Free college tuition for every graduating high-school student. Reduced interest rates for new home mortgages. Free health care. Prison labor paid at fair wages. These are just some of the suggestions detailed in an exhaustive interim report released in early June by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. Two years in the making, the nearly 500-page document is the first of its kind: a “watershed moment” in the decades-long movement to secure financial compensation for the lasting impacts of 250 years of slavery in America—a movement now gaining new momentum.
As reparations advocate and 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones recently declared at a gathering of the U.N. General Assembly in March, “It is time for the nations that engaged in and profited from the transatlantic slave trade to do what is right and what is just. It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas.”
