A Political History of America’s Black Reparations Movement

Just as enslaved Africans were the first abolitionists—liberating themselves and their families whenever possible—so, too, were black Americans the nation’s earliest architects of reparations. American reparations advocates were motivated by the federal government’s failure to fulfill its promise of an endowment of forty acres and a mule to the formerly enslaved made on multiple occasions toward the end of the Civil War and in the years immediately following 1865.¹ When Gen. William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton asked Rev. Garrison Frazier, a native of Granville County, North Carolina, what he and other freedmen would