repair a lawyer a policy advocate and an organizer with homeless new yorkers talk about what's possible and what's happening next on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it more democrats talking about reparations than ever including several running for the presidency now rather than writing checks to individuals more and more people are talking about collective strategies for repair and reparation community land trust cooperatives and mutual housing associations for example might offer a way to transfer some long promised land and rights to america's black communities while making today's housing economy less speculative delenn trust actually model a way of repairing the damage of the past while simultaneously creating a more equitable economy going forward just possibly joining us to discuss those possibilities are catherine frank a she's the a a new book repair redeeming the promise of abolition kathy co founder and it i could've director of net st that's the national economic and social rights initiative and jerry it's a guy she's a senior organize a pitch of the homeless a grassroots organization founded and led by homeless people which advocates for social justice on issues like housing and what they call the shelter industrial complex welcome everybody so glad to have you let's start with a little history i hate to do this to you catherine but you know people don't know the history they don't get taught it so when we talking about repair when we're talking about reparations for slavery some might say well wasn't there reconstruction  slavery and well in your middle school social studies class or your history class you get the story of we fought a civil war over slavery the slaves were freed there was reconstruction that sort of rebuilt the economy of the south and then here we are today and that's all that was owed but what actually happened is that people were emancipated were freed from slavery into a condition of abject poverty into a kind of world where white supremacy and violent racism still structure their lives and part of what i wanted to do with repair is return to that history and illuminates the ways in which even northern military officials saw it as necessary to provide reparations in the form of land to freed people both as a way to recognize the horrible torture theft rape death separation of families that structured slavery but also to make freedom a reality a practical reality for freed people to have some resources as they began and rebuilt free lives so we've done it we've done it in this country but we don't know it so part of what the book is about designed to do is repair that history is to bring us back to that period and see that this it was doable then and it was seen as necessary to what it meant to emancipate freed people not just to you but when you work with people that are dealing with very urgent needs and concerns does this history resume does it have life today absolutely i folks are continuously being displaced and then entering either the streets and trying to survive that or enter this shelter industrial complex that really is it's not a home and it hasn't really guaranteed any real sustainable pathway for folks getting out of shelter and back into permanent housing for folks and let alone have ownership over those homes and i mean you're hearing i'm hearing a lot of resonance here caffie i mean your organization recently released something called a new social contract that mutes together a picture of the future that could be different but how do you connect to this history what i'd like to start with was some of the concepts that struck me most powerfully catherine book because i was i was really excited as i was reading it part one prong of our new social contract work is land housing and natural resources and we work with picture the homeless on some of these issues really venting the notion of community control and collective ownership of land for those who don't know what community land trust is land that is due these owned collectively but the houses are owned individually by families and so they're building equity you are building wealth but you're doing so outside of the speculative economy there is a contract there's an agreement amongst all the neighbors residents the community land trust to keep the housing permanently affordable this is what prevents the ongoing displacement that that you were describing now what struck me about catherine's book because i was reading two concepts that for me knitted together why this is such a powerful conversation and how important it is now in order to really rethink how we talk about land housing and even natural resources catherine talked about recovering possible futures the idea that there were people even then who knew this was the right thing to do to give reparations to given a concrete form of land the land people had been working for years of new generations and it was abruptly cut off right it was abruptly cut off by the white supremacy that pushed us off that path and in to recover that possible future the other concepts to talk about in the book is we need to understand the difference between history and memory and so we've relegated to history but we haven't really imbedded in our cultural memory so how can you fix something if you have collective amnesia and you refuse to face it so we excavating and recovering this memory making it part you know making our history in our memory hole again allows us to think about this model in a real way it would all be really wonderful as a form of reparations but it would actually be good as move things are there just for the entire country you know so let me come back to you catherine i mean if people do have a memory they have a memory that people were intending to do something along the lines of repair and was stopped as kathy just didn't happen well it's actually did in the sea islands area and then in another area just outside of vicksburg land was seized from the confederate plantation owners when they fled so that land was seized and then it was explicitly and intentionally reallocated to freed people in forty acre units which is where we get that term today of forty acres and a m the understanding that this is how you'll begin your new lives on this land and actually the general's order that allowed for those allocations barred white people from entering those communities and the idea was you people need to heal and you're going to heal and empower yourselves separate from white people and it was it was a beautiful and exciting idea but as soon as lincoln was assassinated the new president came in took all that land back and gave it to the former slave owners and then required that free people enter into year long labor contracts with the people who had owned them before so they reinstituted a form of legalized slavery just under another name with the black code with a lack in all of that so you know as michelle alexander talks about the new jim crow this is this was the seeds of that were taking place in the immediate post war period but for a little window of time there was a whole nother model now there that window d extend into parts of the country with the growth of black towns that were pretty successful until massive white backlash white supremacy violence moving right through to the one thousand nine hundred and twenty years even absolutely there were a few towns largely african american towns and free people sort of peppered through the south but by and large those communities of black people were driven out through lynching from just straight up murder with a gun through just terror racial terror that took place in what we think is this period of wonderful reconstruction it actually was a period of racial terror that drove what we understand to be the great migration of formerly enslaved people african americans to the north to being locked into a multi generations of real poverty so people that had land had had the ability to build for economic lives in the immediate post war period we would see the economy in a very different racially stratified way today and what we've done instead is lock people into the sort of permanent condition of poverty which because we haven't acknowledged this collective responsibility we individualize it as if it's each black person's fault talk a little bit more about those two models that have central to your story the the c i along in south carolina and if it davis bend davis spencer jefferson davis who was the president the confederacy he and his brother owned to play a huge plantation right outside of vicksburg and as soon as general grant moved into that area for that with the northern troops and all of the white people the confederates had to leave black people took over they ran the plantations they were allocated land it was explicitly understood that this would be a kind of black haven a haven of an experiment and freedom similar thing took place in the sea islands all of the white people fled when the northern troops came in and the northern military saw a kind of human horror that shook them to their core by facing what slavery looked like the kind of condition that slaves people presented themselves to these north to the northern military you know sick hungry with no clothing and they were sown credibly move that we have to do something to repair this situation it implicates us mere emancipation is not enough and so forty acre plots of land were allocated to families and what's really interesting is that folks tended to live in collective units not just nuclear families because that's how they had been living before and also the way that slavery split  there were complicated kinship relationships and multiple parent strategies do absolutely and so the idea that we would today return to that idea of collective community ownership reflect also what was going on in that period i mean it's hard not to think of what ifs running through your head as you hear these stories and did you know them i didn't know them races this is this you know going back to when as you were saying when black farmers in the south really kind of like started this whole backcrosses of community living in communities like lantos if you want to think about it this goes back to native indigenous practices where our thought in the way we viewed land it was that this collective ownership where we put on live and be prosperous and have long term sustainability so for me it's like it's not a dream it's not something that is too far out of reach this is something that is possible this is one out of many tools that our communities can benefit from and people across the country have been this is not a new concept people across the country are creating this form as a way to you know maintain affordable ways of living right now if you want to do because i think the other thing that it should cause us to think about is sort of interrogate what we think of as freedom you  that was being practice in those two spaces the sea and island and in davis bend that was a form of being free not just freed and the collective body we can practice today you had mentioned a new social contract you look at all five prongs it's a way of as i think collectively so we can actually be free and we need to understand not only is there no contradiction between that it is one is absolutely impossible without the other catherine to you i mean this beautiful walk kathy is doing here but i can't help thinking it will come back to you on this too cathy of course there was a white supremacist backlash then this feels like a white supremacist revival moment now what makes you think this conversation is is ripe for this nd when we've never experienced a period when where white supremacy didn't structure our political economic legal  lives what i find surprising and i certainly didn't think this as i was writing the book or starting to write the book ten years ago is that the issue of reparations is actually a legitimate conversation right now you've noted there's been a bill introduced into congress year after year after year not to deliver reparations but just to study it and they couldn't even get a hearing on it the bill is now getting a hearing every person who's running for president from the democratic party is talking seriously about reparations actually if they don't have a position they look like they're actually not with the program so to say that white supremacists won't have a reaction to these proposals and to the serious consideration of reparations would be to ignore the power of white supremacy but something has broken out here i've heard elizabeth warren i've heard bernie sanders was terrible on this last time around although i was a bernie i was very positively disposed with him generally but he was terrible on this as he changed he's gotten better you know he's evolving on a lot of things that have to do with racial justice it's not where his heart lies i think it's economic justice in a way that doesn't figure racial justice as it's at its core as i think of all our of work does it's not really a comfortable place for him but he's working on it so he did describe reparations earlier as divisive but he's back to walk that back and he's now talking about it in a different way and i have to say the community land trust a sort of collective ways of thinking property have to figure in some important way in the way that we undertake reparations but they are the only things are right there are all sorts of just knowing the history museums apology other ways of taking down the statues around the country of  confederate heroes to me these are all part of an emerging collective reckoning with the enduring intergenerational injury of slavery but apology without action would be enough right no apology without action would be enough and action has to actually address the underlying structures because our society our economy or politic is structured in a highly racialized way right and it affects all people of color but it is really my opinion centered around this and the end and you know we cannot leave out the the project to wipe on indigenous people to write those two grave kind of original sins are constantly in tension with what are really a set of beautiful ideals of equality fraternity liberty and that is been our historic wrestling right how do we how do we how do we square that circle and we cannot square it until we do what you're talking about h serious reckoning with it and engage it and respond to it both on the level of narrative and on the level of structure but i also think it's essential that white people take responsibility for the advantages that we have been born into so it's not only an issue of addressing the disadvantage that african american people have had in this country but the fact that we're seeing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth taking place right now as the people of my parents generation are dying and we're dropping the estate tax so that that accumulated advantage wealth leg up boots that you can have straps on that can actually pull your life up economically is all built on the fact that there  were there was property there was economic advantage that was part of what it meant to be white in this country that we have to take responsibility for which is why i recommend in the book that we create we raise the estate tax considerably and we tax that what i think is a windfall for people like me and use that money to fund a substantial reparations project would look like i mean it's often the case of the sort of civil rights accomplishments of measured in terms of wage and income improvements and  shrinkage of the disparity in wage differentials it's on this issue of wealth and property ownership and ability to make decisions around property and inheritance that you really see the legacy of slavery tell us more about what's scuse me and we won we were one of the groups but it was one million six hundred thousand dollars divided between three other organizations and so five hundred thousand dollars is a lot for one person if you're thinking about it but it really is not enough and so we were able to get to buildings if i'm remembering correctly we managed to lake own the land that it's on and so what happened is we helped create a mutual housing association with residents folks who we actually sit on the board so there's like two nonprofit organizations that sit on the board of  it and we also have like electives that can also lead be a part of the ball so we have all different stakeholders that are part of it and they make the collective decisions around what kind of repairs are needed what are the fine what are the financial fiscal room responsibilities that we need who are the professionals that we may need to be bringing on board who can actually help us move this work forward in an intentional way and that's the law in the works right one of the things that we need to be i would say that we're trying to advocate more fun is that folks are going to need more financial dollars communities around the country and there have been some around for decades and what's important to know about them is they work spectacularly well over all when the foreclosure crisis hit the community land trust were barely touched the foreclosure rate in communities were very very tiny if you subsidize a family for buying a home in a community land trusts ninety percent of them are still in their private home five years later if you subsidize a family to buy a home in the private market only fifty percent are in their own home five years later so we know the model works this is not a theory this is not an experiment this is something that's been done for a long time what we need is the political commitment to take land out of the speculative economy and create stability and thriving neighborhoods well it's happening in different communities in different ways new york is that particular manhattan and harlem is a very dense place  where gentrification sort of structures the real estate market entirely so to hold back a couple of buildings is a big thing but it may not be transformative in the community but if you go to jackson mississippi where they're also experimenting a lot with community land trust what they're doing there as in detroit and other cities where there just vast parts of the city that have been abandoned right there no services there's no one living there very few people living there so way to recapture those communities and not through gentrification not through what you see in so many cities where they build a new downtown in the yuppies come back from the suburbs and then all the folks who are living there have nowhere to go and end up in shelters what you're doing is you're repairing the very idea of the city itself through community land ownership and community control rather than real estate developers who have no investment in the long term health or culture of the city so how could our conversation what you're calling for around the conversation if only the conversation around reparations but also the actual concrete money how could that conversation shift change the reality on the ground i'm thinking of  years ago talking about one of the st community land trust in the united states that came out of the civil rights movement and that she was involved in in georgia's one of the largest in the south still what they were up against on a daily basis from the agriculture department from pretty much every agency of government of the national regional and local level not to mention just vigilantes was nothing ordinary could could this conversation that your engaging in shift in a way that actually made it safer and more doable for people on the ground i think so because when these sorts of experiments take place on a kind of ad hoc basis here and there in the little cracks in a community they're so vulnerable to the to the violence the backlash of white supremacists or just speculators who often may be the same people in some communities but when it's a national conversation or at least a larger community conversation about a deliberate effort to repair cities repair communities through what are kathy explains really tried and true experiments around collective land ownership it provides a kind of safety i think for those experiments not as just random a anomalies but actually a new model of the city you know hudson yards is a great example of an enormous failure of the idea of a speculative real estate development project on steroids everyone in the city hates this new thing this new sort of symbol of wealth and it's kind of it's just an awful thing and so the contrast to that are the kind of values that under a community landslides and you know as being and massive development on the west side of manhattan that got a lot of cities support and it's really all about commerce you know with a lot thrown in we have a practice nowadays of saying you know what do you think is the story the future will tell of this moment in a nutshell what do you think it will come i think in the future is for us to write write they talk about the history bend towards justice but it's not a lot physics right it depends on the kind of commitment and energy that we put into it but i know the future people are working very hard to write and in th future we are sharing risk income solidarity it's risk it's public responsibility to meet basic needs it's collective community control and it's really a new vision of do democracy