Michigan Legislative Black Caucus proposes reparative justice bills

State Representative Jason Hoskins (D-Southfield) said Black Michiganders continue to live with the legacy of slavery and segregation. 

“If we are serious about addressing these challenges, we must first understand the harms that were done, the policies that perpetuated these harms, who’s affected, and what remedies are appropriate,” Hoskins said during a press conference Thursday...

 https://www.michiganpublic.org/politics-government/2026-06-19/michigan-legislative-black-caucus-proposes-reparative-justice-bills 

 

Trump administration seeks to halt first US reparations program for Black people

White House joined suit to stop city of Evanston, Illinois, from compensating victims of housing discrimination..

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/17/lawsuit-stop-reparations-evanston-illinois 

UN calls for reparations to remedy the historical wrongs of trafficking enslaved Africans | PBS News

While the United States opposes the past wrongdoing of the transatlantic slave trade and all other forms of slavery, it "does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred," deputy U.S. ambassador Dan Negrea said before the vote...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-calls-for-reparations-to-remedy-the-historical-wrongs-of-trafficking-enslaved-africans 

 

Iran rejects Trump proposal to end war, gives 5 conditions : NPR

The conditions include safeguards against future attacks on Iran, the payment of war reparations to the country and a recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz…

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5760675/iran-war-military-deployment 

 

BOMBSHELL: Trump demands $230 million FOR HIMSELF from DOJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdtxzXM_FPc

 

Reparations for Jan 6 insurrectionists? Schiff Joins Shadow Hearing to Expose Danger of Trump's Pardons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BtHtB9_R5g

 

The Tulsa race massacre affected the ‘economic freedom’ of generations

The fiery loss of businesses and homes at the hands of a white racist mob in 1921 in the Greenwood district, once considered to be the "Black Wall Street" of America, was not only about loss of life but also loss of Black wealth. … 

Generations of Black Oklahomans lost out on homes and businesses that could've been potentially passed on and uplifted those coming behind to a new economic status of prosperity and opportunity…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/10/tulsa-race-massacre-reparations-lawsuit-oklahoma-supreme-court

40 Acres and a Lie Part 3 (Reveal podcast)

Calls for reparations were ignored for decades. Now, local governments are taking up the cause – and outrage is growing.

The loss of land for Black Americans started with the government’s betrayal of its “40 acres” promise to formerly enslaved people – and it has continued over decades.

Today, researchers are unearthing the details of Black land loss long after emancipation.

“They lost land due to racial intimidation, where they were forced off their land (to) take flight in the middle of the night and resettle someplace else,” said Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, an assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College. “They lost it through overtaxation. They lost it through eminent domain. …There’s all these different ways that African Americans acquired and lost land.”

It’s an examination of American history that is now happening at the state, city, even county level as local government task forces are on truth-finding missions. Across the country, government officials are now asking: Can we repair a wealth gap for Black Americans that is rooted in slavery? And how?
Interview: 

https://revealnews.org/podcast/40-acres-and-a-lie-part-3/

40 Acres and a Lie Part 2 (Reveal podcast)

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly White residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools and other amenities.

In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.

But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.

Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity have unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.
Interview: 

https://revealnews.org/podcast/40-acres-and-a-lie-part-2/

Oklahoma Supreme Court Dismisses Tulsa Massacre Lawsuit - The New York Times

White men deputized by the civil officials assaulted the neighborhood from the ground and the sky. Within two days, Greenwood was no more: 35 city blocks were reduced to heaping ashes, up to 300 of its citizens were dead and thousands were left homeless. The attack erased generational wealth that had been built at a time of great racial oppression. 

No person or entity was ever held responsible, no survivors were compensated for their losses, and the story was buried. It would be decades before the massacre was talked about openly. Yvonne Kauger, one of the nine Oklahoma Supreme Court justices, noted in an earlier hearing that she did not learn about the massacre in high school...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/us/oklahoma-supreme-court-tulsa-massacre-lawsuit.html

Evanston sued over reparations payments to Black residents - The Washington Post

Evanston's $20 million program is open to Black people who either lived in the city or whose direct ancestors lived there between 1919 and 1969. During that period, Evanston officials have acknowledged, it enforced discriminatory housing policies that deprived Black residents of opportunities to build wealth…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/04/evanston-reparations-lawsuit/

Federal Judge Hits Proud Boys with MASSIVE Ruling They Didn’t See Coming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD7RVZovAEw

Why This Economist Wants to Give Every Poor Child $50,000 (Ezra Klein Show podcast)

“Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic prosperity and well-being,” says the economist Darrick Hamilton. He’s right. Policy analysis tends to focus on income, but it is wealth that often determines whether we can send our kids to college, pay for an illness, quit a job, start a business or make a down payment on a home. Wealth is also the source of some of our deepest social inequalities: The top 10 percent of households in the U.S. own about 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the typical Black family has about one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family.

Hamilton is an economist at the New School who has spent decades studying the origins of the United States’ wealth disparities and how to close them. His “baby bonds” proposal — which would give poor children up to $50,000 in wealth by the time they become adults — has been put forward as national legislation by politicians like Senator Cory Booker and Representative Ayanna Pressley, and a state-level version of it is about to be established in Connecticut. So I asked him on the show to walk me through the structure of wealth in America today, the policy decisions undergirding that structure and the kinds of policies we could pass to dismantle it.

Mentioned:

• “Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?” by Darrick Hamilton and William Darity, Jr. 
• “A Birthright to Capital” by Darrick Hamilton. Emanuel Nieves, Shira Markoff and David Newville  
• “Hidden in Plain Sight” by The Corporation for Enterprise Development 
• “Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain” by Darrick Hamilton, William Darity, Jr., Anne E. Price, Vishnu Sridharan and Rebecca Tippett 

Book Recommendations: 

• When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson 
• Racial Conflict and Economic Development by W. Arthur Lewis 
• Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Interview: 

https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-t35rq-1918eb7f

Tuberville’s comments on inner-city teachers adds to an ugly pattern

An Associated Press report explained soon after, "Tuberville's remarks about reparations played into racist stereotypes about Black people committing crimes. ... Tuberville is falsely suggesting that Democrats promote crime and that only Blacks are the perpetrators. In fact, crime has slowed in the last year and most crimes are committed by whites, according to FBI data."…

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/tubervilles-comments-inner-city-teachers-adds-ugly-pattern-rcna86807

John Kerry: rich countries must respond to developing world anger over climate

"How can you look somebody in the eye, with a straight face, and not accept the notion that there are damages, there are losses?" he asked. "We see them all around the world. You see them in heightened sea levels, we see them in fires, we see them in floods, in Pakistan and elsewhere. We see them in the higher intensity of storms."…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/03/john-kerry-rich-countries-must-respond-to-developing-world-anger-over-climate

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2 (Reveal podcast)

A Catholic boarding school on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is seeking forgiveness for its troubled history. But school survivors want justice first.

Interview: 

https://revealnews.org/podcast/indian-boarding-schools-part-two/

The forgotten history of what California stole from Black families

Stories like Johnson's – and countless other Black families who have been victims of racist and discriminatory policies – are rarely told as part of California's history. But after a reparations taskforce undertook the unprecedented effort to consider redress for Black residents, stories like hers are finally being heard as a more complicated picture of California's past comes to light. 

It's one that, despite California's founding in 1850 as a free state, has been marked by "atrocities in nearly every sector" of society over the past 172 years, according to a recent taskforce report, including land confiscation and housing discrimination…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/25/the-forgotten-history-of-what-california-stole-from-black-families

Rich nations owe reparations to countries facing climate disaster, says Pakistan minister | Pakistan | The Guardian

Rich polluting countries which are predominantly to blame for the "dystopian" climate breakdown have broken their promises to reduce emissions and help developing countries adapt to global heating, according to Pakistan's minister for climate change, who said reparations were long overdue...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/pakistan-floods-reparations-climate-disaster

Official deed to Bruce's Beach recorded and handed over to rightful owners - CNN

"This transfer will allow the Bruce family to realize generational wealth, which they have been denied for generations simply because they were black in America," said State Sen. Steven Bradford, author of the state bill that allowed the Bruce heirs to receive the property...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/20/us/bruces-beach-deed-transfer-california-reaj/index.html

‘Atrocities in every sector’: California’s reparations panel details discrimination | California | The Guardian

The 500-page report, issued by the first-in-the-nation reparations committee, extensively describes "segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect" inflicted on Black people nationally, and in California – recounting mistreatment since the state's founding in 1850. The report concludes that "atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations, resulting in the current wealth gap between Black and white Americans".

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/01/california-reparations-taskforce-report-african-americans