Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future

Changes at the global, federal, state, and municipal level are pushing forward the reparations movement for people of African descent. The distinguished editors of this volume have gathered works that chronicle the historical movement for reparations both in the United States and around the world.

Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent.

Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.

Contributors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Hilary McDonald Beckles, Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Chuck Collins, Ron Daniels, V. P. Franklin, Danny Glover, Adom Gretachew, Charles Henry, Kamm Howard, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jesse Jackson, Sr., Brian Jones, Sheila Jackson Lee, James B. Stewart, the Movement 4 Black Lives, the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the New Afrikan Peoples Organization/Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought Emerita and emeritus professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her thirteen books include History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Time.Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua is an associate professor in history and African American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of America’s First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915. V. P. Franklin is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history and education at the University of California Riverside. His eleven books include The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.