Today’s Action: Support Reparations for Black Americans

It didn’t stop with slavery. The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a century of terror against Black Americans, which the federal government turned a blind eye to and sometimes sanctioned. The 20th century practice of red-lining was a thinly veiled scheme to push families of color to the margins of society while preventing homeownership and generational wealth accumulation that ushered in the white middle class.

Long after the end of Jim Crow, Black Americans have continued to be disenfranchised, locked out of educational and job opportunities reserved for whites, and made to fear persecution by the very law enforcement system that ostensibly protects them (on their tax dollars no less).

The term reparations has become a controversial one thought to make amends for wrongs done by and to people long dead. But what we are really looking at is restitution for billions in financial, physical, and psychological damages from crimes that continue to this day.

The bills before the House and the Senate do not prescribe a solution, only mandating that reparations be studied, and if this nation aspires to anything resembling justice, it is crucial that Congress pass the legislation without delay.

Call or email your Members of Congress and demand their support for The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (H.R.40/S.1083).

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 marked the beginning of contemporary legal protections against discrimination for black Americans…though hardly the end of discrimination itself. Today, only 64 years later, the median income for white American is ten times that of black Americans, and organizations like Black Lives Matter remind us the deadly discrimination of Jim Crow is alive today, in the form of guns instead of nooses.

Support for studying reparations is two-fold: not just the study itself, but also a clear and vocal support for a needed change across-the-board in the status-quo for black Americans.

And it’s hundreds of years late.

Email or call (202.224.3121) your Members of Congress tell them cosponsor The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans (H.R.40/S.1083).