At the end of the Civil War, the confederacy surrendered their soldiers. But they would not surrender all the Black people they enslaved.
Juneteenth celebrates the day – two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and two months after the Civil War ended – when thousands of Union soldiers breached one of the last strongholds of Confederate insurgents in Galveston, Texas.
The Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery passed later that year, only after an exception was carved out allowing the inhumane practice to persist for people with a criminal conviction.
Reparations is a transformative right to access justice and accountability. A transparent accountability process must be defined in concrete terms by the survivors of community-wide atrocities like racial segregation, mass criminalization, forced sterilization, family separation, land theft, and militarized police violence.
Below, we expose some of the falsehoods circulating to help you define reparations for yourself!
Reparations are theoretical, not legal. FALSE
Reparations are remedies that have been mandated by courts, legislatures, regional treaties, bilateral and transnational agreements, and numerous United Nations (UN) human rights instruments to rectify and prevent civil and human rights violations. Across the country, private citizens and public commissions are defining reparations through a variety of victim-centered accountability processes that aim to bridge the gap between theoretical human rights and material justice for survivors.
International human rights don’t apply in the US. FALSE
Critics often dismiss reparations as a foreign legal concept. Yet, this ignores a stark irony: the U.S. legal system is itself a foreign import. Over 80% of our civil/property laws and criminal codes are direct copies of 16th-century British colonial law – a system engineered for imperial control and retribution against all who challenge it, not community healing. Reparatory justice may feel “foreign” in the U.S. because taxpayers here spend over $400 billion on the carceral industry and less than 1% on victim rehabilitation.
Long before the United States or the United Nations (U.N.) existed, every pre-colonial Indigenous and African system of justice included some community process for making amends to victims of large-scale rights violations or environmental damage. Many of the earliest functioning ‘reparations’ forums shared several elements. They often required the return of what was stolen (to increase safety), public acknowledgement/cultural preservation (to discover the truth), dignified burials (to respect heritage), wealth and land redistribution (to strengthen social harmony), transnational compacts (to rehabilitate what was damaged) and restructured governance (to prevent it from happening again).
The end of slavery marked on Juneteenth did not come with reparations. Black people in the U.S. are still owed acknowledgment, compensation, restitution, and rehabilitation for all of the harms that flowed from our enslavement, and for all of the wealth built on our stolen lives, labor and torture.
Demands for reparations are central to the Vision for Black Lives, the policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives.
The enslavement of African-descended people in the United States.
◆ All of the continuing impacts and harms that flow from chattel slavery and anti Blackness, including Jim Crow, white supremacist violence, segregation, land theft, housing discrimination, environmental racism, educational injustice, mass criminalization and incarceration, detention and deportation.
◆ The War on Drugs and discriminatory enforcement of prostitution laws.
◆ Police violence, and violence against people in prison, on probation and parole, and in immigration detention and deportation.
The Movement for Black Lives is committed to building power to secure reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people in the U.S. Contact your Congressperson and Senator to urge they take action by:
Call your state and local legislators and demand that they introduce and pass state and local legislation that creates a commission to study how the state, county or city contributed to and benefited from slavery and its after-effects to determine how to best make reparations for people of African descent. (See if there is an existing reparations initiative in your state, city or county here.
Amplify the call for reparations through your networks, platforms, and spheres of influence
Support organizations working to advance reparations at the local, state, and federal levels – check for your movement organizations doing reparations work near you here.
Vote for candidates who are committed to sponsoring and supporting reparative justice.
Educate yourself and your community about the ongoing economic, social, and generational impacts of slavery and systemic racism.
