US lawmakers are considering a bill to study paying reparations to descendants of enslaved people, which could open the door for a potential vote on an issue that has gained momentum in recent years.
On April 14 the House Judiciary Committee held the first-ever markup – the process by which committees debate and amend legislation — on a bill that creates a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for Black people. It addresses the period of slavery and discrimination in the United States from 1619 to the present day, and will propose remedies including financial reparations.
“The historic markup of HR 40 is intended to continue a national conversation about how to confront the brutal mistreatment of African Americans during chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the enduring structural racism that remains endemic to our society today,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement Friday.
Its intent is not to divide, lawmakers said, but to continue efforts already begun in some states and cities during recent years of racial reckoning.
House Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, the bill’s sponsor, said that by passing HR 40, Congress could “start a movement toward the national reckoning we need to bridge racial divides.”
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Side Note: To make this type of determination is going to be quite a chore. The nonprofit Georgetown Memory Project has hired genealogists to research the lineage of people sold by Georgetown and to reach out to people it identifies as descendants; the university is also putting documents related to the university’s slave holding history online. Tony Burroughs, founder and CEO of the Center for Black Genealogy and author of “Black Roots: A Beginners Guide to Tracing the Africian American Family Tree” explains many of the gaps in the archives that challenge black Americans doing genealogical research and how they work around those gaps. He said that “You can’t do genealogy based on assumptions,” Burroughs cautioned. “You can’t assume that your ancestors were enslaved without finding evidence of that.” There were hundreds of thousands of free people in the North and the South before the Civil War; Burroughs often sees people with free ancestors go down research rabbit holes, looking for an enslaved ancestor where there wasn’t one. Burroughs make it clear to prospective researchers that the challenges of finding enslaved ancestors might seem great, but they are not insurmountable.