Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.

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

Summary: This resolution recognizes the responsibility of the federal government to provide reparations and encourages the passage and implementation of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.