This resolution recognizes the responsibility of the federal government to provide reparations and encourages the passage and implementation of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.
[Congressional Bills 118th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 414 Introduced in House (IH)]
<DOC>
118th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 414
Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to
provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting
harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 17, 2023
Ms. Bush (for herself, Ms. Lee of California, Ms. Tlaib, Ms. Pressley,
Mr. Bowman, Mrs. Ramirez, Ms. Lee of Pennsylvania, Ms. Omar, Mr.
Jackson of Illinois, and Mr. Green of Texas) submitted the following
resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to
provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting
harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.
Whereas Black people are, and have always been, human beings, yet the Federal
Government has historically failed to recognize our dignity and
humanity;
Whereas reparations are defined as a victim-centered process by which survivors
of atrocities and serious human rights violations, and their
descendants, have the right to seek restitution, compensation,
rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition for past
and ongoing harms;
Whereas to meet the international legal obligation of reparations, the Federal
Government must compensate descendants of enslaved Black people and
people of African descent in the United States to account for the harms
of chattel slavery, the cumulative damages of enslavement, and the
epochs of legal and de facto segregation;
Whereas the Federal Government is responsible for--
(1) policies that led to the economic, political, and social erosion of
Black communities;
(2) failing to keep Black people safe from or actively sanctioning
White domestic terrorism and failing to prosecute it when it occurred;
(3) the impacts of government-imposed segregation leading to harmful
health outcomes and environmental racism;
(4) the ongoing harms of racialized mass incarceration and family
separation, oppressive and abusive criminalization, and the continued
impact of embedded historical harms of the criminal legal system on Black
people and Black communities; and
(5) banking, consumer, housing, health, education, and employment
discrimination;
Whereas reparations must be administered by the Federal Government to
descendants of enslaved Black people and people of African descent for
sanctioning the kidnapping and trafficking of human beings, creating and
maintaining a violent racial hierarchy, embedding slavery and other
methods of economic exploitation into the fabric of society, and
emboldening White supremacy with legal, social, and economic tools of
control;
Whereas the full length of legalized slavery's impact on Black wealth creation
and well-being today, including the nearly 300 years of chattel slavery
from the year 1502, when enslaved Africans were brought to Hispaniola
and later their descendants brought to United States territory, to the
year 1789, when the first Congress met, must be recognized and fully
accounted for;
Whereas, over the course of nearly 300 years, at least 12,500,000 Africans were
kidnapped from their homelands by European traders and forcibly brought
across the Atlantic Ocean in one of the largest forced displacements in
human history, and at least 2,000,000 did not survive the horrifying,
brutal, and grueling journey across the Atlantic, also known as the
Middle Passage and Maafa;
Whereas forcibly separating Black families, often with members being transferred
to the Caribbean, was a murderous and tortuous reality for millions of
enslaved people who had to endure separation from loved ones they could
no longer talk to or keep in contact with, perpetuating deep
psychological and emotional trauma;
Whereas Spanish colonizers brought enslaved Africans to modern-day Florida in
1565;
Whereas 1619, a year before the Mayflower arrived on American shores, marked the
first year White Virginians purchased around 30 enslaved Angolans from
Portuguese traders who were forcefully transported through the trans-
Atlantic slave trade, thereafter launching a violent system of racial
subjugation, exploitation, and genocide;
Whereas, from the Nation's founding in 1776, Federal policies produced and
sustained the institution of slavery, thus voluntarily accepting the
British legacy of the institution, and with it, the responsibility to
provide reparations;
Whereas the Founders in drafting the Constitution preserved slavery and
racialized social stratification through systemic measures, without
needing to explicitly mention harmful intent and racialized impacts;
Whereas the Founders and their contemporaries understood freedom and liberty in
direct relation to enslaved people and in their capacity to enslave
Black people;
Whereas the trade in and chattelization of human beings is referenced in 3
sections of the Constitution, namely article I, section 9, clause 1,
which expressly sanctioned the continuation of the international slave
trade for 20 years, article I, section 2, clause 3, which upheld the
further dehumanization of the African by relegating their status to that
of three-fifths of a White man, and article IV, section 2, clause 3,
which egregiously mandated the capture and return to enslavement of
fugitives;
Whereas the system of enslavement served to unite all Thirteen Colonies under
the banner of White supremacy;
Whereas, of the Nation's first 12 Presidents, 10 enslaved Black people;
Whereas President James K. Polk traded enslaved Black people from the Oval
Office;
Whereas enslaved Black people built the United States Capitol and the White
House;
Whereas more than 1,700 United States Congressional Members who served in the
18th, 19th, and 20th centuries had enslaved Black people, including the
first woman elected to the United States Senate, Senator Rebecca Latimer
Felton;
Whereas the Dred Scott v. Sanford legal ruling in 1857, which decided that
enslaved Black people were not citizens of the United States under
article III, was decided by 5 slaveholding Supreme Court Justices,
including Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Associate Justices John
Campbell, John Catron, Peter Daniel, and James Moore Wayne;
Whereas the horrors of chattel slavery are immeasurable and have led to
generational trauma for millions of Black people;
Whereas enslaved people were prohibited and denied the right to maintain their
indigenous languages, faiths, and cultural practices and traditions from
Africa;
Whereas the most productive enslaved people were often whipped the most
violently and were often used as breeders to save slave owners from
purchasing enslaved persons;
Whereas the ban on importation of Africans for enslavement was implemented in
1808, driving trade underground and increasing the numbers of enslaved
people through childbirth as the sole method available;
Whereas millions of enslaved Black women were routinely raped, sexually
assaulted, and tortured at the hands of their White enslavers, and
others were purchased and forced to staff brothels, all of which
reinforced White male dominance and gender hierarchy;
Whereas the rape of enslaved Black women grew so routine that some have
calculated that over 60 percent of enslaved women and girls experienced
sexual coercion and rape in their lives, and that 1 out of every 6 Black
persons born into captivity in 1860 was born as a byproduct of the rape
of a young, teenage, enslaved girl;
Whereas infant mortality rates on plantations were incredibly high, and in the
South, 50 percent of enslaved infants were stillborn or died within the
first year of life in the early 1800s;
Whereas the enslavement of Black people became an indispensable economic driver
in the United States, allowing White Americans in both the South and the
North to enjoy the profit of unpaid and dehumanizing labor;
Whereas the enslavement of Black people and the country's commitment to using
unflinching violence and oppression created an endless supply of labor-
enriched White slave-owners and their descendants, fueled the country's
economy while suppressing self-determination and wealth-building for
enslaved Black people, and postemancipation, left newly freed Black
people with zero wealth and landless, with a lack of education, poor
health, and severed family and homeland ties;
Whereas the economy of the United States was founded on the production of
tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, all of which were planted, harvested,
and produced by enslaved Black people;
Whereas the economy of the United States, in both the North and South,
flourished as a result of Black trafficking, torture, and exploitation;
Whereas, while New York began to abolish slavery in 1799, New Yorkers invested
heavily in the Southern plantations, insured enslaved people as
collateral, produced the agricultural tools that were used in Southern
plantations, and funded the building of ships that were used to traffic
enslaved people;
Whereas, by 1831, the United States was delivering nearly half the world's raw
cotton crop as a result of chattel slavery;
Whereas, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved
person increased by 400 percent;
Whereas cotton produced by enslaved people accelerated worldwide commercial
markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts,
novel financial products, and modern forms of insurance and credit that
will define financial markets for centuries to come;
Whereas, in 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Black people
was $250,000,000, or more than $8,200,000,000 today;
Whereas the bodies of enslaved people, gorged and congealed in the name of White
supremacist hate, became the single largest financial asset of property
in the United States that were purchased through loans, repaid with
interest, and insured with exorbitant policies;
Whereas the vending, bartering, and selling of enslaved people, and with it the
forced separation of Black families, became a self-sustaining economy
bringing in trillions of dollars across the United States;
Whereas White slaveowners used enslaved people as partial to full collateral in
8 out of 10 loans to access more wealth and resources, often to purchase
more enslaved people;
Whereas enslaved people themselves became commodities that, by 1860, were valued
at over $4,000,000,000;
Whereas, in 1857, in the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, the Supreme Court held
that Black people were not citizens of the United States, and therefore,
had no rights to be respected, thereby further codifying White supremacy
into law;
Whereas the institution of slavery was so powerful and corrosive that it helped
to both create the wealth of the United States, and also threatened to
entirely destroy the fabric of the Union during the Civil War;
Whereas 78 percent of military-age free Black men served in the Union Army, and
200,000 Black men enlisted in the Union to fight during the Civil War,
accounting for 1 in 10 Union soldiers;
Whereas Confederate soldiers often killed Black soldiers rather than capture
them, and also enslaved Black war captives during the Civil War;
Whereas President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which by
1934, when the Act ended, had granted more than 270,000,000 acres of
land in the West to White people virtually for free;
Whereas, even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate States ignored
Lincoln's emancipation order and maintained the institution of slavery;
Whereas slavery did not legally end until 1865, with the close of the Civil War;
Whereas, while the 13th Amendment is known to have abolished slavery and
indentured servitude, it made an exception for those convicted of
crimes;
Whereas, rather than shrinking after the technical abolition of slavery,
Southern plantations increased in size, as for example, the number of
Louisiana plantations in selected parishes increased by 286 percent
between 1860 and 1880;
Whereas, following the Civil War, in 1865, Confederate veterans founded the Ku
Klux Klan, a group that would unleash genocidal violence and a reign of
terror across the country for decades to come;
Whereas the Federal Government provided reparations to White slaveowners in the
District of Columbia for the loss of human property through the
Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, while never addressing the need
for restitution to enslaved Black people and their descendants;
Whereas the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Bureau, also known
as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established to provide economic and social
aid to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865, but was eventually looted
and corrupted by White politicians and businessmen, resulting in its
demise in 1872, and in more than 60,000 Black people and organizations
losing their deposits and having to wait years for only a fraction of
them to be returned;
Whereas, Callie House, a formerly enslaved Black woman, alongside Reverend
Isaiah Dickerson, founded the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension
Association in 1898, in a mass effort to pass Federal pension
legislation for formerly enslaved people, and whose efforts were
ultimately shut down by Federal agencies;
Whereas an estimated 6,500 racial terror lynchings took place between 1865 and
1950;
Whereas, in a series of outbreaks of race-related violence, an estimated 39 to
150 Black people were murdered in 1917 in the East St. Louis ``Riots''
and another 6,000 were left homeless;
Whereas the East St. Louis ``Riots'' has been described as the ``worst case of
labor-related violence in 20th-century American history'';
Whereas more than 200 Black people were killed and another 6,000 were left
homeless during the 1919 attack and lynching in Moberly, Missouri,
costing $400,000 ($8,460,000 in 2022) in property damage;
Whereas White supremacists, deputized by Tulsa officials, raided, mobbed,
massacred, and completely burned down nearly 40 city blocks of Tulsa's
Greenwood District, a self-sustaining Black economy, also known as
``Black Wall Street'', in 1921;
Whereas White supremacists raided, mobbed, massacred, and completely burned down
a small but thriving Black community, Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, in
addition to countless other Black communities across the United States;
Whereas the massacres in Tulsa and Rosewood were only 2 of more than 100 White
supremacist massacres that occurred from the end of the Civil War to the
1940s;
Whereas Black voters and political candidates were intimidated, harassed,
violently suppressed, and sometimes murdered for simply exercising their
constitutional right to vote;
Whereas participation of Black voters in electoral processes were routinely
suppressed by poll taxes and literacy tests to preserve White supremacy;
Whereas the Supreme Court codified the ``separate but equal'' doctrine in Plessy
v. Ferguson in 1896, thereby allowing racial segregation laws to exist
and enshrining a racial caste system in the United States;
Whereas not only were enslaved people never granted any form of compensation
after the abolition of slavery, they were thrust into a near-century-
long epoch of legal segregation through Jim Crow laws;
Whereas, after emancipation, laws that governed slavery were retooled into Black
Codes to control free Black people, thereby establishing a criminal
legal system that sanctified the continuation of slavery by another
name;
Whereas so unbearable were these Black Codes and the brutality of Jim Crow, that
6,000,000 Black people were displaced and forced to migrate to the North
seeking some form of safety and political asylum within the border of
their own country during ``The Great Migration'', also known as ``The
Great Displacement'';
Whereas the Federal Government abdicated its responsibility to protect its own
citizens from relentless violence, resulting in the displacement of
millions of Black people between 1916 and 1970, many of whom were
refugees from White supremacist violence;
Whereas, from Mississippi to Minnesota, States began to criminalize any form of
resistance to racial hierarchies and expand their criminal codes as
``The Great Migration'' began to expose racial fault lines across the
country;
Whereas medical experimentation on Black people without their consent, including
forced gynecological experiments on enslaved Black women and the
Government-sponsored Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on Black men, led to
major medical discoveries, at the full expense of Black people's
humanity, dignity, and rights;
Whereas, at the end of World War I, Black veterans returned to their homes and
were assaulted for daring to wear the United States uniform;
Whereas Black people were intentionally and systematically excluded from Federal
social service programs;
Whereas, despite being disproportionately affected by unemployment during the
Great Depression, Black people were largely excluded from New Deal
programs;
Whereas Black people were excluded from the Social Security and Wagner Acts of
1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938;
Whereas 65 percent of Black people nationally and 70 to 80 percent of Black
people in the South were ineligible for Social Security when it was
signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1935;
Whereas Black neighborhoods have been divided and effectively destroyed by
Federal highways systems and the fraudulent use of eminent domain;
Whereas the racist origins of the Federal Housing Administration, subsequent
discriminatory housing policies, coupled with anti-Black business
practices, conspired to concentrate wealth in White neighborhoods;
Whereas, from the 1930s to the 1960s, Black people across the country were
effectively barred from the home-mortgage market, thereby locking Black
people out of the greatest opportunity for wealth accumulation in the
history of the United States;
Whereas many States barred Black people from fully participating in the Aid to
Dependent Children Program;
Whereas Black veterans were disqualified from receiving title III benefits of
the G.I. Bill, benefits which provided veterans with access to low-
income home loans;
Whereas this form of exclusion from Federal programs that provide economic and
Social Security measures has continued well into the 21st century;
Whereas, well into the 1960s, Black people in the Deep South were unaware they
were freed and forced to work, violently tortured, and raped;
Whereas, despite the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling deeming racial
segregation in public schools as unconstitutional, public schools
serving Black students remain inherently separate and unequal, receiving
$23,000,000,000 less in school funding;
Whereas, in 1948, Missouri was a catalyst in securing equal housing for Black
people across the country with the passage of Shelley v. Kraemer,
striking down racial restrictive housing that prevented people of the
``Negro or Mongolian Race'' from purchasing homes;
Whereas, in 1963, Governor George Wallace blocked Black students at the
schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama;
Whereas mass protests erupted across the United States during the civil rights
era demanding an end to racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and
institutionalized racism that resulted in the passage of the Civil
Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the end
of legalized school segregation;
Whereas the FBI established the Counterintelligence Program, also known as
COINTELPRO, in 1956, with one of its major goals to target Black
activists fighting for self-determination, reparations, and racial
justice;
Whereas, in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb laced with
Tovex and C-4 explosives on the MOVE organization, a Black liberation
organization, who were living in a West Philadelphia rowhome leaving 11
dead, including 5 children;
Whereas, while the United States was founded based on Black plunder, it has yet
to acknowledge, reconcile, and provide adequate redress for the
sanctioned system of slavery and its vestiges resulting in modern-day
disparities;
Whereas Black people are still presumed dangerous and therefore are
systematically targeted and criminalized under our legal system,
including through the war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing laws,
the prosecution of children as adults, and the disproportionate
targeting, stopping, and arresting of Black people by law enforcement;
Whereas 1 in 16 Black people of voting age is barred from actively participating
in the democracy of the United States, including through
disenfranchisement due to felony convictions;
Whereas Black agricultural landowners have been dispossessed from at least 90
percent of their land due to racially discriminatory practices by the
Department of Agriculture and private companies;
Whereas Black communities bear the brunt of environmental racism and remain
disproportionately impacted by extreme temperatures and environmental
hazards due to the close proximity to places like chemical plants, oil
refineries, trash incinerators, construction sites, and waste dumping
sites, as a result of lacking of greenery and tree canopies;
Whereas Black women with children remain disproportionately barred from
accessing the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program;
Whereas, while the legacy of slavery still affects our society today, it is
rarely taught comprehensively in our school systems;
Whereas the school systems of the United States are committing educational
malpractice by treating this country's history of slavery and racial
hierarchy as an aberration;
Whereas, since January 2021, over 44 States have proposed legislation or taken
other steps to ban teaching of the ways in which racism has shaped the
law and way of life in the United States, and 18 States have already
imposed bans;
Whereas Black students are suspended from school at a rate 4 times greater than
White students, and Black girls, despite being only 19 percent of
preschoolers, make up 54 percent of girls suspended from preschool,
effectively funneling Black children into the school-to-prison pipeline;
Whereas the legacy of racialized barriers to education is still so prevalent
today, that Black women graduate from a 4-year degree with 60 percent
more debt than their White male peers;
Whereas the Federal Government repeatedly abdicated its responsibility to
adequately acknowledge and provide redress for the crimes of enslavement
and the continuation of racial subjugation, and cannot absolve itself of
its responsibility today;
Whereas, under fundamental international human rights law, governments have an
obligation to provide full and effective remedies for violations of
human rights, including acts of racial discrimination, and victims of
human rights violations have the right to pursue such remedies;
Whereas Black people are often funneled into some of the most difficult jobs
with lower wages, and continue to be targets of wage and land theft,
exploitation, and deprivation of fundamental human rights;
Whereas the racial wealth gap is a direct legacy of chattel slavery in the
United States and the continued displacement, exploitation, and
sanctioned theft of formerly enslaved Black people and their
descendants;
Whereas the Federal Government must eliminate the Black-White racial wealth gap
as it is a direct legacy of chattel slavery and the cumulative impact of
legal and de facto segregation that followed;
Whereas financial reparations must be paid by the Federal Government for an
amount that respected economists have estimated totals, at minimum,
$14,000,000,000,000 to eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently
exists between Black and White Americans;
Whereas scholars have estimated that the United States benefitted from
222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the end of slavery in
1865, which would be valued at $97,000,000,000,000 today;
Whereas if the United States closed racial gaps for Black people in the areas of
housing, education, wages, and investment 20 years ago,
$16,000,000,000,000 could have been added to the economy;
Whereas the damage experienced by Black people stemming from enslavement and its
evolutions is not confined solely to economics or the racial wealth gap,
and should take in account centuries of forced labor postenslavement,
denials of employment, predatory lending practices, and ongoing banking
discrimination, as well as educational inadequacies, health disparities,
cultural degradation, and the criminal punishment system;
Whereas the Federal Government must formally apologize for the state-sanctioned
institution of chattel slavery and subsequent anti-Black institutions,
laws, and practices;
Whereas reparations call for the interrogation, overhauling, and end of abusive
Federal institutions that continue to inflict unjustifiable harms on
Black people today;
Whereas the Federal Government must compensate the descendants of enslaved Black
people and people of African descent in the form of direct monetary
reparations for the harms and vestiges of chattel slavery and its
evolutions, as well as with other targeted benefits;
Whereas the Federal Government must return, restore, or provide adequate remedy
for property unjustly stolen from Black families through the use of
racially restrictive covenants and eminent domain;
Whereas the Federal Government must pay its debt, in all necessary forms, to
descendants of enslaved Black people and people of African descent in
order to support a continuous and holistic healing process;
Whereas a holistic program for reparations must address the wealth extracted
from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food
apartheid, housing discrimination, and racialized capitalism in the form
of corporate and government reparations focused on healing ongoing
physical and mental trauma, and ensuring access to and control of food
sources, housing, and land;
Whereas a comprehensive reparations program must include rehabilitative measures
such as trauma-informed care to address inheritance of historical and
intergenerational traumas;
Whereas the historical and present systemic harms stemming from slavery are
multifaceted and were inflicted at multiple levels, and thus the
establishment and implementation of reparations can never truly restore
the physical, psychological, and cultural damage done, however, as a
form of redress, it can address harms and cumulative damages;
Whereas the Federal Government has provided compensation and other forms of
redress to other communities against which it has committed gross human
rights violations, including Japanese Americans pursuant to the Civil
Liberties Act of 1988, who were forcibly removed and incarcerated in
concentration camps in World War II;
Whereas the Federal Government abdicated its responsibility time and time again
to adequately acknowledge and provide redress for the crimes of
enslavement and the continuation of racial subjugation and never enacted
resolutions formally apologizing for slavery or H.R. 40, the Commission
to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act;
Whereas the Federal Government must engage in a holistic reparations process of
repair, healing, and restoration of a people injured, because of their
group identity, by governments, corporations, institutions, and
families;
Whereas a holistic program for reparations must address the cultural and
educational exploitation, erasure, and extraction of Black communities
by establishing public school curricula that critically examine the
political, economic, and social impacts of chattel and slavery, Jim
Crow, and post Jim Crow era discrimination and funding to support,
build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure
the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs;
Whereas the Federal Government via the National Parks Services must seek to
erect markers on every site where a Black person was lynched, a massacre
of Black people was committed, and Black towns or neighborhoods were
destroyed;
Whereas the Federal Government must restore and preserve African burial grounds,
Black cemeteries, and other significant cultural and historical sites;
Whereas the Federal Government must recover and identify physical remains of
victims of state-sanctioned racial violence and help resource proper
burial of remains at the direction of connected family and community
members;
Whereas the Federal Government must restore the voting rights of all formerly
and currently incarcerated persons;
Whereas the Federal Government must amend the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, which formally abolished slavery, to repeal the punishment
clause, which reads ``except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or
any place subject to their jurisdiction'', which implies that Black
people convicted of crimes can be legally held in bondage;
Whereas the Federal Government must exonerate Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Callie
House for their unjust targeting and imprisonment, and the President
should issue a posthumous pardon to them;
Whereas the Federal Government should establish targeted funds to be
administered by the National Publishers Association and the National
Association of Black Owned Broadcasters to support the work of Black-led
news programs, radio and television broadcasting dedicated to cultural
education, and civic engagement for the benefit of Black Americans;
Whereas the Federal Government should provide free education to students
attending historically Black colleges and universities, who are
committed to serving Black communities, provide monetary incentives to
local school districts that adopt and implement a curriculum on the
history of people of African descent, and ensure that the Department of
Education provides and supports educational programming that
comprehensively and deliberately encourages the incorporation of lessons
and curricula on slavery and its vestiges;
Whereas the Federal Government must support Black farmers and enable them to
seek adequate judicial remedies, as well as expand and compete in the
United States and global economy;
Whereas the Federal Government must institutionalize and support culturally
appropriate, holistic, preventive, mental health, and curative treatment
services to Black communities;
Whereas the Federal Government must support and strengthen community-based
infrastructure such as hospitals and medical facilities that specialize
in services for Black communities;
Whereas, in 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights urged
the United States to end anti-Black racial discrimination, violence and
systemic racism against people of African descent by providing
comprehensive reparations;
Whereas, in 2022, the United Nations Committee on Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination recommended implementation of a Federal
reparations commission to develop reparation proposals as key strategy
for achieving racial justice;
Whereas, in other countries, including South Africa, Canada, Colombia, and
others, poorly designed reparations processes have not only failed to
bring complete justice, but have created new forms of harm;
Whereas reparations are fundamentally a justice and accountability process that
should carry more symbolic and practical power than traditional social
policy; and
Whereas reparations programs should be distinguishable from the Federal
Government's responsibility for people's general welfare, including
routine social services and development aid: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) recognizes the responsibility of the Federal Government
to provide reparations, in all necessary forms, including
financial compensation, to rectify ongoing harms resulting from
violations, by the Federal Government, of Black people's human
right to self-determination and freedom from discrimination,
including with respect to housing, health, education, life,
security of person, water and sanitation, and a healthy
environment;
(2) encourages support, passage and implementation of H.R.
40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals
for African-Americans Act, which has been introduced every year
since 1989, via Congress or the executive branch;
(3) encourages the reintroduction, passage, and
implementation of legislation establishing the United States
Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation;
(4) acknowledges and apologizes for the state-sanctioned
institution of chattel slavery, and encourages the
reintroduction and enactment of resolutions apologizing for
slavery, without any limiting clauses;
(5) acknowledges the significance of and momentum brought
by legacy organizations as well as additional grassroots and
national organizations leading the modern-day reparations
movement;
(6) encourages the creation of local, State, and Federal
initiatives to identify sources of reparations demands arising
from chattel slavery and its longstanding impact on Black
people; and
(7) honors the lives and legacies of those named and
unnamed whose lives were stolen by the institution of chattel
slavery and other forms of state-sanctioned violence in the
United States.
<all>
Introduced in House
Introduced in House
Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
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