Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Hey fam!
My remarks at the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission were truncated for time, so I decided to share my full remarks, which will be submitted to the commission, here:
Slavery Built America: The Debt
I want to talk about a debt. A specific, unpaid, multi-generational debt. One that built this nation’s wealth, prestige, and dominance. I’m talking about the debt owed to American Descendants of Slavery—ADOS. It’s not just a moral obligation. It’s an economic one. One that demands repair.
Let’s begin where the wealth began—with slavery.
Historian David Blight, writing about the pre-Civil War economy, said:
“In 1860, 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the single largest financial asset in the entire U.S.”
That’s $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars—more than all the nation’s factories, railroads, and banks combined. Slavery wasn’t a side story to American development. It was the story. The forced labor of our ancestors laid the bricks of the U.S. Capitol, harvested the cotton that powered the Industrial Revolution, and built the economic infrastructure of both the North and the South.
And what was our inheritance?
Multigenerational plunder.
A Legacy of Theft and Exploitation
After emancipation, our people were never made whole. In fact, every promise of freedom was followed by a new iteration of theft.
Sharecropping trapped us in cycles of debt on land we didn’t own, often working for the very people who once enslaved us.
Convict leasing criminalized Black life and turned incarceration into a profit model, supplying corporations with cheap, brutal labor.
Land theft destroyed our opportunity to build generational wealth. From Wilmington to Tulsa to the slow grind of eminent domain and tax foreclosure, our land was stripped from us.
Redlining and FHA policy kept us from accessing home loans while white families bought into suburbs and watched their home values rise.
Employment discrimination locked us out of high-paying industries, union jobs, and pensions.
Mass incarceration further devastated families and communities, gutting our social fabric and removing wealth through fines, fees, and lost wages.
This is not a closed chapter. These aren’t historical footnotes. They are ongoing conditions, and their impact is measurable.
Inheritance of Poverty: The Present-Day Numbers (slow down)
You hear it all the time: “You weren’t a slave. Why should you get reparations?”
But if we’re not entitled to repair, why are we still living with the injury?
The wealth from slavery is still circulating in this economy, while the poverty from slavery is still locked in our communities.
Consider this:
According to Federal Reserve data, between the third quarter of 2022 and the fourth quarter of 2023, the value of stocks held by Black households in America fell by 30%—dropping from $360 billion to $270 billion. During that same period, the value of stock holdings by white households grew by $7 trillion—from $28 trillion to $35 trillion.
This is not about hard work or hustle. It’s about capital—and how it’s inherited.
Wealth is a lineage (inheritance). So is poverty. Our access to capital, when it exists, is often predatory—payday loans, high-interest credit cards, rent-to-own appliances.
Our oppression is inherited, just like their advantage. It’s not just about Blackness. It’s about lineage. We are the descendants of slavery, not just people with dark skin who happen to live in America.
And this is where the reparations framework gets distorted in today’s conversations.
Too often, there’s an assumption that all Black people in America share the same claim, but lineage matters. Black immigrants were barely even present in this country prior to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Before that? They were to the right of the decimal point in census data—statistically insignificant.
According to Pew Research, “African-born Black immigrants stand out for their more recent arrival in the U.S.: Three-quarters immigrated in 2000 or later, with over four-in-ten (43%) arriving between 2010 and 2019 alone.” We don’t deny the presence of racism in their experiences. But reparations are not about racial experience—they’re about lineage and injury.
The people who arrived here post-1965 are not due repair for harms they did not experience. They weren’t enslaved here, they didn’t suffer Jim Crow, and they weren’t locked out of New Deal wealth. Their families didn’t flee Tulsa, or suffer the convict leasing camps of the Deep South.
Black immigrants and their progeny voluntarily emigrated into a racist country. That was their choice. Our enslavement was not a choice.
This is not about division—it’s about precision.
A reparations framework based on harm cannot include those who were not harmed. It must be rooted in descendancy from chattel slavery and the government-backed plunder that followed. Anything else reduces a justice claim into a diversity initiative.
America Has Done Reparations Before
And let me address the biggest lie of all: that reparations are impossible.
The truth? America has already done reparations. Many times. It’s not a question of capability—it’s a question of will.
Let me walk you through some examples.
“Early reparations legislation resulted from Marshall Island inhabitants suing the United States in the U.S. Court of Claims. To process those claims, the independent Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1986, and the government set up a $150 million Nuclear Claims Fund to compensate victims in exchange for the islands agreeing to ‘espouse and dismiss’ the damages claims of its citizens.”
America caused nuclear damage and paid out to people not even within its borders. That fund was created to extinguish liability, and yet, even that wasn’t the end of the spending.
“The United States agreed to compensate for harms, ‘past, present and future … which are based on, arise out of, or are in any way related to the Nuclear Testing Program’ related to loss or damage to persons or property as a result of the U.S. nuclear testing program. Due to claims and damages far exceeding the original amount of the trust fund, between 1954 and 2004 the federal government spent between at least $834 million (in 2022 dollars) on paying for individual compensation, health care, cleanup of contaminated sites, and housing resettlement efforts. By December 2004, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal had paid personal injury awards to approximately two thousand individuals. The program ceased payments in 2011 after the funds were depleted, despite efforts to continue the payouts.”
This wasn’t an apology—it was a payout. A substantial one. And it wasn’t the only program.
“The second major legislation for nuclear testing reparations was enacted in 1990… After decades of advocacy, in 1990 the federal government enacted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which established a $100 million trust fund to provide “compassionate lump-sum payments” to individuals harmed by exposure to radiation… The program awards tax-free lump-sum compensation ranging from $50,000 to $100,000…”
That’s real money, real compensation. Specific harms were identified. Payments were made accordingly.
“In 2000, more than half a century after the United States tested the first nuclear bomb, Congress enacted a third major program… the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation (EEOIC) program. This sweeping program of reparatory compensation provides up to $150,000 in cash stipends plus medical care… President Clinton’s Executive Order 13179 stated:
‘Thousands of these courageous Americans… paid a high price for their service, developing disabling or fatal illnesses… While the Nation can never fully repay these workers or their families, they deserve recognition and compensation for their sacrifices.’”
What’s important here is that reparations were based on a specific harm. Not to “nuclear workers of color.” Not to “all people exposed to hard times.” It was targeted, specific, and lineage-based.
Japanese Reparations and the Lesson for ADOS
Let’s not forget the Japanese American Redress Movement. After World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were wrongfully incarcerated in internment camps. Decades later, after coordinated advocacy, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which paid $20,000 to each surviving internee.
As The Atlantic article titled “What Reparations Actually Bought” shows, this compensation wasn’t symbolic. It changed lives. It allowed recipients to go back to school, open businesses, buy homes. It was real money, and it was given to a specific harmed group—not all Asians, not even all Japanese Americans—just those who were detained.
That’s the model. Specificity, not symbolism. That’s how reparations work.
The ADOS Movement: Turning Injustice Into Action
And that is why we started the ADOS Movement—to build a grassroots, national coalition around this lineage-based justice claim.
We don’t believe in vague diversity initiatives. We believe in direct repair.
We are building this movement from the ground up. We’re forming chapters, educating the public, and challenging politicians. We’ve changed the conversation. And we’re just getting started.
Here with us today is ADOS Maryland, one of our many chapters across the country, who embody what it means to organize for justice at the local level. They are making sure that elected officials hear our voices and understand our demand: reparations for American Descendants of Slavery.
This isn’t about hope. It’s about homework. About building the infrastructure for justice, brick by brick, chapter by chapter.
Closing: The Debt Remains
So no—we’re not asking for a favor. We’re demanding what is owed. Not just for our ancestors—but for us. For the communities still locked out, still locked down, still locked into the very poverty that slavery created and Jim Crow preserved.
America knows how to do reparations. It has done them before. It just hasn’t done them for us.
But that time is coming.
Thank you.