The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people – and it has continued over decades.
Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation.
“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land (to) take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain. …There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”
It’s an examination of American history that is now happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials are now asking: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?
This week on Reveal, we explore the renewed fight for reparations.
Dig Deeper
Listen: 40 Acres and a Lie Part 1 and Part 2
Read more: 40 Acres and a Lie (A collaboration between Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal)
Credits
Reporters: Nadia Hamdan and Roy Hurst | Producers: Nadia Hamdan, Roy Hurst and Steven Rascón | Series editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Fact checker: Kim Freda | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Membership manager: Missa Perron | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Claire Mullen | Production intern: Aisha Wallace-Palomares | Original vocals: Renn Woods | Additional music: Dave Linard | Interim Executive Producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, April Simpson, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery
This project was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation.
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. This is the final episode of our three-part series, “40 Acres and a Lie,” and we’re ending on a topic that has come up many times throughout the series, reparations, and the question of what’s owed, because that’s what 40 Acres and a Mule has come to symbolize, an unpaid debt. In the iconic film “Buck and the Preacher,” Ruby Dee tell Sidney Poitier this hope for a new start, it was all a lie. |
| Ruby Dee: | They don’t give us nothing, not no 40 acres and no mule and not freedom, neither. |
| Al Letson: | You’ll find these same kinds of scenes in the made-for-TV miniseries, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” “Roots,” and “Freedom’s Road,” starring the great Muhammad Ali. |
| Muhammad Ali: | Sure, I speak for all the Negroes here. They just want a little farm, a few acres of land what they can put in and plant, and take out their own crops, and feed themselves and their families. That’s all they want. |
| Al Letson: | This land represents the government’s failure to give Black people a fair shot in a country that enslaved them for more than 200 years. |
| Speaker 4: | Who will pay reparations on my soul? |
| Al Letson: | The phrase, 40 Acres and a Mule, has stuck around because that injustice has never been forgotten. |
| Speaker 5: | Well, me, I’m being rowdy, hot and Black. I want my 40 acres and my mule. |
| Al Letson: | When we hear it today in a film or a song, it’s meant to evoke a deep sense of betrayal and a desire to right a wrong. |
| Speaker 6: | 40 acres and a mule. 40 acres and a mule. |
| Speaker 7: | You owe me $10.00, you ain’t giving me nine. You only give me 40 acres and a mule. |
| Speaker 8: | … reparations. How you calculate the amount to be paid? To try to imagine America without the slaves. |
| Speaker 9: | We all right. What you want you, a house? You, a car? 40 acres and a mule? A piano? A guitar? Anything. |
| Al Letson: | The fire that was lit with slavery in 40 Acres has not stopped burning. Instead, it seems to be getting stronger because the injustices did not end there. They’ve just taken a different shape. Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan recently traveled back to Georgia, the state where 40 acres began to meet someone who encapsulates the many ways Black people have continued to lose land and wealth. |
| Elon Osby: | People hear my story and you can almost see it in their face. “What can I do? What can I do to make up for this?” |
| Al Letson: | Her answer is simple reparations. Nadia takes it from here. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Elon Osby thinks that newly freed people should have gotten more back then. |
| Elon Osby: | I didn’t understand why just a mule. You know, why not a cow and some chickens? |
| Nadia Hamdan: | We’re sitting in Elon’s dining room in Atlanta. Much like her home, Elon is a pop of color. She’s wearing bright florals and a bold lip. Her salt and pepper curls cut short. And even as she jokes, she’s quick to acknowledge just how valuable those 40 acres and the mule would’ve been, not just to families back then, but the generations afterward. |
| Elon Osby: | Your children reached the age of being an adult, then you can give them some of that and they can start being self-sufficient and it goes on and on. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Generational wealth. |
| Elon Osby: | Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the start. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Yeah. |
| Elon Osby: | That’s the start. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Yeah. |
| Elon Osby: | But I think they should have asked for a cow. I do. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Elon knows more than most what land can mean to a Black family. More specifically what losing land can mean because her family was displaced. Not once, but twice. We start in Forsyth County, a 45-minute drive from Atlanta. |
| Elon Osby: | My grandfather owned 60 acres of land. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Elon’s grandfather was named William Bagley, and back in 1910, William and his family were one of only a few dozen Black families who actually owned property in the county. |
| Elon Osby: | I think he was way ahead of his time. I really think he was. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | But in 1912, hundreds of Black families, including Elon’s, would be violently driven from their homes and everything Elon is about to tell us has been confirmed by the Atlanta History Center. They actually did an entire research project about this moment in Forsyth County. It all began because of two incidents with White women. The first, an accusation of rape against a Black man, but historians say it’s commonly believed something else happened. |
| Elon Osby: | She was actually having an affair with one of the Black men there and her husband or somebody caught her, and so her story changed and then she was raped. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | This was a common phenomenon at the time. And according to the Atlanta History Center, the rape charges were ultimately dropped. Then a few weeks later, a different White woman is brutally murdered nearby, and a group of Black men are arrested immediately despite very little evidence. And before any sort of trial took place, White people stormed the jail and the main suspect in the case. |
| Elon Osby: | He was pulled out of the jail there and they lynched him on the town square. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Historians say it appears the sheriff purposefully put this man in the jail to be lynched to satisfy the mob, and the mob doesn’t stop there. These two incidents seem to have ignited a fire across the county. |
| Elon Osby: | They call them the night riders. They rode through Forsyth County and they burn people’s farms and their homes. They kill people. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | These bands of White men intimidated other Black families leaving illegal eviction notices on their homes, basically telling them to leave or else. And so the Bagley’s packed up a wagon with everything they could and left in the middle of the night. Elon’s mother was only two years old. |
| Elon Osby: | I think about the scariest time that I can think of in my life and then think about nowhere near this. There are people with guns and torches who are riding through your community where you live and telling you, you got to leave. My grandfather owned 60 acres of land and you have to leave that with no compensation and you don’t go back. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And so the Bagley’s are forced to start over. By 1920 they settled here in Fulton County. In a place known today as Buckhead. Buckhead is considered the richest and Whitest neighborhood in Atlanta, and it was affluent back then too. Elon’s mother and father eventually ended up working for White families in the area. One is a cook, the other is a butler and a chauffeur. That’s how the Bagley’s ended up living in a small Black community known as Macedonia Park. It was a modest community for sure. Dirt roads, no running water, no sewage system. Everyone used outhouses, but Elon says her family was happy there. William owned six lots and a small general store. |
| Elon Osby: | They called it the Rib Shack, but it was a combination of a store, they sold barbecue, and then on the weekends it was like the nightclub. They had a jukebox in there and people would come and they danced and had a good time and did all that kind of stuff. And from that they did pretty well. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | So well in fact, that Elon’s grandfather became a sort of mayor of the community, and that’s why Macedonia Park- |
| Elon Osby: | Became known as Bagley Park, and it was because of his standing in the community, his leadership. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Over two decades, Elon’s family built a new life here, but this too would once again be taken. In the early 1940s, a neighborhood was built right next door to Bagley Park, a wealthy White neighborhood known as Garden Hills. |
| Elon Osby: | Bagley Park was in their backyard. And so the Women’s Club, they got together and they started complaining about the conditions that were in Bagley Park. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | It was known as the Garden Hills Women’s Club, and they felt that Bagley Park was a health hazard because there was no sewage system, only outhouses. Now, there’s no denying that the conditions in Bagley Park were unsanitary, but it’s not as if the residents there wanted to live without a sewage system. |
| Elon Osby: | They had begged Fulton County for a connection to the sewer lines and they said that they couldn’t do it. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And yet somehow once Garden Hills was built- |
| Elon Osby: | They were connected to sewer lines. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And they’re literally right next to each other. |
| Elon Osby: | Right next door. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Was it not even proposed by the White families to say, “Hey, get them a sewer system.” It was just immediately like, “Get these people out of here.” |
| Elon Osby: | I think it was only that thought. Just get them out of there. And so Fulton County came up with the idea, we need a park. We need a park for the rich White people. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | You guys have to move. |
| Elon Osby: | Yeah. That was it. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Eminent domain. |
| Elon Osby: | Yes, and they made offers to them. If you didn’t accept the offer, then they took it and you didn’t get anything. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Were the offers fair? |
| Elon Osby: | No. No, they weren’t. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Each homeowner was given $4,000 to leave Bagley Park. For the Bagley family that’s the same amount they paid for the property. So they didn’t make any money from the sale. By 1952, all homes and businesses in Bagley Park had been demolished and turned into a public park. And as some sort of consolation, Fulton County decides to keep the name Bagley Park. Is it strange though to name the park after dispossessing the person that it’s named after? |
| Elon Osby: | They had their park for the White people. What the name of it was, was not important. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | William and his wife Ida died just a few years before that. So neither of them were alive to watch their family be uprooted once again. |
| Elon Osby: | I’m sure they went to their deathbed with the idea, my family is taken care of. They have land. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Yeah. |
| Elon Osby: | They’ve got Bagley Park. This is home. Surely nothing is going to come and force us away from this. It just cannot happen. And then it did. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Elon’s story is just one story, but there are more, many more in Fulton County alone. And for the first time, stories like this one aren’t just going to be indexed into a historical archive. They’re going to be the basis for a so-called “harm report.” One that hopes to measure an injustice and calculate what’s owed because in 2021, Fulton County created a reparations task force. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | We are finding so many things. I mean, it’s so apparent that you have a group of people that have been wronged over decades and even centuries. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | This is Karcheik Sims-Alvarado. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | And my name is spelled K-A-R-C-H-E-I-K. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik is a professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | Sims. S-I-M-S- |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And she now serves as the chair of the task force- |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | Hyphen, big capital A- |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The first of its kind in the county. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | L-V, as in Victor, A-R, as in revolutionary, A-D-O. I should say R for reparations. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik is wearing a white blouse and a blue leather skirt. Her hair pulled back so you can see her face, which seems to easily break into a smile. She says, the Bagley’s are a case study, one that shows a pattern of land loss among Black families specifically. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | And they lost land due to racial intimidation where they were forced off their land and take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else. They lost it through over taxation. They lost it through eminent domain. So there’s all these different ways that African-Americans acquired and lost land. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik knows Elon and her story well, because Elon has actually joined the task force to represent the many descendants like her, but this has been an evolution because she didn’t always believe in reparations. |
| Elon Osby: | I would say no. I just want people to say I’m sorry, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it now and I want people to pay. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Elon says, if you hit people in their pockets, they’ll think twice before making the same mistake. Not only that, but the task force recently shared with her just how much wealth her family lost after being forced out of Bagley Park. |
| Elon Osby: | Millions and millions. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | A county assessment valued the land at about $6 million, but the market value is likely much higher. |
| Elon Osby: | What could have been? What could have been? |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik’s small team of researchers, there’s only about half a dozen of them, have been studying stories like Elon’s for the last two years. They’ve been scouring court records, library archives, people’s garages for proof of anything that shows the harm that was done to Black people in the county. For example, they found a newspaper clipping from 1949. It’s saying a development company in Fulton County explicitly bought a different park to keep the Black community from “encroaching” and then sold it to the county with the stipulation that they do not resell the land to Black people. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | They purchased the land to make it a park to prevent African-Americans from actually becoming homeowners, to become landowners. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik says the use of parks has actually been weaponized over centuries. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | And parks seem so benign, right? You think, “Oh, it’s trees. It’s where playgrounds are.” But they also have served as buffers to divide Black communities and White communities. You have African-Americans who have lost their lands, indigenous people who have lost their lands for the purpose of parks. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And the task force is not just looking at land loss. They’re not even just looking at the 20th century. Karcheik says they’re looking at everything. From slavery to now. So far, the task force has collected more than 15,000 documents that they will use to put together their final harm report. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | There is no history that’s been written on slavery in Fulton County in Atlanta, which is one of the reasons why our research is hard is trying to find those primary documents in order to tell that story. They’re hidden, they’re displaced. We don’t know where the records are. We’re still looking. And even that is a challenge. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | And you can’t do this work without the records. I mean this entire series wouldn’t have even been possible without public records becoming more public. And Karcheik says that’s part of what they’re trying to do with the task force. Make county records more accessible, but it hasn’t been as easy as you’d think. Records have been moved and stored in places that take time to find. It can take months just to get access to one room in a courthouse. Then meetings are scheduled and canceled without warning. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | I’m just going to try to make the most out of the situation. I know how to take lemons and make it into lemonade, lemon meringue pie, lemon curd, lemon pound cake, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Karcheik believes she will be able to compile more than enough evidence of wrongdoing. And if at least four of the seven county commissioners agree with her and vote yes, they’ll move into the next phase. Who will receive reparations and how much will they get? But there’s legislation out there that would try to shut down local initiatives like Karcheik’s. Congressman Brian Babin of Texas introduced a bill last year that would prohibit the federal government from giving bailouts or other financial assistance to “any state or local government that enacts any law providing reparations for slavery.” |
| Brian Babin: | Well, the American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for radical race-based reparation payments to please the woke left. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Since then, we’ve seen a few copycat bills introduced in state governments. Even in Fulton County, at least two of the commissioners do not want to see reparations happen. Here’s Commissioner Bridget Thorne in a video on Fox News. |
| Bridget Thorne: | My problem is it is so open-ended and it is going to be biased research. It’s only going to be research looking at how we need to pay reparations, not if we need to pay reparations. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | In an email response to us, the commissioner says she believes reparations are part of a victim mindset and “What occurred in the past, even when wrong, nevertheless occurred in the past and cannot be undone by reparations.” |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | I just need four votes. My goal is not to try to win the support of all individuals who are on the commission. I just need four to say, “Yes.” |
| Nadia Hamdan: | You seem very confident. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | Oh. I was born for this and I know exactly what I’m doing. I know how to make the case. I’ve already seen what’s at the finish line. I just have to deliver. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The final harm report will be delivered in October. Karcheik isn’t alone in her optimism despite the fact that only 30% of the country is in favor of the idea, we’ve watched the number of reparations efforts skyrocket in the last decade. The African-American Redress Network is a research group that’s been tracking the changes. |
| Linda Mann: | There was an uptick around 2014. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Linda Mann is the group’s director. |
| Linda Mann: | Which coincidentally aligns with the shooting of Michael Brown by the Ferguson police officers and the resulting riots. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Their data shows that at the start of the millennium, they could count only four reparations efforts. In 2014, that number jumped to 18. |
| Linda Mann: | And of course, George Floyd, I think things exploded. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests had a huge impact on the number of calls for reparations. That year, Linda says they watched the numbers jump to 67 and it hasn’t stopped. Today the Redress Network has found nearly 600 reparations efforts across the country. The majority of them are things like public apologies, commemorations and truth finding efforts, but like Karcheik in Fulton County, many are hoping that the truth-finding will lead to actual compensation. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | We have to do it on the local level because of what the federal government has failed to do. And the reason why I know that we’re going to score victories because those who once said that there is no way that reparations will be given. They are now saying who will receive it, and what will it look like, and how much? |
| Al Letson: | To Karcheik it’s the people on the ground, the grassroots activists who can spark the most change. That was true even decades ago when a Detroit congressman introduced a federal reparations bill. Thanks, in large part, to a man named Ray. |
| Karcheik Sims-A…: | When we started talking about the power of one, right? You just need one person to ignite a fire. |
| Al Letson: | That’s up next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Before reparations became a mainstream debate that was taken seriously by academics and politicians, it was regular people who were keeping the reparations movement alive. Callie House, Isaiah Dickerson, Audley Queen Mother Moore. |
| Audley Moore: | I was asking for $200 billion for the injury that we have received, the injury as a result of our enslavement. |
| Al Letson: | Today, these are not household names and neither are the organizations they help create, like the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women and the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. Long titles that just really mean, “I want my 40 acres and my mule.” These people lived and breathed reparations in relative obscurity. And in 1960s, Detroit, so did Ray Jenkins. |
| Ray Jenkins: | 1967, I was asking for 1 million for each Black person. |
| Al Letson: | Producer Roy Hurst takes us to Detroit to hear about one man’s role in the long arc of reparations. A man so dedicated, they called him Reparations Ray. |
| Roy Hurst: | Rico Jenkins is Ray Jenkins’ son. He grew up hearing his dad talk about reparations a lot. |
| Rico Jenkins: | Reparations was his baby. He talked about it constantly his entire adult life. |
| Roy Hurst: | To hear Rico tell it, Ray Jenkins’s overall activist meter was always in the red. |
| Rico Jenkins: | He was a freedom fighter for all kinds of causes. My mom would liked to him be at home more, but he was out picketing and doing all kinds of things for the Black race. |
| Roy Hurst: | Rico was 67, retired from the Detroit Police Department. And he admits it wasn’t always easy being Ray Jenkins because he was often drafted into his father’s passion, whether he liked it or not. Like the time back in 1963 when Rico helped his dad integrate a local bank. |
| Rico Jenkins: | I was nine years old. I don’t want to say the name of the bank because I’m sure I’m going to say it wrong, Standard Federal or somebody. Anyway. |
| Roy Hurst: | The bank was actually called First Federal Savings & Loan Association. It no longer exists. |
| Rico Jenkins: | They didn’t have any Black employees there. |
| Roy Hurst: | There were also accusations of racist loan practices, and Ray was picketing the main branch with the local chapter of the NAACP. First Federal was denying all charges and refusing to budge, but Ray had Rico’s savings account there. One day he came to have a talk with his son. |
| Rico Jenkins: | He said, “We’re going to go in the bank. All the picketers are going to be in there. And we’re going to ask for your $3,000 in pennies just to cause some havoc or whatever.” We went in there, television cameras, news, everybody in there. I come in there, I’m asking for the money. They said, “We are not going to grant you that.” All the picketers inside there, they’re saying, “Rico wants his money, Rico…” They’re crawling on the floor and everything and I’m scared in fact. But my dad said, “Everything’s going to be all right. We going to do this.” |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray Jenkins was a Detroit migrant from Memphis. He stood out in a crowd. Handsome with a pencil mustache, a tall, slender frame, always in a suit. In the late-1950s Ray opened Ray Jenkins Realty. And as Detroit saw its demographic shifting with White flight to the suburbs, Ray helped first-time Black homeowners find their place in the city. Being his own boss gave him a level of middle-class wealth, prominence in freedom for his civil rights work, especially reparations. |
| Speaker 10: | Abe, what’s in the news tonight? |
| Abe: | Local Black brother calls for back pay for slave ancestors. |
| Roy Hurst: | This is from a local public television show from 1968 called CPT or Colored People’s Time. And this may be the first real media attention Ray ever received for his reparations calls. |
| Abe: | Brother Ray Jenkins, a local real estate broker and civil rights worker has called upon the president of the United States to award to every Black citizen a substantial amount of money for all the years their ancestors were in slavery. |
| Rico Jenkins: | My dad started an organization that he called SLAP. |
| Abe: | Mr. Jenkins protest movement will be named SLAP, “Which means Slave Labor Annuity Pay.” |
| Speaker 10: | Slave Labor Anniversary Pay. |
| Abe: | Says Jenkins. When the slaves were freed in 1863, they were promised by this government, 40 acres and a mule. |
| Rico Jenkins: | And he would write congressmen, presidents, whomever, and talk about reparations. |
| Roy Hurst: | And we can’t exactly say Ray’s letters were ignored. |
| Rico Jenkins: | He got letters back. Yeah, it’s always a Dear John letter, “We’re thankful for your thoughts, but at this time we don’t think this is feasible,” or something of that nature. |
| Roy Hurst: | In other words, Ray wasn’t receiving any invites to Washington for further discussions. |
| Rico Jenkins: | No, no. |
| Abe: | The members of CPT will be anxiously awaiting their checks, Brother Jenkins |
| Roy Hurst: | Only obscure Black media were willing to give Ray time, and even that was rare. Here he is in an interview with Detroit Black Journal in 1990. |
| Speaker 11: | This is something that’s very, very personal to you. |
| Ray Jenkins: | Very personal. |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray was more than 20 years older and still going. |
| Ray Jenkins: | My grandfather was a slave in Mississippi. His daughter is right here right now, 89 years old. And she quite concerned about the 40 acres and the mule that the Black people did not receive. |
| Roy Hurst: | And Ray would stress he wasn’t begging. |
| Ray Jenkins: | It’s not a handout. It’s a debt that owes us from the government. |
| Rico Jenkins: | He used to say, “This is a debt owed for 246 years of free labor.” |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray was a fixture at local political meetings and social functions. He was well known to clergy and to the mayor. He was a regular at city council meetings and on a local call-in talk show, Wake Up Detroit. |
| JoAnn Watson: | Every day, every day, one topic. |
| Roy Hurst: | This is the late JoAnn Watson, former Detroit City Councilwoman and host of Wake Up Detroit. |
| JoAnn Watson: | “JoAnn, we need some reparations. It ain’t a handout, it’s a debt owed. Tell the people, JoAnn.” I said, “You just told them, Ray.” After some years with him calling every day, I said, “Now your name is now Reparations Ray. You no longer just Ray Jenkins.” |
| Rico Jenkins: | I mean it stuck and it was perfect actually. |
| Roy Hurst: | Except for one thing. The people Ray was seeking reparations for, Black people, a lot of them didn’t want to hear about it. |
| Ray Jenkins: | Over the years when I mentioned those reparations to Black people and other people, they thought it was a joke. |
| Rico Jenkins: | I don’t think Black people wanted to be associated with slavery and being a slave. And it was just the opposite for my dad. He was very, very, I mean, extremely committed to this, almost to a fault. A lot of meetings, I would go with him as a little fella and he would get ridiculed so bad. I felt bad for him so much so I wouldn’t even want to go to the meetings anymore because of how people treated him for him asking for that. |
| Roy Hurst: | Rico says it went on like this for decades. |
| Rico Jenkins: | But he did have a good friend, Congressman John Conyers. |
| Keenan Keller: | Mr. Conyers was a magnet for people with progressive views and kept an open ear. |
| Roy Hurst: | Keenan Keller is a lawyer with the House Judiciary Committee and worked closely with Conyers. |
| Keenan Keller: | Everybody knew Reparations Ray. |
| Roy Hurst: | Conyers couldn’t ignore Ray. For one thing, Rico says that in 1964, Ray hosted a fundraiser at his home, helping Conyers become one of only five Black congressmen in the nation. Through Conyers, Ray had a connection to power and was determined to make the most of it. |
| Rico Jenkins: | He would go to his office or knowing that he might be at a certain meeting, he would show up there. And so much so that I’m sure when they saw my dad coming, they’re turning and trying to get away from him. Of course, he would put my dad off. “Oh yes, it’s a good idea,” and whatever, but he never did anything about it. |
| Roy Hurst: | But then in the summer of 1988, something extraordinary happened. |
| President Ronal…: | My fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. |
| Roy Hurst: | President Ronald Reagan signed a bill granting reparations to Japanese Americans. More than 40 years earlier after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps for the duration of the war. |
| President Ronal…: | This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race. And the legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 survivors. |
| Roy Hurst: | The survivors were each given restitution of $20,000. And it was as if raised fire had been doused with kerosene. |
| Ray Jenkins: | They stayed in a concentration camp for three years and they go get 20,000 each. And Black people stayed in slavery 246 years, didn’t get a nickel. |
| Roy Hurst: | In the end the government paid out more than $1.6 billion to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans. Ray knew that if there was ever a time to get the ball rolling, this was it because nobody thought Ray was so crazy anymore. |
| Ray Jenkins: | People said, “Well, maybe the man is not too ridiculous.” And everybody started jumping on the bandwagon. |
| Roy Hurst: | And remember JoAnn Watson, the former host of Wake Up Detroit?, she said Ray turned his attention to Conyers with the full court press. |
| JoAnn Watson: | Followed him all over Detroit, followed him around to every place he went to speak, Ray would jump up and grab the mic. “Congressman, you need to introduce that reparation now the Japanese done got some money and an apology.” |
| Keenan Keller: | John Conyers, he saw this interesting confluence of events between what was going on with Japanese American reparations and African Americans. And then people came to him and he said, “All right, we’ll do this.” |
| Rico Jenkins: | But I think on the urging of my dad for years and years and years of browbeating him about reparations, he finally said, “Let’s do something>” |
| Roy Hurst: | For Conyers. Doing something meant proposing legislation. And in 1989, he introduced the bill we know today as H.R. 40. The 40 refers to, yes, 40 acres and a mule. |
| John Conyers: | I don’t want to give you the Conyers solution to reparations for America. |
| Roy Hurst: | This is what Conyers told a reporter. |
| John Conyers: | What I do want to give you is the opportunity for us to have an official study and discussion of this for the first time in our history. |
| Roy Hurst: | Conyers understood the uphill battle an African-American reparations bill would face. And so, H.R 40 takes a soft approach. Instead of laying out a definitive package for recompense, it aims to establish a federal commission to study the issue and develop possible proposals for redress. |
| John Conyers: | Here, where is he? |
| Speaker 12: | Ray, Ray. |
| John Conyers: | Ray Jenkins. Come up on this stage. |
| Roy Hurst: | 13 years after H.R 40 was first introduced, thousands gathered at the Capitol in Washington DC to demonstrate for reparations. John Conyers interrupted his speech to acknowledge Ray. |
| John Conyers: | Reparations Ray Jenkins, this is the man that did it. He hung with it during the lean years when we couldn’t get thousands upon thousands out, Ray did it. |
| Speaker 15: | That’s right. |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray was 81 years old by then. Conyers took Ray’s hand and clenched it high above their heads in a gesture of solidarity. But when Conyers says Ray did it, he doesn’t mean reparations at a federal level move forward. In fact, just the opposite happened. It stalled for decades. But Keenan Keller says Conyers expected this. He knew he was playing the long game. |
| Keenan Keller: | He was not afraid to take on an issue that had a very long legislative arc. |
| John Conyers: | That’s right, Reparations Ray did it. |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray had also been playing the long game. |
| John Conyers: | When he couldn’t get an audience with nobody, Ray kept on keeping on. And now we are millions strong. |
| Roy Hurst: | Ray died in 2009 at the age of 88. But up on that stage that day with thousands of Black people in the crowd cheering with gratitude, it must have felt like an amazing sea change. When Conyers says, “Ray did it,” what he meant was that finally there was support for what was once considered unthinkable. A payment, redress for live spent in, a movement was brewing. In 2021, H.R 40 he finally got a hearing. It was another small step toward federal reparations. And neither Ray nor Conyers were alive to see it. And today, city, states and counties aren’t waiting for Congress to act. Local governments are forming commissions, proposing bills, and taking reparations into their own hands. |
| JoAnn Watson: | I stand here representing generations who are enslaved and never paid. |
| Roy Hurst: | In California. |
| JoAnn Watson: | Who never got the promise of 40 acres and a mule. |
| Speaker 16: | A rushed reparations bill… |
| Roy Hurst: | In New York. |
| Speaker 17: | Is doing an injustice to everyone who has suffered. We must get this right. |
| Speaker 17: | If you go from slavery to the present day… |
| Roy Hurst: | In Detroit. |
| Speaker 17: | They owe us a lot of money. |
| Roy Hurst: | And then of course there’s Evanston, Illinois. |
| Speaker 18: | Reparations has happened in Evanston. |
| Roy Hurst: | It’s the first US city to successfully deliver reparations to Black Americans. Over the last few years, hundreds of people have started receiving housing grants and cash payments of $25,000. |
| Speaker 18: | It is what I call a down payment towards the repair that is due. |
| Speaker 19: | What do we want? |
| Crowd: | Reparations. |
| Speaker 19: | When? |
| Crowd: | Now. |
| Speaker 19: | What do we want? |
| Crowd: | Reparations. |
| Speaker 19: | When? |
| Crowd: | Now. |
| Speaker 19: | What do we want? |
| Crowd: | Reparations. |
| Rico Jenkins: | I feel unbelievable that people are talking about reparations. I don’t want to get upset, but I’m sorry. I know the ridicule my dad took for years of talking about this and for people to be actually talking about this that it is something that might happen, it really hits me right in my heart. And I’m just sad that my dad couldn’t see some of this because of what he fought for is so hard and so many years. It would be delightful for him just to see a little bit of light because when he was going, there was no light at all. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, we hear from two economists, former classmates at MIT, both in their 70s and both Black, but stand on opposite sides of the debate over reparations. |
| Speaker 20: | I’m asking the federal government to pay a debt that it has not met for 157 years. |
| Speaker 21: | Nobody is coming to save us. Who are we asking to pay? |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Reparations. What does it even mean? |
| William Darity: | A program of acknowledgement, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice. |
| Al Letson: | This is what it means to economist William Darity of Duke University. The first step is acknowledgement. |
| William Darity: | Acknowledgement means that the culpable party admits that it has committed an act that is wrong, deeply wrong. |
| Al Letson: | Then redress. |
| William Darity: | The redress component is the actual act of compensatory justice or restitution. |
| Al Letson: | And finally, closure. |
| William Darity: | The account is settled, that the act of restitution is treated as sufficient for the purposes of closing the books on the debt. |
| Al Letson: | Closing the books on the debt. While I struggle to imagine any number could be enough to do this, William actually has one. It’s why he’s become such a well-known figure in the reparations movement because he and his colleagues have calculated what they believe is the final number the federal government should pay, $14 trillion. And how did William get to this number? Through many different calculations, but the first one he tried was to calculate the value of the broken promise this whole series is based on, the promise known as 40 acres and a mule. |
| William Darity: | I think that there’s no doubt that there’s a legitimate view of the 40 acres commitment as a form of reparations. |
| Al Letson: | He believes if that program had never been rescinded, around four million freed people could have settled that huge chunk of land set aside for them, which stretched from South Carolina to Georgia to Upper Florida. |
| William Darity: | The territory that would’ve been essentially a coastal Black Belt Community. |
| Al Letson: | And according to his math, if you were to take that dollar value of all that land in the 1860s and bring it to today’s value, you get $14 trillion. |
| William Darity: | Which is identical to the figure that you get if you try to calculate the difference in wealth between the average net worth for a Black household and a White household and multiply that by the number of Black households. |
| Al Letson: | A recent survey by the Federal Reserve shows that in 2022, the average income of Black households was nearly $1.2 million less than the average income of White households, a racial wealth gap that started with 40 acres. |
| William Darity: | I think that’s the beginning of the racial wealth gap in the United States because it meant that you restored land to the oppressors and you denied restitution to those who had been oppressed, which eliminated their capacity to transfer resources across generations to support their descendants. And so you create a divide in terms of the opportunity to transfer wealth to children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the like. |
| Al Letson: | And William believes the only way to create more economic equality between Black and White people is for the federal government to pay reparations. |
| William Darity: | The federal government is the entity that made slavery legal in the United States. The federal government is the entity that did not give the newly emancipated land in the aftermath of the Civil War. The federal government is the architect of the 20th century discriminatory policies with respect to home ownership provisions. So this is not a question of some individual bearing responsibility for this burden. This is a national responsibility. I’m asking the federal government to pay a debt that it has not met for 157 years. |
| Glenn Loury: | I don’t want the narrative to be we Black people are owed something, pay up. |
| Al Letson: | This is Glenn Loury of Brown University, like William, he’s an economist. He’s in his 70s and he’s Black. William and Glenn were actually classmates together at MIT. But when it comes to reparations, they couldn’t be more different. |
| Glenn Loury: | I am not denying that we are owed something. I mean, I would have to be a fool to not say that we had been to some degree dispossessed, but you don’t want to discharge that obligation. |
| Al Letson: | What Glenn means is he doesn’t like the idea of institutions being able to wash their hands of racial inequity once the debt is paid. |
| Glenn Loury: | You’re still going to have the three-year reading gap. You’re still going to have the so-called ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, St. Louis or Baltimore. You’re still going to have the jails overflowing. There’s structural dynamics that are going on here. |
| Al Letson: | Glenn believes that these are not only matters of politics and government, they’re also a matter of individual responsibility. |
| Glenn Loury: | Nobody is coming to save us. Who are we asking to pay? We endow our great-White fathers and mothers with omnipotent power. They can restore us if only they would. Think about the indignity of that posture. |
| Al Letson: | Now, this isn’t how most Black people feel about reparations. In 2021, the Pew Research Center surveyed Black Americans and 77% said the descendants of formerly enslaved people should be repaid in some way. But Glenn still doesn’t think reparations are a good idea, although his position softened slightly when we laid out the details of the 40 Acres Program. |
| He didn’t know that newly freed people were actually given land titles or that our partners at the Center for Public Integrity had identified the names of more than 1,200 freed people who received these land titles, only to have that land taken back almost as quickly as it was given. | |
| Glenn Loury: | I don’t see why you shouldn’t compensate the people who were dispossessed. But is that reparations to Black people for slavery, or is that a recognition that 1,000, 1,200, however many you can find and identify, have a claim? |
| Al Letson: | In other words, Glenn thinks of 40 acres as a specific land loss issue. But that land wasn’t just land. It was a promise of true independence, and it was meant for all freed people. So Reveal producer Nadia Hamdan had a question for Glenn. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | Did we really give Black people their freedom if we did not give them that economic foundation as well? |
| Glenn Loury: | I don’t like the question, but the answer would have to be no. We didn’t give them their freedom. Understood as you intended to be understood. I’m not going to quibble. |
| Nadia Hamdan: | But you said you didn’t like the question. |
| Glenn Loury: | Why don’t I like the question? You’re asking too much of freedom. See, I mean, life is not fair. I’m an economist. They call us the dismal science, and that’s because we bring the message that you got to deal with the hand you were dealt. I mean, there is no cosmic justice. There’s nobody up here. Would that we had been in a country where the politics of it and the morality of it would’ve allowed for a just reckoning? Sure. |
| Then they would’ve been made “free.” But we actually live on the planet earth in the context of real countries where none of them are possessed of that kind of dispensation. So it’s an idle speculation to sit and ask, what if they had been really free? There were never going to be really free. | |
| Al Letson: | But while Glenn and a majority of Americans accept this history in a it is what it is kind of way, I’m not so sure. History is not dead facts set in stone. As we learn more about the past, our understanding of it evolves and so must how we address it. But none of this is simple. I mean, this entire series is essentially about land ownership. Land that was originally stolen from indigenous people. The theft of their land and the genocide of their people also remains unresolved. |
| And the task of reconciling the past with the present becomes even harder when we can’t even agree how to talk about these things. When I was growing up in the South, all these new housing developments were popping up. Several of them had plantation in the name, Oak Leaf Plantation, the Plantation at Ponte Vedra, Julington Creek Plantation. It was odd to me to put that word in the name of a new well-to-do development. To me, it was like naming a neighborhood after a concentration camp. | |
| I don’t know what the people who named it thought of the word plantation. Maybe it made them think of big sprawling estates, fields of green and mint juleps on the porch. It makes me think of how long my ancestors spent bent over in the sun building those sprawling estates, working in the fields, serving those mint juleps. Never getting a chance to share in the prosperity and comfort they created for others. | |
| I don’t bring this up to villainize those developers, but rather to show that we may have a common language around words like plantation, but not a common context. And when we talk about reparations, that’s one of the major problems. We may be using the same words, but they mean something very different. When public integrity reporters unearthed all those land titles, it gave us more context. We are now learning the names of those who are betrayed by the 40 Acres Program. | |
| Real people with descendants who are alive now still experiencing a wealth gap that began centuries ago. We know this history matters. We know the importance of documents. We know a lot of people have stopped treating reparations as a joke, and we know the cause for justice have only gotten louder. And while I am not advocating or dismissing the movement for reparations, I’m not convinced that it will ever happen in my lifetime, not even in my children’s lifetime. But I am convinced of one thing, the conversation is changing. | |
| This story was reported and produced by Nadia Hamdan and Roy Hurst. Nadia is also our lead producer for today’s show. That help from Steven Rascón. Cynthia Rodriguez is our series editor. Thanks to our partners at the Center for Public Integrity, including April Simpson, Alexia Fernández Campbell, Pratheek Rebala, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Freeman, Peter Newbatt Smith and Wesley Lowery. This project was supported by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism and Wyncote Foundation. | |
| Victoria Baranetsky is Reveal’s general counsel. Missa Perron is our membership manager. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. That helped this week from Claire C-Note Mullen. Our production intern is Aisha Wallace-Palomares. Original vocals by Renn Woods, and additional music by Dave Linard. Our interim executive producers of Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. | |
| Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |