From an interview yesterday with Nikole Hannah-Jones on Fresh Air, on the subject of reparations for slavery:

HANNAH-JONES: Reparations to me – and if you notice in the piece, which is quite long, we don’t even use the word reparations until the very end section of the piece because it’s such a charged word. But what it means to me is, it is restitution. It is when a country or a community or a corporation that has done something egregious to a person or a group of people tries to restore or repair the damage that was done. And that is what reparations is to me.

Which is not an eccentric or personal understanding; that is what it means. Reparations are owed. Why? Because of 2.5 centuries of slavery. The thing about 2.5 centuries of slavery, you see, is that it leaves the enslaved people very badly off, so they can’t just wave bye-bye to their former owners and go off to have a fine new life.

In the context specifically of Black Americans, reparations has to do with 250 years of chattel slavery, followed by another 100 years of legalized segregation or apartheid and racial terrorism and how that impacted the economic well-being of Black Americans, how that prevented generation after generation Black Americans from acquiring the type of wealth or foothold in the economy that allows you to live a life that is much more typical of white Americans, that allows you to truly take advantage of the bounty of this country. So reparations to me is about repair.

Which should have happened a long long time ago. Instead, guess what – the opposite happened. More exploitation, more deprivation, more terrorism.

HANNAH-JONES: Well, actually, the concept of reparations for slavery begins even before emancipation. Enslaved people who had gotten their freedom had begun trying to sue to get some kind of compensation for their enslavement even during slavery. But what happens at emancipation – we are often taught in this country that Black people are emancipated, and then everyone is on an even footing. We don’t often question, what does that mean to be emancipated after 250 years of bondage, to be emancipated with no job, no home, no money, no clothes, no bed, no pots, nothing? Enslaved people were unable to own anything or to accrue anything at all.

And so what happens at emancipation is this expectation that the government should help formerly enslaved people to get a foothold. And what Black people wanted more than anything was land. They didn’t want dependency on the government. They wanted to be given some of the land that they had worked for generations so that they could become independent, so that they could make their own money and be independent of the white people who had ruled over them.

And there were Black men who had served in the Union army – there was a meeting that was held between some of these men and some generals from the Union army. And they asked, well, what do you want? And what they said is, we want land. We want land so that we can be prosperous and be our own people. So General Sherman takes that to heart, and he issues Field Order No. 15. And Field Order No. 15 declares that Black families will get 40 acres of former Confederate land, and that they will be able to work that land. And actually at the time, it was a loan. It wasn’t even being given to enslaved people. It was on loan, and they would eventually make enough money and pay for the land. And for a brief period of time, this is what happened. A small number of formerly enslaved people in the Georgia Sea Islands and in coastal South Carolina had the land that they had once worked for white people turned over to them, and they began to farm it.

But Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson replaced him, and Andrew Johnson was a shit. He grabbed the land and gave it back to the Confederates, the ones we have all those statues to.

HANNAH-JONES And that ended the only real effort in the history of this country to provide reparations for those who had been enslaved. And it really left formerly enslaved people in absolute, devastating poverty. There are stories of mass starvations of Black people after they had been freed, you know, having to leave the plantation and find shelter in burned-out buildings, of trying to forage for food in burned-out fields. It was a devastating period for Black people, and this country decided that it was going to do nothing, that it owed these people nothing.

GROSS: And the Black people who had been enslaved had worked their lives for no pay, no property, no right to keep their family together. And slavery ends, and they get nothing; they’re left with nothing.

HANNAH-JONES: Exactly. I mean, think about this great wealth that was created, was literally created through their labor and the way that the laws around slavery were, that Black people could not own property. As property, they could not own property. So anything that they accrued, everything that came from their labor, went automatically to the people who owned them. Their children belonged to the people who owned them. It was illegal for Black people in many places to even make a will. You could not have heirs if you were Black. You could not bequeath anything onto your children. So everything that you earned, that you made, all of the products of your labor went to the enslavers.

And none of that has ever been paid back.