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William Darity Jr., Elizabeth Jordie Davies, David Hochfelder, Kamri Hudgins, Earl Lewis, Monique Newton, Giuliana Perrone, Jesse H. Rhodes, Trina R. Shanks, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field are contributors to RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences double issue “Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences,” edited by William Darity, Jr. (Duke University), Thomas Craemer (University of Connecticut), Daina Ramey Berry (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Dania V. Francis (University of Massachusetts, Boston). The issue brings together current social science research and policy options regarding reparations for Black Americans. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

William Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy and African American Studies at Duke University. He is co-editor of this double issue of RSF and a co-author of the article “Black Reparations in the United States, 2024: Introduction.” He is also a former RSF visiting scholar, a contributing author to RSF journal issues “Plessy v. Ferguson and the Legacy of ‘Separate but Equal’ After 125 Years,” “The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report,” and “Anti-poverty Policy Initiatives for the United States,” and a contributing author to RSF volumes Prosperity for All?, An American Dilemma Revisited, and The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.

Elizabeth Jordie Davies is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of California, Irvine. She is a co-author of the article “Limited Scopes of Repair: Black Reparations Strategies and the Constraints of Local Redress Policy.” She is also an RSF-Gates Pipeline Grants Competition recipient.

David Hochfelder is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is a co-author of the article “Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice.”

Kamri Hudgins is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Michigan. She is a co-author of the article, “Crafting Democratic Futures: Understanding Political Conditions and Racialized Attitudes Toward Black Reparations.”

Earl Lewis is the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions, and the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. He is a co-author of the article, “Crafting Democratic Futures: Understanding Political Conditions and Racialized Attitudes Toward Black Reparations.” He is also an RSF trustee and an RSF research grant recipient.

Monique Newton is a doctoral candidate in the department of political science at Northwestern University. She is a co-author of the article “The Politics of Expedience: Evanston, Illinois, and the Fight for Reparations.”

Giuliana Perrone is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the article “Rehearsals for Reparations.”

Jesse H. Rhodes is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and co-director of the UMass Poll. He is a co-author of the article “Why Reparations? Race and Public Opinion Toward Reparations.”

Trina R. Shanks is the Harold R. Johnson Collegiate Professor of Social Work, director of the Center for Equitable Family & Community Well-Being, and director of the School of Social Work Community Engagement at the University of Michigan. She is a co-author of the article “A Policy Platform to Deliver Black Reparations: Building on Evidence from Child Development Accounts.”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Research Center at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of the article “Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan.” She will also be an RSF visiting scholar for the 2025-26 academic year.

Q. What are reparations? Why are reparations for Black Americans needed? What are some of the difficulties that arise when coming up with a plan for Black reparations? What are some key points you’d like readers to take away from this issue of RSF?

Darity: The definition for reparations that Kirsten Mullen and I made use of in our book, From Here to Equality, is a program of acknowledgement, redress and closure. This is a bit different from the United Nations standard for reparations, although they are not dichotomous by any means. In fact, the closure category corresponds very closely to what the United Nations labels the non-repetition clause of their definition of reparations. But in our definition, acknowledgement means that the culpable party admits that they have done wrong, a grievous wrong, and that they make a commitment to engage in an act of restitution. Some people would say repair, but I suspect restitution is the better term. And that act of restitution would be directed towards the community that has been victimized. And acknowledgement is not complete merely by the admission of responsibility, but it is only made complete by the commitment to engage in an act of restitution. That act of restitution is embodied in the second condition, which is redress, which is the measures that are taken to provide compensation to the victimized community for the harms that have been inflicted on them. And then the third component of our definition is what we refer to as closure. And the notion here is that the victimized community and the culpable party come to an agreement that the act of redress is satisfactory, and the victimized community will make no further claims on the culpable party. That is, unless there is a renewal of atrocities, or there are new types of atrocities that take place that are a product of the practices undertaken by the culpable party and, again, inflicted on the same victimized community. That's the definition that we use. We view it as a general definition that would be applicable in all contexts and places. And it's noteworthy that there are actually instances where all three conditions have been met to the best of our understanding. And perhaps one of the most notable examples is the United States government paying reparations to Japanese Americans who were unjustly subjected to mass incarceration during the course of World War II.

Reparations are needed for Black Americans because Black Americans have never been granted full citizenship rights in the United States and a program of reparations would be a mechanism for providing the material conditions for full citizenship in the United States. In the work that I've done with a number of collaborators, but especially again, with Kirsten Mullen, we've placed the emphasis on closing the racial wealth gap in the United States as a means of bridging the distance between the conditions for full citizenship and the conditions that currently exist. In the most recent Survey of Consumer Finances that was issued by the Federal Reserve, conducted in 2022, the magnitude of the disparity in wealth between Black and White households amounts to about $1.15 million per household. This corresponds to a figure of about $400,000 per person. If we estimate that out of approximately 48 million Blacks in the United States, there are 40 million or so who are descendants of persons who were enslaved in the United States and who constitute the eligible population, then the expense of a reparations program based on the 2022 survey data would be approximately $16 trillion.

I think that any plan for Black reparations has to address four conditions. The first is who is eligible. And that's tied to the question, what are the objectives of your program? The second condition that has to be met is how much is due. The third is who is responsible for paying. And then the fourth and final one is, what forms that payment takes. So, if you were to ask me what the difficulties are, the first set of difficulties are associated with making sure that the plan of action addresses those four conditions and addresses them in a satisfactory way, rather than a cursory or a superficial way.

The other range of difficulties, of course, is associated with the entire political process of actually enacting a reparations plan. We have a long history of aversion to reparations for Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. In the aftermath of the Civil War, a promise was made to the freedmen that they would receive 40-acre land grants as restitution for their years of bondage. This is a promise that was not kept. In contrast, the federal government did provide one and a half million White families with 160-acre land grants, under the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862, in the western territories as the nation completed its colonial settler project. So, there has been, from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, a pattern in which the federal government has provided asset building opportunities overwhelmingly for White Americans to the neglect of the Black American population. This is the foundation for the racial wealth gap. So, the question becomes, how do we overcome the resistance, the long-standing resistance to an active compensation for Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States to the point that we would be able to actually say that we have completed the project of providing Black Americans with full citizenship?

Are there any grounds for optimism in what looks like a very bleak landscape? Perhaps the fact that in the year 2000 only about 4% of White Americans endorsed monetary payments as reparations for Black Americans. By the beginning of 2024, that percentage had risen to about 28%. Still not anywhere close to a majority, but substantially higher than 4%. In the context of the entry of the Trump administration into authority, there's been a diminution in that percentage to closer to 24%. But again, still, that perhaps is the foundation for actually building a successful movement in the long term.

The other thing I'd like to mention is that the resistance to reparations is not unique to the current administration. Previous administrations under Democratic Party control have also been very, very reluctant to introduce a reparations plan. The most that they've done is introduce a shallow piece of legislation, referred to as H.R. 40, which is supposed to establish a study commission for reparations at the federal level. There's a very, very provocative article, in which the two researchers argue that H.R. 40 essentially provided Democratic Party politicians with cover to avoid indicating that they really were not in favor of reparations. So, I say both political parties have not demonstrated any kind of determination to produce a reparations plan. So, the momentum has to come from below. And I'm hopeful that the changes in attitudes that I've described over the past two decades may provide a basis for this eventually becoming a reality.

There are a number of key points I’d like readers to take away from this double issue. I think one of the most important is that acts of reparative justice are not unusual. They're not abnormal. One of the first papers that appears in the in the volume is by Linda Bilmes and Cornell William Brooks that actually demonstrates how routine the United States government's practice of the provision of reparations is. This raises the very serious question as to why the Black American case is treated as so highly exceptional, historically.

Other dimensions of these articles include critical discussion of the various initiatives at the state and local level that are parading under the label of reparations. I'm sure that all the contributors to these two special issues do not share my perspective on this, but my personal view is that you cannot actually conduct a comprehensive reparations program by relying upon state and local initiatives. And that if anything would be of value, it would be for the states and localities to actually form a coalition to pressure Congress, from the standpoint of petitioning and lobbying, for a national reparations plan. But there's some very, very useful analysis of the state and local efforts that are in this pair of issues.

There's also a discussion of other ways in which you might close the racial wealth gap besides the direct payment approach that is that is advocated in my own work. There's a paper that examines the possibilities of structuring some other types of plans that would close the racial wealth gap that would not rely upon the direct payments that would go exclusively to Black American descendants of U.S. slavery. I think that there's some strengths and weaknesses in these alternative proposals, but I think they're interesting and worth considering.

And then I think that there's a substantial amount of information about the entire history of reparations activities, not just in the United States, but globally. Those are explored in great detail in this particular double issue. I think if somebody wanted an introduction to the whole set of issues surrounding reparations for Black Americans this is an excellent compendium of papers. But also, for people who already have some degree of familiarity, I think that there's a lot of substance here for them as well.
 

Q. Proposals for reparations programs for Black Americans typically focus on targeting and redressing stolen wealth. What else should reparations proposals target and why? How might reparations programs address that target?

Wrigley-Field: Reparations proposals vary in what they're trying to address. Often, it's stolen wealth. Sometimes, it's something else, including repairing disparities in health. But almost all reparations proposals take wealth as the mechanism of redress, and the form that reparations take is some kind of wealth transfer. This makes sense, nothing else confers flexible control over your own life circumstances and your broader context the way wealth does. But if wealth is the ultimate proxy for power, then I would argue that time—how much we get, how much control we have over it—might be the best proxy for freedom. American racial domination—American  slavery and Jim Crow—were always about these intertwined thefts—stolen wealth and stolen time—including the ultimate way to steal someone's time from them, which is to end their life. This posed a question to me: What might reparations for slavery and Jim Crow look like if we conceptualized them, not just as repair for lost wealth, but also for lost time? Specifically, for lost lifespan? One of the questions I needed to answer was could reparations that used wealth as the mechanism function in practice, as repair for lost lifespans? The social science-based answers to that are complicated.

I will summarize them as saying, partly. A mass infusion of wealth back into the African American communities that it was stolen from would probably do a lot to equalize lifespans. There are probably also still some really important things that it wouldn't do. And actually, I think the way that the answers to that question are complicated are really interesting. They get at deep questions about what reparative programs are really for and what kinds of social policies you would need to, for example, finally allow people to realize what I call the twin mobility rights that are long denied by America's racial regimes. Those are the right to move freely between places and the right to stay where you are and have it be safe. So, the question, can wealth-based reparations act, in practice, like reparations for lost lifespan? takes us to some really interesting places.

But another question is: What, besides a transfer of wealth, could it look like to have a reparative program based on giving people back their time? My article considers some candidates, ranging from paid sabbaticals to a mass expansion of the Black medical workforce, to participatory budgeting style programs where localized communities would engage in collective processes to decide what would be the best way to return their time to them. But ultimately, what I'm advocating is, above all, that we try to name the harm that we want to repair and recognize that Black lifespans, which are far shorter than they need to be, are a form of racial domination that continues today. But we could change that if we treated that as urgent and necessary to repair.
 

Q. How did federal urban renewal programs harm Black Americans? What are some potential remedies for those harms?

Hochfelder: We estimate that 1.3 to 1.5 million people were displaced for urban renewal projects. Around the country, there were 1,200 municipalities that had urban renewal projects. Total federal spending was $13 billion. Total spending at all three levels of government, local, state, and federal, was probably over $20 billion. Of the 1.3 to 1.5 million displacees, 60% were classified by the U.S. Census as non-White. In the Northeast and Midwest, that almost always means African American. On the West Coast—California, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—that  could include Asian Americans—Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans—but that 60% figure of displacees being non-White usually means Black. And if you take into account people of Puerto Rican or other Latino descent who are often discriminated against in terms of housing relocation, the figure of poor working-class people of color, that 60% figure increases, obviously. Two-thirds of the displacees were tenants. If we take urban expressway construction into account—a very similar program with very similar ends—the figure of displacement probably goes up to around 3 million people in total between 1950 and 1975.

Financial harms were different for owner-occupiers, absentee owners, and renters, obviously.  What we found is that the elderly were often the hardest hit financially and psychologically. It was hard for them, especially if they were owner-occupiers who’d paid off their house, maybe living on a fixed income of Social Security or Railroad Pension. It was very hard to start over as homeowners. And loss of a long-standing place, residences or neighborhood ties, often was psychologically damaging to that demographic. But even in the case of renters, the idea is, “Oh, if you're a tenant, you could just move apartments. It's not that hard to find a new apartment.” But urban renewal demolitions tended to worsen or create housing shortages in particular communities. And tenants who were people of color, African American or Latino, or who had large families had a lot of trouble finding new places to live and often had to rent replacement apartments at much higher rents or further from places of work and shopping.

Owner-occupiers, again, except for the elderly, tended to get under compensated for their property. They were supposed to receive fair market value, according to eminent domain rules. Fair market value is defined as the price that a willing seller and an informed buyer would reach free of coercion. Obviously, in urban renewal, the seizing of property is not non-coercive. It's a forced taking. Owner-occupiers and absentee owners were often hurt because of the long time lag between an urban renewal project being planned and the property actually being taken through eminent domain. According to federal regulation, the municipality had to take possession of the property right when the project entered the execution stage, but a project could have been in planning stages for five or six years. So, owners stop making repairs, tenants move out, vandals break in and steal the copper pipes and wires. It’s demolition by neglect, or as the appraisal industry called it, condemnation blight. So, we found many instances where owners of buildings were not adequately compensated for how much they paid for the building, say, in 1955 or 1952, and the repairs and updates that they made to the building because of that long time lag between the planning stage and the property being acquired by the local urban renewal agency.

Asking about potential remedies is a good question. And as you probably realize, the answer is complicated. What I will say is that over the course of the urban renewal program, 1950 to 1975 roughly, Congress becomes increasingly aware that compensation is inadequate. In 1970, Congress passes the Uniform Relocation Act, which significantly improves compensation to owners, renters, and business owners. But at that point, 90% of the relocations had already happened. So, as the 1950s and 1960s proceed, the compensation slowly gets better. The most severe financial harms were experienced by the people displaced early in the program, say, before 1962 or 1963. People later tended to get better compensated, so they weren't as financially harmed. We're not going to talk about how to value the psychological consequences of forced relocation, but that is an issue that psychiatrist and urbanist Mindy Fullilove has addressed in her books.

As far as remedies are concerned, there are a number of approaches that communities have tried out. In Newburgh, for example, the descendants of displacees have been asking the city government to provide a right of return. That is, some say over the roughly 20 acres of vacant urban renewal land that used to be Newburgh’s downtown. The descendants want a seat at the table as to how that land will be repurposed, and if it's going to be used for residential construction, they want to be first in line to be able to move in and take an apartment.

Compensation has to happen. All three levels of government participated in these decisions, so all three levels of government share responsibility. And all three levels of government will have different tools available for compensating, usually now it's the descendants of displacees. The people who were displaced, if they're alive, are very old, so we're usually talking about children and grandchildren. Two-thirds of the funding for these projects came from the federal government. Half of the remaining one-third, so one-sixth, came from the state of New York, and the remaining one-sixth was paid by the municipality itself. So, if we use that as kind of the formula, the federal government would be responsible for compensating for two-thirds of the financial harms done.

There's also debate about eligibility in the class of people harmed. Would you have to prove that your family was displaced for urban renewal? And how would you do that if the records didn't survive? Or could you simply say, “Oh, my family lived in an urban renewal project area. I don't have the documentation about how much they were paid for moving expenses or how much they were offered for their house, but I am part of this class, and everyone in this class deserves compensation.” Race can factor into this as well. So, to give a personal example, my great grandfather's family was displaced in the 1950s for the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. He was Italian American and was able to find a new apartment really easily. No financial damage done to my great grandfather and his family. Should my great grandfather, i.e. me as his descendant, be eligible for some sort of reparations, versus, say, an African American family displaced for the same project that found worse quarters at higher rent? I would say that I would not consider myself as part of the class that should be compensated because I know from talking with my family that my family did not experience financial hardship as a result of the Kennedy Expressway being built. So, it's a very tricky question, how do we evaluate who is eligible to be compensated, and how to take race and other demographic factors into account.

Q. Slaveholders would regularly grant freedom to their slaves in their wills. Sometimes, they would also bequeath land, money, education, or transportation to free states. This has often been considered an act of paternalism. How else might these bequests be considered? In some cases, formerly enslaved people had to sue for these bequests. What can these lawsuits add to the conversation about reparations for Black Americans?

Perrone: The question of paternalism, I’m not saying it's something else, it is paternalism. And it is also evidence of something more than that. Paternalism alone doesn't explain giving away your entire estate to enslaved people. So, in these kinds of exceptional circumstances, I think there's more to the story. And in the wills, themselves, there's often language that suggests there is a sense of a relationship between enslaved and enslaver that's not easily captured or even analyzed. It's a tricky thing. We know relationships existed, but the contours of those relationships are often very muddy and difficult for historians to really triangulate. But I think at the very least, what my research shows is the potential for the redistribution of assets, wealth, land, or whatever else, to formerly enslaved people. They function as reparations, even if nobody talked about these bequests as reparations. So, they, in some ways, are like a test case that tell us, “Well, look at what happens when you provide the basis for generational wealth to freed people.”

Since I published, I started researching some of the individuals named in the wills, and I've started tracing them through federal records. And I know, for example, that the Haley family, who I used to introduce the article, remained on that land for several generations. And so, I know that this actually was, in fact, the basis of that family's survival for at least up to two generations.

The fact that formerly enslaved people had to sue for it in these particular cases, says a lot about overall sentiment among White southerners about Black Americans inheriting White wealth. So, it tells us about another aspect of Black-White relations at that time, one that we would perhaps consider more traditional or expected between White and Black Americans. That is, that White Americans do not believe that Black Americans—free or otherwise—should be entitled to this. Many of these southerners don't simply believe that Black people are entitled to freedom or should be anything other than enslaved. Despite the Civil War and despite emancipation, they still believed that this thing, this institution, was legitimate and should have continued.

But it also further corroborates the fact that there is an established relationship between enslavers and the people that they once owned, because these enslaved people knew about this. They knew that there was a will, they knew that there was something that had been promised to them, and they used that knowledge and whatever relationship they had to make the estate pay its due—to make sure that the bequests were given as they were supposed to be according to the terms of the will. So, this is a project that's really in this messy middle ground of relationships between individuals, which are so hard for historians to fully capture. You can never really say what emotions are present in somebody's mind. But it's very clear that there are complicated, complex relationships between enslavers and enslaved people. Sometimes, that includes a sexual relationship, but in my study, most of the bequests were given to people who appeared not to have any genetic relationship to the enslaver.
 

Q. Can you briefly talk about the factors or characteristics that are associated with opposition to Black reparations?

Rhodes: We were really interested in understanding opposition to reparations, particularly among White Americans. This because we know that support for reparations is really high among African Americans and that in order for reparations to become a reality, you need support from a substantial fraction of White Americans as well, just given the distribution of Americans in this country, the demographics in this country. We had done some polling at the UMass Poll that asked people why they were opposed to reparations and what were the main reasons for their opposition. Again, opposition is very high among White Americans. We gave them an array of options from that reparations would be too expensive to they would be too difficult to administer to that possible recipients weren't deserving of benefits. And what we found was really striking. We found that White respondents disproportionately believed that African Americans were just not deserving of reparations. So, the problem for many Whites was not technical, or administrative, or challenges related to distinguishing between African Americans who were actually descendants of enslaved people and therefore the proper targets of reparations under most programs. But rather, many Whites just believe that African American people didn't deserve them. And that really made us think about the sources of opposition.

We realized that what seemed to really be doing the heavy lifting was not technical concerns or policy concerns, but a deeper resentment or animus towards African American people. There's been a lot of research on White attitudes in American politics that shows that racial animus, or resentment, or negative attitudes are a powerful predictor of Whites’ attitudes towards policies from welfare to Medicare and Social Security, and we wanted to investigate the role of negative racial attitudes on opposition to reparations. And what we found was that, even controlling for things that you would expect to influence attitudes towards reparations, from partisanship and ideology to education and income, negative racial attitudes had a powerful role, in fact, was one of the most potent influences on Whites' attitudes towards this policy.
 

Q. What role does awareness of racial inequality play in support for reparations? Does local context matter?

Hudgins: Awareness of racial inequality plays a big role, a substantial role, in support for reparations. However, through the research that we conducted in this article, we find that that substantial impact is pretty nuanced. We've come to believe that just providing people with information is enough to change your attitudes, or to change policy beliefs, or what you do when it comes to being in the voting booth. However, we found some pretty nuanced results, and differences between our national data and our local level data. In the national data, we found that awareness does play a role, in the sense that it makes people aware. But for the local data that we have, we found that it wasn't just awareness of racial inequality that changed how people thought, it was the understanding that racial inequality was tied to some sort of previous harm.

So, the individuals at the local level were able to say, “Okay,” for example, “Jim Crow was a thing.” And then not only were they aware of Jim Crow, they were able to connect the discrepancies and the disenfranchisement that came with that era to current disenfranchisement, such as inequality in the housing market and the racial wealth gap. So, they're able to make that connection. And then we found that awareness of the causes of current day racial inequality led to higher support for reparations, especially at the local level. Especially when thinking about Detroit, which was the local level sample that we used in our article, and thinking about white Americans attitudes towards reparations. White Americans in Detroit who had that level of awareness of the legacy of racial inequality and racism, were more likely than White Americans on the average and at the national level to support reparations. Earl, do you have anything you want to add?

Lewis: I would add two more pieces. What I think the article shows is that the history of harm, in and of itself, may be a place to start a conversation about reparations, but the proximity to harm seems to be the place that may move the needle. We point out, for instance, that at the federal level, there have been attempts since 1989 to get a bill passed through the House to create a commission to study the implications of slavery and its derivatives on people of African descent in the U.S. That has not been able to make it out of committee since 1989, although the number of signatories has increased over time. However, as we began to scan the nation, as you know, the number of local efforts has actually increased. So, you go from a national potential solution to state and local solutions. But even there, the ability to document harms and make them proximate to the moment in which conversations are occurring seems to be able to move the needle a little more than talking about harms in the abstract. And I think that's one of the things we discern. 

Hudgins: And just to build on that, one of the reasons, tying back to the results from the article, we think that what Earl just talked about is prominent, is because it might be a little bit easier to make the connection between the harm that happened and the inequalities that you're seeing today at the local level than at the national level. Like Earl said, that is pretty abstract. Our article has data supporting that maybe people just need to be able to make that connection. But that's not something easily changed for people who have those rooted beliefs. Those are pretty hard to change once they’re there. So, we had some suggestions thinking about education and how education really matters in terms of K-12 and how we're talking about the harms and the inequality that results from it. 
 

Q. What are Child Development Accounts? How can they be used to inform a Black reparations program in the U.S?

Shanks: Child Development Accounts, also known as CDAs, are a policy structure for addressing enduring wealth inequality by enabling wealth to begin growing early and to continue growing throughout life. These accounts have been successfully implemented as part of policy experiments, but versions have also been passed by state legislatures and proposed at various levels of government. Many have suggested substantive proposals to specify parameters for reparations policy with particulars such as eligibility details and amounts. To be clear, our work and evidence speak to a delivery structure. That is, the policy structure used to deliver any assets allocated for reparations. We are specifying the policy vehicle for holding and growing reparations in a practical, evidence-based and sustainable way.

In our article, we examine three possible systems for holding, growing, and distributing assets: cash payments, trust funds, and a savings plan structure adapted for a purpose. Our evidence suggests that a savings plan structure is the most effective option for building and distributing assets through reparations policy. In a savings plan, assets would be owned and accessible to the individual beneficiary but managed by professional asset management firms chosen through competitive contracting. The scale of such a policy and the resulting assets under management would enable the reparations agency to negotiate for low investment fees that otherwise would be inaccessible to individuals in the marketplace.

Our evidence is from SEED for Oklahoma Kids, or SEED OK, a long running randomized experiment we've conducted in the Sooner State. This experiment is now in its 18th year. We drew a probability sample of infants born in Oklahoma in 2007 and conducted a baseline survey with their primary caregivers before signing them up—some to a treatment group and some to a control group. We intentionally over sampled African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics. The experiment used a centralized account structure of the state's 529 college savings plan, adapting accounts by adding key CDA design elements. The Oklahoma Treasurer's Office automatically opened a state-owned account for each member of the treatment group and deposited $1,000, which the state plan invested in an age-based option with a mix of stocks, bonds, and capital preservation funds. By automatically opening and seeding accounts, the SEED OK experiment developed universal inclusion via centralized policy structure, which derives funding from multiple sources, promotes wealth building and social development, and serves as a foundation for cultivating financial capability. This SEED OK evidence, along with research and other local CDA programs, show that money can be delivered to eligible individuals and remain in safe investment options until the recipients are ready to access those resources. This is a useful model for any reparations policy.

If you want to learn more about CDA accounts and research, you can go to the Center for Social Development at https://csd.wustl.edu/child-development-accounts/ and learn more about white papers and other resources. You can also look up any of the co-authors of our paper to see research we've done on child development accounts. There's a recent white paper a group of us have done, in collaboration with the Urban Institute, a fact sheet on Principles for Federal Early Wealth-Building Policy. And I have a recent paper looking at the impact of wealth on child development outcomes in the Annual Review Of Developmental Psychology called “Struggling for Economic Security: Wealth, Race and Child Development.” There's much more information if you want to know more, but this gives a basic explanation of how Child Development Account research can provide a platform for reparations policy.
 

Q. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois became the first city in the U.S. to create a publicly funded reparations program. How does the program work and how did it come about? What have been some of the program’s limitations and how has it evolved over time?

Newton: Evanston, Illinois made national headlines in 2019 by becoming the first city in the nation to fund reparations for its Black citizens. Although other cities and municipalities have passed resolutions in support for reparations, Evanston remains the only city in the country to actually distribute funds. My co-author and I embarked on a large qualitative research project about Evanston, Illinois, where we interviewed Black residents about the program, how it came about, andm ultimately, their feelings about the program. You should know that the program was a long time coming. It actually goes all the way back to 2002, when Judge Lionel Jean Baptiste sponsored a resolution. It was approved by the city council in Evanston to explore reparations for African Americans for injustices they suffered after slavery. Fast forward, 17 years later, Councilwoman Robin Rue Simmons really begins the push for local reparations, and from there, they move swiftly. In 2019, Evanston adopts a resolution affirming the city's commitment to end structural racism. The reparations committee gets codified into local government, and in November 2019, the city council passes the resolution eight-to-one authorizing $10 million in the reparations fund, with rental assistance included. 

Now, a couple years later, in March 2021, it’s passed. It was initially called the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program. And the plan was to provide $25,000 to Black residents who could demonstrate that they lived in Evanston between the years 1919 and 1969 or who was a direct descendant of someone who lived in Evanston at that time. And initially, to avoid the undue tax burden, recipients could use the fund only for a down payment, a mortgage, a home repair, or other housing related costs. But since then, the program has expanded and allows now for direct cash payments. It's important to note that the program is funded with the city's real estate transfer tax as well as tax revenue from recreational marijuana purchases. This was an intentional choice made to recognize the ways marijuana criminalization has disproportionately affected people of color.

To be honest, Jennifer, it's been a wild success. A total of $20 million in payments has been approved over 10 years, with $3 million already distributed. The remainder of the funds have been transferred to a local, Black-owned bank, Liberty Bank, hoping to extend the bank's lending power. It's recently been met with its first legal challenge – a class action suit was filed in June of last year, basically arguing that the race-conscious criteria violate the 14th Amendment.  

What we talked about in the paper was really the process of how these changes come about. I mentioned the reparations committee, which meets once a month. It's the primary vehicle in which the committee is engaging with community members. My co-author and I attended these meetings, and they're exactly how you imagine them. A lot of the people who attended the meetings we saw were Black people, but especially Black women. And really, senior, elderly Black women at that, who were taking time out of their day, once a month, to trek to these meetings. It's really at these meetings where you see the tension between Robin Rue Simmons and the committee and the community at large. And we argue these meetings see—I don't want to say backlash or pushback—but what do you tend to see at these meetings were people bringing up ways that the program falls short, or ways that they thought the program could be implemented better, honestly. One example, folks often talked about how the program discriminated against renters. What if you don't own your home? How are you going to repair your garage, or something like that? And so that was the tension that came up. Initially, it wasn't a Black bank that was distributing funds, so folks brought that up. And again, folks pushed the entire time for cash payments. And what we find is that early in the process, cash payments were on the table, but as they as they got through the political process, they had to take cash payments away.

We coined the term politics of expedience to describe the policyscape and what took place at this moment in time. Of course, in the background of all this is the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the Black Lives Matter mass protests. And we argue, that it created this perfect ecosystem, essentially, this perfect storm, for a policy such as this. Dare I say a radical policy? It was pretty radical at the time and had never been done before. A policy like this to get passed, but especially a policy like this to get better—we argue it improved over time—is only through the persistent political activism of Black Evanston residents, and Black women in particular. Due to them the city council made amendments to the ordinance and better secured viability of the housing program. There are folks we talked about that argued it wasn't reparations at all. It was a housing program, and so they switched to direct payments. Direct cash payments, we find, are more in line with what the Black residents, and some White residents we talked to, were hoping for. So, the program was established in 2019 and, again, it was amended in 2023, four years later, to provide cash payments for the first time in United States history. And in the article, we tried to offer a little bit of a glimpse into this suburb above Chicago, and the politics of the city. 
 

Q. Can you speak briefly about the reparations programs in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois? What can they tell us about local reparations efforts?

Davies: In our article, “Limited Scopes of Repair Black Reparations Strategies and the Constraints of Local Redress Policy,” we compare two cases of local reparations policies: the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and the Chicago Reparations Program for Police Torture Survivors. Each of these programs was locally conceived. The one in Evanston, by government officials, and the one in Chicago, by activists against police torture. Both programs were innovative approaches to addressing histories of racial injustice at the local level, beyond slavery.

The first case is located in Evanston, just north of Chicago. In November 2019, the city committed to providing redress for the city's history of anti-Black discrimination in the areas of housing, economic development, and education. This is the first initiative of its kind that is a long-term program. Originally a commitment of $10 million over 10 years, the first iteration of the program is the local reparations restorative housing program. This program is designated to repair past discrimination in housing policy, specifically. In its first wave of payments, the initiative provided grants valued at $25,000 to each recipient for home repairs, mortgage assistance, or down payments for a home in Evanston.

The second case is the city of Chicago's reparations ordinance, approved by the City Council in May 2015, which is the first reparations initiative in the nation to acknowledge and take steps to redress police torture. The reparations ordinance acknowledges that, beginning in 1972, at least 120 Black people—mostly, but not exclusively, Black men—were kidnapped and tortured by Chicago police, coerced to confess to crimes they did not commit, and, for many, forced to endure decades in prison based on these false confessions. Ultimately, the Chicago reparations ordinance included $5.5 million to survivors of police torture, free access to the city's college for survivors and their family members, the creation of a public memorial, a mandatory curriculum on the subject in Chicago Public Schools, a formal apology, and the establishment of a Justice Center on Chicago's South Side dedicated to addressing the effects of torture.

This analysis helps to better conceptualize Black reparations as constituting not a singular or unified vision of redress, but, instead, as constituting diverse visions and evolving strategies that vary depending on political context, political opportunity structures, and the diverse social locations, and political priorities held by reparations advocates, activists, and beneficiaries. Furthermore, we offer the concept of “deliberative marginalization,” as we find that both programs were criticized by some of the most vulnerable and most directly affected beneficiaries as having exclusive deliberation and implementation processes. Subsequently, this study shows both the promise and constraints of reparations policy at the local level of government.