[Slava]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

More than 50 years ago, MLK made the case for reparations.

It's 1862. Abraham Lincoln announces the Emancipation Proclamation. Three years later, the Union wins the Civil War. The United States ratifies the 13th Amendment, banning slavery. Hooray, racism is over! Yeah, no. The former slaves are now "free", but most have no homes, no possessions, no education. Many freed slaves had no other choice but to work the cotton fields for their former masters (albeit their labour now had to be paid...poorly).

Meanwhile, the United States was experiencing a period of rapid westward expansion. Some states, like Oregon, passed racist laws forbidding black people from moving there. The Oregon black exclusion law would not be repealed until 1926. Concurrently, the Homestead Acts were giving away land (land that was stolen from Native Americans, but that's an entirely different topic) for free to white European settlers. If you were a white peasant farmer from Ukraine, the US government gave you 160 acres of farmland. If you were a black peasant farmer from Mississippi, you got to go back to work for the landowner who abused and exploited you for years.

To this day, in 2020, many of the most opulent estates and mansions in the South are former slave plantations. The descendants of the slave owners have passed down their unearned family wealth for generations. The descendants of black slaves, who started with nothing, still largely live in poverty 150 years after they were freed.

To add to this, if you're ever in Atlanta I'd recommend heading to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. There are a bunch of amazing things, but the sheer absurdity of the Jim Crow laws and recency of some of them was shocking to me. Obviously slavery itself ended a couple of lifetimes ago, but racism and laws surrounding segregation certainly raged on. I think on the 3rd floor they have a wall with all of the laws and when they were repealed. Honestly, the number that were in the 1990's and 2000's was just stunning.