IV 

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; 


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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 


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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, 

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tution, 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; 


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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 

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sons 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 slaveowners and their descendants, fueled the country’s economy while suppressing self-determination and wealthbuilding 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, 


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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; 


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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 


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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 ExSlave 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 


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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 


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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 


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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; 


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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; 


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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 

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treme 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 


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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 BlackWhite 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 

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vestment 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 

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mental 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 


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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’’, 


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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; 


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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 antiBlack 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 

1 Resolved, That the House of Representatives— 

2 (1) recognizes the responsibility of the Federal 

3 Government to provide reparations, in all necessary 

4 forms, including financial compensation, to rectify 

5 ongoing harms resulting from violations, by the FedVerDate Sep 11 2014 03:25 May 18, 2023 Jkt 039200 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 6652 Sfmt 6201 E:\BILLS\HR414.IH HR414

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•HRES 414 IH 

1 eral Government, of Black people’s human right to 

2 self-determination and freedom from discrimination, 

3 including with respect to housing, health, education, 

4 life, security of person, water and sanitation, and a 

5 healthy environment; 

6 (2) encourages support, passage and implemen7 tation of H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and De8 velop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans 

9 Act, which has been introduced every year since 

10 1989, via Congress or the executive branch; 

11 (3) encourages the reintroduction, passage, and 

12 implementation of legislation establishing the United 

13 States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and 

14 Transformation; 

15 (4) acknowledges and apologizes for the state16 sanctioned institution of chattel slavery, and encour17 ages the reintroduction and enactment of resolutions 

18 apologizing for slavery, without any limiting clauses; 

19 (5) acknowledges the significance of and mo20 mentum brought by legacy organizations as well as 

21 additional grassroots and national organizations 

22 leading the modern-day reparations movement; 

23 (6) encourages the creation of local, State, and 

24 Federal initiatives to identify sources of reparations 


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•HRES 414 IH 

1 demands arising from chattel slavery and its long2 standing impact on Black people; and 

3 (7) honors the lives and legacies of those named 

4 and unnamed whose lives were stolen by the institu5 tion of chattel slavery and other forms of state-sanc6 tioned violence in the United States. 

Æ 


kjohnson on DSK79L0C42PROD with BILLS