As the push for reparations grows, a national group works for redress at local levels

St. Louis is one of many cities across the country with task forces studying and developing reparations plans for Black Americans. These appointed commissions are helping people better understand the systemic and institutional structures that historians and scholars say caused Black communities to decline and played a pivotal role in destroying the generational wealth of African Americans.

Nonprofits and organizations, like the African American Redress Network, are also stepping in to work alongside grassroots groups and task forces to explore ways to repair decades of harm from racial violence, discrimination and divestment from Black communities.

Without reparations, generational gaps within education, healthcare and employment will never close, said Justin Hansford, the co-founder of the Network and a law professor at Howard University.

“It’s impossible to actually get equity without reparations being part of the solutions,” Hansford said. “That’s [a harm report] helping these communities make the case where they are located.”

The African American Redress Network aims to provide a reparations framework for communities to give to local and state leaders. The team consists of civil rights attorneys and a handful of research and law students from Columbia University and Howard University. The Network meets with community members to discuss disparities in education, housing, healthcare, environment and employment. After researching, they produce documents that highlight these types of harms.

Nationally, they have worked alongside many Black communities. The team did advocacy work for a St. Louis reparations group, they created segregation impact studies for Evanston, Illinois, leaders and produced drafts of harm reports for San Francisco and Kansas City’s reparations task forces. In Africatown, Alabama, the researchers helped the community preserve the town’s Black history as a form of racial repair and reconciliation. The group also studies historical rulings to see what legal avenues to push for redress. Its goal is to complete at least 40 redress projects over the next few years.

“We are creating a report to support their efforts for some type of redress or reparative justice,” said Linda Mann, civil rights attorney and co-founder of the Network. “The crazy thing about this is that they’re having to prove a case though.”

The African American Redress Network began in 2019. Historians, lawyers and experts gathered to address racial historical injustices and develop a local and state reparative justice proposal. The redress team became emboldened to fight for reparations in May 2020, when the country started to experience an outpouring growth of energy toward reparations and racial equity after a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. 

During that time, the group created a mapping project. It tracks legislative bills on reparations task forces or truth-telling and reconciliation commissions nationwide. As of today, they have mapped 116 efforts.

“It would be really nice if we would make reparations a moral and ethical call, and not a litigious call,” Mann said.

Hansford hopes as the team continues to work on local reparative efforts, senators who do not support reparations for Black Americans will change their vote and agree on a federal reparations plan.

“Congressmen have to recognize that this is happening on a local level, and so why can’t it happen on the national level,” he said. “From the bottom up, eventually, we’ll get to the national reparations conversation and in the meantime, communities are able to actually participate in their own historical reckoning.”

St. Louis’ reparations fight

St. Louis’ reparations effort is marked on the Network’s redress map. In December 2022, Mayor Tishaura Jones established the city’s reparations commission, and for nearly two years, Black St. Louisans testified monthly to the St. Louis Reparations Task Force Commission. They expressed disturbing stories about their experiences with racial discrimination and how St. Louis’ legacy of slavery stunted their accumulation of wealth. Many residents are concerned about who will qualify for reparations and how much money Black St. Louisans will receive if city officials vote on a cash payout.

James Gallagher III, 85, grew up in the now-demolished Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. He told commission members in July 2023 that 11 of his family members died from health issues, which he believes was because of pesticides that were sprayed across the Black community that he once lived in. As a child, Gallagher had rheumatic fever and he attributed the sickness to ingesting toxic chemicals.

“Reparations is not just for me, it is for all that lived during this era of spraying,” he said. “They were telling us that they were spraying for mosquitoes, and some of the kids were running behind the truck. I didn’t run up behind the truck because I couldn’t stand the smell of the spray; however, I was and still am affected by it, and I’ve been sick all my life.”

Gallagher is just one of many Black St. Louisans who want to see a reparations plan come to fruition in their lifetime no matter if it comes from the local or federal level. After several months of testimonies, St. Louis’ reparations commission began drafting its proposed 100-page harm report. Members plan to lean heavily on the residents’ statements and support their racial grievances with data. The harm report will be written by experts and presented to Jones and the Board of Aldermen in September.

Descendants of enslaved Black people who helped Jesuit missions in Missouri by building St. Louis University, also are calling on university leaders to atone for SLU’s role in slavery. The Descendants of the St. Louis University Enslaved, a local group, said in February that the institution’s stolen labor is worth up to $74 billion.

Reparations cases are unique because they often do not deal with people who were harmed when it happened, which typically impacts large numbers of people, said Areva Martin, the descendants’ attorney.

One of Martin’s major challenges as a civil rights attorney who works on reparations is trying to get communities to understand that reparations target atrocities and should not be seen as a payday for Black Americans.

“Wealth was stolen from us and we’re not asking for a handout. We’re just asking for that which was taken from us,” Martin said. “This is not a money grab, think of it as just a pursuit for equity, and parity and justice.”

Racial equity backlash

Across the nation, parents and educators are fighting with school board members about how to teach Black history in classrooms. Some educators are pushing back by teaching students a complete history of African American experiences.

Hansford said the Black community is now facing backlash after advancements in racial equity since May 2020. Some city and state leaders are beginning to ask task forces and grassroots reparative justice organizations to remove the word reparations from their repair plans. Hansford said leaders believe this strategy will help make the case for reparations politically palatable.

“To me, that is the worst thing that you can do, because what you’re doing is defeating the whole purpose of the project, which is to acknowledge specific racial harm, and to provide a remedy for it,” Hansford said.

Some critics of grassroots reparations organizations and local and state repair movements say the federal government should be leading the charge. Economist and Duke University professor of public policy and African American history William Darity said without a federal program, local initiatives will be inequitable and incomplete.

“This is happening and in the reverse direction from which it should happen,” Darity said. “We should have pursued and put in place a federal reparations program, and then individual localities or states could supplement that.”

He said the goal of any reparations plan should be to eliminate the racial wealth gap between white and Black Americans. Darity estimates the total cost for a complete reparations program from state and local governments would equal nearly $16 trillion. Darity argues that local and state budgets cannot meet the cost of reparations.

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 77% of Black adults say the descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. should receive reparations in some form and 18% of white Americans say the same. Of the surveyed adults who say descendants of enslaved people in the U.S. should receive reparations, 75% say the federal government is responsible for repayment.

House and Senate leaders have introduced resolutions and bills this year to study and develop reparations. Both have since stalled. The African American Redress Network also believes Congress should have already had a bill in place, but until then, the team plans to continue working on reparations plans from the ground up.

“I hope someday to see all the communities that have done this kind of research … go to the federal government and plop down their papers, and say, ‘I have a little reading material for you, it’s time,’” Mann said.

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