IV 
119TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. RES. 414 
Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to 
provide reparations for the crime of 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 15, 2025 
Ms. LEE of Pennsylvania (for herself, Ms. PRESSLEY, Ms. TLAIB, Ms. OMAR, 
Mrs. RAMIREZ, Mr. THANEDAR, Mr. JACKSON of Illinois, Ms. CROCKETT, 
Mrs. FOUSHEE, Mrs. MCIVER, Ms. SIMON, Ms. WILLIAMS of Georgia, 
Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia, and Mr. GREEN of Texas) submitted the fol-
lowing 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 crime of enslave-
ment 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 non-repetition for past and ongoing harms; 
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•HRES 414 IH 
Whereas to meet the international legal obligation of repara-
tions, the Federal Government must compensate descend-
ants of enslaved Black people and people of African de-
scent in the United States to account for the crimes and 
harms of chattel slavery, the cumulative damages of en-
slavement, and the epochs of legal and de facto segrega-
tion; 
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 pros-
ecute 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 incarcer-
ation and family separation, oppressive and abusive crim-
inalization, and the continued impact of embedded histor-
ical 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 maintain-
ing a violent racial hierarchy, embedding slavery and 
other methods of economic exploitation into the fabric of 
society, and emboldening White supremacy with legal, so-
cial, and economic tools of control; 
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•HRES 414 IH 
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 rec-
ognized and fully accounted for; 
Whereas, over the course of nearly 300 years, at least 
12,500,000 Africans were kidnapped from their home-
lands by European traders and forcibly brought across 
the Atlantic Ocean in one of the largest forced displace-
ments 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 mem-
bers being transferred to the Caribbean, was a mur-
derous and tortuous reality for millions of enslaved peo-
ple who had to endure separation from loved ones they 
could no longer talk to or keep in contact with, perpet-
uating 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 Amer-
ican shores, marked the first year White Virginians pur-
chased 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 poli-
cies produced and sustained the institution of slavery, 
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•HRES 414 IH 
thus voluntarily accepting the British legacy of the insti-
tution, and with it, the responsibility to provide repara-
tions; 
Whereas the Founders in drafting the Constitution preserved 
slavery and racialized social stratification through sys-
temic 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 arti-
cle 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 de-
humanization of the African by relegating their status to 
that of three-fifths of a White man, and article IV, sec-
tion 2, clause 3, which egregiously mandated the capture 
and return to enslavement of fugitives; 
Whereas the system of enslavement served to unite all Thir-
teen 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 peo-
ple from the Oval Office; 
Whereas enslaved Black people built the United States Cap-
itol and the White House; 
Whereas more than 1,700 United States Congressional Mem-
bers who served in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries 
had enslaved Black people, including the first woman 
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•HRES 414 IH 
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 citi-
zens 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 cul-
tural practices and traditions from Africa; 
Whereas the most productive enslaved people were often 
whipped the most violently and were often used as breed-
ers to save slave owners from purchasing enslaved per-
sons; 
Whereas the ban on importation of Africans for enslavement 
was implemented in 1808, driving trade underground and 
increasing the numbers of enslaved people through child-
birth as the sole method available; 
Whereas millions of enslaved Black adults and children were 
routinely raped, sexually assaulted, and tortured at the 
hands of their White enslavers, and others were pur-
chased and forced to staff brothels, all of which rein-
forced 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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•HRES 414 IH 
rape in their lives, and that 1 out of every 6 Black per-
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 indis-
pensable 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 econ-
omy while suppressing self-determination and wealth- 
building for enslaved Black people, and postemancipation, 
left newly freed Black people with zero wealth and land-
less, 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 planta-
tions, insured enslaved people as collateral, produced the 
agricultural tools that were used in Southern plantations, 
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•HRES 414 IH 
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, cre-
ating 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 peo-
ple, 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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•HRES 414 IH 
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 corro-
sive 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 rath-
er than capture them, and also enslaved Black war cap-
tives 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, Confed-
erate 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 abol-
ished slavery and indentured servitude, it made an excep-
tion 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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