“This has been a 30-plus year journey,” Congresswoman Jackson Lee declared. “We had to take a different approach. We had to go one by one to members explaining this does not generate a check.” Congresswoman Jackson Lee said this week that there’s now enough votes in the House for passage of the historic piece of legislation.
As state and federal lawmakers grapple with whether or not the State of California — and the United States as a whole — should take a closer look at what it owes the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States, a group of Black California activists are getting ahead of the conversation. They are distilling the case for reparations down to why African Americans deserve to get paid for centuries of free labor and the Jim Crow laws and other forms of state-enforced discriminatory practices that followed. They are also specifying which segment of Black Americans should get those payments.
