In 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15— a promise to redistribute 40 acres of once Confederate-owned land in coastal South Carolina and Florida to each formerly enslaved adult to begin mending the seemingly unmendable. It never came to pass. H.R. 40, also known as the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been brought to Congress repeatedly since 1989, first by the late Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), now by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex). Hear Jeffery Robinson, founder of the Who We Are Project and deputy director of the ACLU take on the past, present and future of reparations with veteran political activist Dr. Ron Daniels and legal expert and reparations advocate Nkechi Taifa.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. Vintage, 1992

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. June, 2014.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860 - 1880. Free Press, 1999

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014.

H.R.40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act

Lockhart, P.R. The 2020 Democratic Primary Debate Over Reparations, Explained. Vox.com, June 19, 2019

Marable, Manning. Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader. Routledge, 2011.

National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) 10-Point Reparations Plan

Taifa, Nkechi. Black Power, Black Lawyer. House of Songhay II, 2020.

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