black-white wealth gap, manufactured by federal policy. Hence the federal government is obligated to remedy the situation.

How Should Payments Be Made?

In keeping with other instances of restitution for atrocities, direct payments should be made to members of the victimized community. These cases include the German government’s remuneration to victims of the Holocaust and the U.S. government’s payments to Japanese Americans subjected to mass incarceration during World War II.

Significantly, the U.S. government even has elected to make monetary awards to victims of atrocities when the United States itself was not the perpetrator. These include compensation paid from the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund to families that lost loved ones during the September 1, 2001, terrorist attacks and the $10,000 approved for U.S. citizens for each of the 440 days they were held hostage in Iran from November 4, 1979, through January 20, 1981. The latter will amount to $4.4 million payments per captive.

The procedure should be no different with respect to black American descendants of U.S. slavery. The objective is to ensure that eligible recipients have full discretion over use of the monies, as others have in the precedents mentioned here.

Direct monetary payments need not exclusively take the form of cash transfers. As we point out, as a mechanism to ensure that payments function as an asset-building mechanism and to reduce the inflation risk, payments could take the form of less liquid assets—for example, annuities or endowments.

Indeed, some of the comprehensive reparations funds might go to community projects and economic development programs, although we do have concerns about place-based reparations, particularly in an environment of expanding gentrification. Consequently, we prioritize direct, uniform payments to eligible recipients because that is the only way to ensure that those who deserve reparations actually receive them.

Opposition to Black Reparations

Two major strands of raw opposition to reparations arise out of misperceptions. One category of misperceptions involves the causes of racial economic inequality, particularly racial wealth inequality. This set of false beliefs treats the source of black-white economic disparity as dysfunctional or self-defeating behaviors on the part of black Americans themselves. We devote the entirety of chapter 2 of From Here to Equality to a dissection of this array of inaccurate presumptions.

A second category of misperceptions involves the historical record of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, false beliefs driven by the sustained poisonous authority of Lost Cause ideology. The nation’s failure to de-Confederatize has left intact a mendacious image of dignity for the secessionists’ racist narratives about black ability, intelligence, and character, and outright lies about the nation’s nineteenth-century history—all reaffirming the nation’s commitment to white supremacy. We devote portions of chapter 3 and chapter 8 and all of chapter 12 of this book to refutation of these errors. These false beliefs, running in a straight line from the Confederate secession, energized the attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6, 2021.

Missteps

Blatant opposition represents an obvious obstacle to black reparations. But there are more subtle obstacles, additional barriers created by presumed supporters of redress. The first of these is the growing movement for so-called reparations at the local and state levels or financed by individuals and private organizations.

As we noted above, state and local governments’ efforts to fund a full reparations plan are destined to fall short of the mark. We estimate the city of Evanston, Illinois, which professes to have inaugurated the nation’s first municipal reparations plan, would require about $3.85 billion to close, independently, the $350,000 per capita racial wealth gap. The city’s annual budget is closer to $350 million.

Under its reparations plan, Evanston has appropriated $10 million, funding sufficient only to provide $25,000 housing vouchers to 400 of its 11,000 eligible black residents. The $25,000 vouchers, potentially going only to about 4 percent of Evanston’s population eligible for reparations, will fall $325,000 short of the amount required to erase the racial wealth gap, even for each lottery winner who receives a grant.

Asheville, North Carolina, has proposed to set aside $2.1 million for its reparations plan. Set that figure and the city’s annual budget of $200 million against the $3.15 billion needed for Asheville to close the racial wealth gap for its approximate 9,000 eligible black residents. Amherst, Massachusetts, a much smaller town that also has indicated its desire to pursue local reparations, has an eligible black population of about 2,000 residents. The cost it will incur to eliminate the racial wealth gap for all 2,000 is $700 million. The town’s budget is $85 million.

California has established a reparations task force charged with bringing proposals for restitution for the state’s black residents to the Assembly. It is impossible for the task force to design a plan that will eliminate the racial wealth gap for eligible black Californians, about 2 million in number, since the cost would be $700 billion, more than double the state’s current $260 billion annual budget.

Piecemeal or local reparations are not capitalized sufficiently to eliminate the racial wealth gap. It would be better for towns, cities, and states inspired to support reparations to invest resources in lobbying and petitioning the U.S. Congress to adopt a national reparations plan and to refer to their local initiatives as racial equity projects rather than reparations.

The second obstacle is the deception propagated that support for H.R. 40, legislation to establish a congressional commission to develop proposals for reparations, constitutes a major step on the road to black reparations. H.R. 40 is plagued by both substantive and structural flaws. The substantive flaws are attributable to the legislation’s open-endedness with respect to the proposals the commission develops. The law, as currently written, gives the commission no directives about the nature of the reparations plan(s) it brings to Congress. It is vital that any law establishing a reparations commission must charge it with designing a plan that incorporates the four pillars central to the architecture of an effective black reparations project:

1. It must designate black American descendants of U.S. slavery as the eligible recipients.

2. It must specify, at minimum, that a key target of the reparations project is elimination of the black-white wealth gap, achieved by raising the average level of black wealth to the average level of white wealth.

3. It must indicate that the federal government will finance the project.

4. It must prioritize direct monetary payments as the core form of restitution.

H.R. 40 does none of this.

The structural flaws in the legislation are legion. First, the bill specifies that the Federal Advisory Committee Act does not apply to this commission. The Federal Advisory Committee Act ensures that all advisory groups engage in transparent deliberations—for example, hold hearings, hold public meetings, and provide ongoing reports of their activities prior to delivery of the final report.

Second, the bill provides each member with pay at a daily rate of up to Executive IV level on the federal salary scale, which is up to $172,000 per annum. The commission now has a timeline of at least eighteen months. This means pay could run as high as $253,000 per member. We are convinced it is inappropriate for members of a commission with a mission this sacred to receive pay for performing this national service. Commissioners should receive compensation for their expenses, and a paid professional staff should support their efforts—but the members of the commission themselves should not receive salaries. The presence of the paid professional staff should enable them to maintain their normal lines of employment while serving on the commission. We should not want individuals who only will serve if they receive significant pay.

Third, originally the bill had provisions for seven members appointed by the president (three), the Speaker of the House (three), and the president pro tempore of the Senate (one). Between the 2015–16 and 2017–18 sessions of Congress, the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) / National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) rewrote the bill to expand the number to thirteen, adding six members who would be representatives of organizations with a legacy of promoting reparations. (At the time, there were no specifics about how the six would be selected or appointed.)

The version of the bill that came out of the April 2021 House Judiciary Committee markup session now specifies fifteen members: nine members, three each appointed by the president, the Speaker, and the president pro tempore, and the additional six selected from the major civil society and reparations organizations that have historically championed the cause of reparatory justice, oddly, selected by the (administrative) director of the commission. The administrative director will be appointed by the chair and vice-chair.

The bill, as currently written, says a quorum is seven members, less than half of the total membership of the commission. Therefore, a quorum could be established by the six members appointed by the commission’s administrative director and only one of the remaining nine members. Finally, the bill, as currently written, says no elected official or public employee can be a member of the commission. It is interesting to note that federal law would prohibit any of these persons from receiving payments. Consequently, the bill ensures that every member will be eligible to receive a salary.

Neither piecemeal local or personal actions nor H.R. 40 will get us from here to true reparations. They are, at best, detours, and, at worst, major roadblocks on the road to racial equality.

Additional Considerations

This book went to press before the coronavirus crisis hit, so we were unable to discuss the pandemic and its implications for African American reparations. In two editorials on the subject during the initial months of the pandemic, we argued that the disproportionate adverse impact of the pandemic on black America reinforced the need for a comprehensive plan for black reparations.¹⁴ Subsequently, we were members of a research team led by Eugene Richardson at Harvard and James Jones at Stanford that produced a study indicating that had black Americans received reparations payments that eliminated the racial wealth gap prior to the pandemic, transmission rates of the disease would have been 31 to 68 percent lower.¹⁵

While we mention the horrific Tuskegee experiment in chapter 11 of this book, we neglected to indicate that reparations were paid in 1974 to participants in the study, including both monetary reparations (in 2014 dollars, $178,000 for men in the study who had syphilis, $72,000 for their heirs, $77,000 for those in the control group, and $24,000 for heirs of those in the control group) and a promise of lifelong medical treatment for both participants and their immediate families.¹⁶

We also wish that we could have provided a more detailed accounting of the atrocities committed by white terrorists in the course of their violent subversion of Reconstruction, beyond the discussion of Robert Gleed’s representative narrative in chapter 10. However, the record of the so-called Klan hearings, published in 1872 as the Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Inquire in to the Conditions in the Late Insurrectionary States, running at thirteen volumes and 7,012 pages, merits its own book-length study.

Shortly after From Here to Equality was in print, Conner Bailey, a professor of rural sociology at Auburn University, wrote us a generous note, urging us to take explicit account of the importance of the manipulation of heirs property laws in property takings from black people.¹⁷ This was another important mechanism used by whites to appropriate black-owned land. We anticipate Bailey, who was the lead author on a U.S. Department of Agriculture report on heirs property and black land (and wealth) loss, will produce his own book-length study of the practice.¹⁸

Last, we would like to have included documentation on the market for black bodies after death. So-called resurrection men were paid to dig up black corpses soon after death to provide white medical schools with cadavers for study, without the permission of surviving family members.¹⁹ Defilement of the dignity of the dead extended the degradation they encountered in their lifetimes.

Final Thoughts

The reception for From Here to Equality has been gratifying. It has served as a springboard for us to have the opportunity to discuss the case for black reparations and the structure of a black reparations plan with communities of faith, museums and libraries, colleges and universities, podcast and radio program hosts, journalists across the spectrum of media, and book groups nationwide. We even have had the opportunity to engage in conversations with researchers, activists, and general audiences internationally, including in India, Brazil, France, the UK, Iran, and Spain.

When From Here to Equality was published, it was serendipitous that it entered the world in a climate hungry for a serious conversation about redress for black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. We only can hope that this second edition and newer works with the same spirit and mission will help make black reparations in the United States a reality—that the debt overdue for nearly 160 years finally will be paid.

William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen

Durham, North Carolina

March 2022

NOTES

1. Michael C. Dawson and Rovana Popoff, Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White, DuBois Review 1, no. 1 (March 2004): 47–91.

2. The Legacy of Slavery: An AP-NORC Poll Conducted in September 2019 Examines Opinions About the Legacy of Slavery and a Reparation Policy, Associated Press–National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, October 2019, https://apnorc.org/projects/the-legacy-of-slavery.

3. UMass Amherst/WCVB Poll Finds Nearly Half of Americans Say the Federal Government Should Not Pay Reparations to the Descendants of Slaves, University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 29, 2021, https://www.umass.edu/news/article/umass-amherstwcvb-poll-finds-nearly-half. In the only poll we could identify that asked for respondents’ opinions about monetary compensation to descendants of slaves, Latino individuals were evenly divided between yes and no. See Reparations for Slavery in the United States?, Point Taken Marist Poll, May 10, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/point-taken/blog/marist-reparations-slavery-united-states (accessed March 7, 2022).

4. See Most Still Reject Reparations for Slavery, Rasmussen Reports, April 9, 2019, https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/social_issues/most_still_reject_reparations_for_slavery; and Katanga Johnson U.S. Public More Aware of Racial Inequality but Still Rejects Reparations: Reuters/Ipsos Polling, Reuters, June 25, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-reparations-poll/u-s-public-more-aware-of-racial-inequality-but-still-rejects-reparations-reuters-ipsos-polling-idUSKBN23W1NG.

5. See esp. Trina Williams Shanks, The Homestead Act: A Major Asset-Building Policy in American History, in Inclusion in the America Dream: Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy, ed. Michael Sherraden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20–41.

6. Neil Bhutta, Andrew C. Chang, Lisa J. Deitling, and Joanne W. Hsu, Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, Fed Notes, September 28, 2020, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm. Since data from the 2019 SCF was not available until September 2020, six months after From Here to Equality was published, we relied upon data from earlier surveys, including the 2016 SCF. Therefore, when we refer to the 2019 SCF in our preface, we frequently are updating statistics presented in the first edition of the book.

7. William Darity Jr. and Dania Frank [Francis], The Economics of Reparations, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 93, no. 2 (May 2003): 326–29. The criteria for eligibility for black reparations presented here was a product of brainstorming between Darity, Frank, and Kirsten Mullen.

8. Equal payment to each eligible black American U.S. slavery descendant will have a pronounced, favorable impact on intragroup equalization of wealth. In a study where we used 2016 data, we found that the median to mean ratio of wealth among black Americans will increase from less than 15 percent to more than 85 percent, a dramatic positive change in the within-group distribution of wealth. See William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, Resurrecting the Promise of 40 Acres: The Imperative of Reparations for Black Americans (New York: Roosevelt Institute, 2020), 8, https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_Report_ResurrectingthePromiseof40Acres_202005.pdf.

9. William Darity Jr., Fenaba Addo, and Imari Z. Smith, A Subaltern Middle Class: The Case of the Missing ‘Black Bourgeoisie’ in America, Contemporary Economic Problems 39 (2021): 499.

10. Darity, Addo, and Smith, 498.

11. Darity, Addo, and Smith, 499.

12. Fenaba R. Addo and William A. Darity Jr., Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the Great Recession, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 695 (May 2021): 182. Evidence presented here is a direct refutation of the positions taken by Matt Bruenig, Adolph Reed, and Pascal Robert, all of whom seem to be treating the gauge of black-white wealth inequality as the median gap. See Bruenig’s The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Under Classes, People’s Policy Project, June 29, 2020, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/06/29/the-racial-wealth-gap-is-about-the-upper-classes; Reed’s essay The Surprising Cross-Racial Saga of Modern Wealth Inequality, New Republic, June 29, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/158059/racial-wealth-gap-vs-racial-income-gap-modern-economic-inequality; and Robert’s article The Obsession with the Black-White Wealth Gap Protects the Elites, Newsweek, December 21, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/obsession-black-white-wealth-gap-protects-elites-opinion-1661910.

13. William Darity Jr. and Andrea Kirsten Mullen, Race in America: Reparations, Economist, May 18, 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352056246_Race_in_America_Reparations_William_Darity_and_A_Kirsten_Mullen_on_direct_payments_to_close_the_racial-wealth_gap.

14. See William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, Coronavirus Proves, Yet Again, the U.S. Needs Reparations, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 20, 2020, and William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, Coronavirus Is Making the Case for Reparations Clearer than Ever, Newsweek, May 5, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-making-case-black-reparations-clearer-ever-opinion-1501887.

15. Eugene T. Richardson, Momin M. Malik, William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, Michelle E. Morse, Maya Malik, Aletha Maybank, Mary T. Bassett, Paul E. Farmer, Lee Worden, and James H. Jones, Reparations for American Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States and Their Potential Impact on SARS-COV-2 Transmission, Social Science and Medicine 276 (May 2021): 113741–42.

16. Dylan Matthews, Six Times Victims Have Received Reparations—Including Four Times in the US, Vox, May 23, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5741352/six-times-victims-have-received-reparations-including-four-in-the-us.

17. Personal correspondence from Conner Bailey to the authors, July 19, 2020.

18. Conner Bailey, Robert Zabawa, Becky Barlow, and Ntam Baharanyi, Heirs Property and Persistent Poverty among African Americans in the Southeastern United States (Washington D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture, 2019).

19. See Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

Introduction: Standing at the Crossroads

In order to see where we are going, we not only must see where we have been, but we must also understand where we have been. —Ella Baker, AZ Quotes, 1964

The world has never seen any people turned loose to such destitution as were the four million slaves of the South. . . . They were free without roofs to cover them, or bread to eat, or land to cultivate, and as a consequence died in such numbers as to awaken the hope of their enemies that they would soon disappear. —Frederick Douglass, Celebrating the Past, Anticipating the Future, 1875

Racism and discrimination have perpetually crippled black economic opportunities. At several historic moments the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically, but at each juncture, the road chosen did not lead to a just and fair America.

The formation of the republic provided a critical moment when blacks might have been granted freedom and admitted to full citizenship. The Civil War and the Reconstruction era each offered openings to produce a true democracy thoroughly inclusive of black Americans. Had the New Deal project and the GI Bill fully included blacks, the nation would have widened the window of opportunity to achieve an equitable future. Passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s might have unlocked the door for America to eradicate racism.

However, at none of these forks was the path to full justice taken.

From Here to Equality is a book primarily about the economic divide between black and white Americans—how it came to be and how it can be eliminated. Specifically, we contend, a suitably designed program of reparations can close the divide. Black reparations can place America squarely on the path to racial equality.

Reparations programs have been used strategically in the United States and throughout the world to provide redress for grievous injustices. These include the U.S. government’s provision of reparations for Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated (interned) during World War II, the German government’s provision of reparations for victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and the Canadian government’s provision of compensation to indigenous peoples who were removed forcibly from their families and confined to Christian, church-run, Indian residential schools.¹

Reversing the effects of slavery for newly emancipated human chattel was the goal of several plans put into action during and immediately following the Civil War. One of the country’s earliest efforts to dramatically alter blacks’ economic condition was the federal government’s post–Civil War plan to give at least forty acres of abandoned and confiscated land as well as a mule to each formerly enslaved family of four (or ten acres per person).

While some maintain that this planned payment of land and a work animal to newly freed men and women in the nineteenth century is a figment of the black imagination, historical records confirm that the promise of reparations was not a myth.² It was inscribed in federal legislation. In fact, the allocation, activated in 1865, of forty acres for formerly enslaved Africans was at least the second such measure the federal government had developed to assign land to the former chattel. The idea that reparations could be an effective method of addressing the effects of slavery and white supremacy has a long history, cycling in and out of popular discourse and the national policy arena. Reparations are as timely today as they were in the 1860s.

The ultimate goal of From Here to Equality is to help rejuvenate discussions about and to promote reparations for African Americans. As the final chapter of this book will show, there are several mechanisms for reversing gross inequalities between blacks and whites that overcome the frequent reflexive reaction that this is impractical or infeasible. Real equality is a worthy goal, and it can be achieved.

Reparations are a program of acknowledgment, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice. Where African Americans are concerned, the grievous injustices that make the case for reparations include slavery, legal segregation (Jim Crow), and ongoing discrimination and stigmatization.

ARC—the acronym that stands for acknowledgment, redress, and closure—characterizes the three essential elements of the reparations program that we are advocating. Acknowledgment, redress, and closure are components of any effective reparations project. Acknowledgment involves recognition and admission of the wrong by the perpetrators or beneficiaries of the injustice. For African Americans this means the receipt of a formal apology and a commitment for redress on the part of the American people as a whole—a national act of declaration that a great wrong has been committed. But beyond an apology, acknowledgment requires those who benefited from the exercise of the atrocities to recognize the advantages they gained and commit themselves to the cause of redress. Redress potentially can take two forms, not necessarily mutually exclusive: restitution or atonement. Restitution is the restoration of survivors to their condition before the injustice occurred or to a condition they might have attained had the injustice not taken place. Of course, it is impossible to restore those who were enslaved to a condition preceding their enslavement, not only because those who were enslaved are now deceased but also because many thousands were born into slavery. But it is possible to move their descendants toward a more equitable position commensurate with the status they would have attained in the absence of the injustice(s).

Atonement, as an alternative form of redress, occurs when perpetrators or beneficiaries meet conditions of forgiveness that are acceptable to the victims. Achieving these elements of a reparations program requires good-faith negotiations between those who were wronged and the wrongdoers.³

There is no existing mechanism for establishing when African Americans collectively will have reached an agreement that sufficient steps have been taken to justify forgiveness. Consequently, atonement is difficult to accomplish. That is why, in our proposal, we treat restitution as the appropriate form of redress. We have clear metrics for determining when restitution has been achieved that we do not have for establishing the same for atonement.

Specifically, restitution for African Americans would eliminate racial disparities in wealth, income, education, health, sentencing and incarceration, political participation, and subsequent opportunities to engage in American political and social life. It will require not only an endeavor to compensate for past repression and exploitation but also an endeavor to offset stubborn existing obstacles to full black participation in American political and social life.

Reparations demonstrably would be effective if an improved position for blacks is associated with sharp and enduring reductions in racial disparities, particularly economic disparities like racial wealth inequality, and corresponding sharp and enduring improvements in black well-being.

Closure involves mutual conciliation between African Americans and the beneficiaries of slavery, legal segregation, and ongoing discrimination toward blacks. Whites and blacks would come to terms over the past, confront the present, and unite to create a new and transformed United States of America. Once the reparations program is executed and racial inequality eliminated, African Americans would make no further claims for race-specific policies on their behalf from the American government—on the assumption that no new race-specific injustices are inflicted upon them.

A central theme of From Here to Equality is the sustained American failure to recognize the pernicious impact of white supremacy and the sustained American failure to adopt national policies that reverse the effects of white supremacy. At each point that the nation stood at a critical crossroads with respect to its racial future, it chose the wrong fork.

The first two chapters comprise part 1 of From Here to Equality. In chapter 1, we examine the historical trajectory of the black reparations movement in the United States, demonstrating the consistent denial of efforts to establish a comprehensive program of compensation for black America.

Chapter 2 is devoted to a systematic analysis of the comparative current status of blacks vis-à-vis whites in the United States. We give particular attention to the racial gulf in wealth accumulation, because wealth (or net worth) is the most powerful indicator of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being. In the same chapter, we also present evidence showing that many Americans are simply wrong about the magnitude and the causes of racial wealth disparities.

Part 2 of the book is devoted to an analysis of the effects of the American system of slavery on the nation’s economic and political development. The third chapter identifies the beneficiaries of slavery both in the near and longer terms. We examine the key role that slavery played in American economic development, in both the north and the south. As we stress throughout the volume, the case for justice must include identification of not only the perpetrators of racial harm but also those who gained from the harm—whether or not they inflicted it.

Chapter 4 examines the first major fork in the road for America—the possibility of ending slavery and producing black citizenship at the founding of the new nation. The period of struggle for independence from Britain was rich with possibilities, possibilities that would have been engendered by ending slavery at the origin of the United States but were summarily forsaken.

In part 3 we consider alternative routes not taken during the period of the Civil War. Chapter 5 is an in-depth exploration of the rejected option of compensated emancipation, an option that would have prevented or attenuated the war while also ending black enslavement. Chapter 6 details antiblack atrocities that took place during the war. Readers may be surprised to learn the extent to which even the Union army was unwilling to incorporate blacks who had joined their ranks as equals.

Part 4 investigates the lost opportunities for constructing citizenship for the formerly enslaved in the aftermath of the war. Chapter 7 treats a variety of experiments conducted before, during, and after the Civil War to establish communities of freedmen predicated on creating opportunities for full participation in American life. Chapter 8 describes the ferocious postwar conflict over the Radical Republicans’ plan for Reconstruction, which included the provision of at least forty acres of land for freedmen and full political participation for black men. The failure to take the Radicals’ path set the stage for the subsequent 150 years of black degradation. Chapter 9 records the destruction of the dreams and ambitions embodied in Reconstruction and the restoration of a regime of white rule in the post-Confederate south.

Part 5 of From Here to Equality advances a bill of particulars for the outrages and damages wreaked upon black Americans during the century and a half since the Civil War. Chapter 10 focuses on the abuses of the Jim Crow era, the period of legal segregation in America, while chapter 11 is devoted to the insufficiency of the civil rights era to produce racial equality in the United States. Chapter 10 pivots on the sequence of white massacres that resulted in the annihilation of black lives and property. Chapter 11 centers on the prolonged devaluation of black life throughout the post–civil rights era via discrimination and violence.

The final part of the book consists of two chapters and provides a springboard to the design and implementation of a plan for black reparations. Chapter 12 constitutes a systematic response to reparations’ critics, while chapter 13 outlines the potential structure of an actual reparations program. These last two chapters, taken together, supply a systematic response to customary logistical concerns raised about black reparations, with the final chapter offering a detailed description of how best to enact them.

From Here to Equality draws a thick line from the nation’s origins to the present.⁴ The case we build in this volume is based on all three tiers or phases of injustice: slavery, American apartheid (Jim Crow), and the combined effects of present-day discrimination and the ongoing deprecation of black lives. Most advocates of black reparations have focused exclusively on the injustice of slavery as the basis for redress. Law professor Boris Bittker argued that the case for black reparations should center solely on the harms of legalized segregation, while Roy L. Brooks, also a legal scholar, has argued that the foundation for black reparations is the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.⁵ We submit that the bill of particulars for black reparations also must include contemporary, ongoing injustices—injustices resulting in barriers and penalties for the black descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.

Sociologist Joe Feagin catalogs the continuing injuries inflicted on black Americans, including wage penalties, physical and psycho-emotional health wounds, and community and institutional damages.⁶ Despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, a wave of federal legislation in the 1960s and 1970s intended to eliminate legal apartheid in the United States, and the enactment of antidiscrimination laws, blacks continue to bear the weight of American racism.

That burden is manifest in labor market discrimination, grossly attenuated wealth, confinement to neighborhoods with lower levels of amenities and safety, disproportionate exposure to inferior schooling, significantly greater danger in encounters with the police and the criminal justice system writ large, and a general social disdain for the value of black people’s lives. The legal apparatus created by the civil rights revolution does little to address the complex web of harms imposed upon black Americans today.

Taken individually, any one of these three tiers of injustice—slavery, the regime of legal segregation and subordination, and current discrimination—makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.

Part 1

1

A Political History of America’s Black Reparations Movement

The Civil War of 1861–65 ended slavery. It left us

Reviews for From Here to Equality, Second Edition

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From Here to Equality, 2nd edition, by William Darity Jr and A Kirsten Mullen is an in depth and detailed look at the case for reparations as well as a plan for making them.I think as far as making the case, this volume succeeds very well. Only so much detail can be covered in a single book meant for the public, and plenty of detail is covered, but when the time comes for working out details much more will need to be considered. To have left out all of the history would not have made sense here, this is a book that both makes a case for and creates a plan for reparations. One can't plan without making the case.On reading, I don't see anything that just seems "wrong" in their plan, from who to include to how much. That isn't to say this will end up being the best plan, and perhaps ultimately the most workable plan that still accomplishes the goals will have to be more inclusive, which means altering it from reparations stemming from US slavery to reparations for the many wrongs that went into making the US a white supremacist nation and doing so by using or trying to eliminate entire populations.So while the case is, I think, made sufficiently well, I view the plan as an opening suggestion in what needs to be a comprehensive settlement but one that happens sooner rather than later. We can't keep this in committees and discussions without clear timetables and goals. At the same time we have to find a way to make the maximum change with one decision so that we aren't repeating this process for every group that has a justification in calling for reparation.Although this volume left me with as many questions as answers, I do feel like my questions are further along the path than they might otherwise be. Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.