Reparations Advocates Prepare for Backlash During Next Trump Term

The Washington Post

17:12 JST, December 21, 2024

EVANSTON, Illinois – The reparations movement achieved some significant gains over the past year.

New York state and the District of Columbia have established panels to study offering recompense to Black Americans for slavery and racial discrimination. And officials in Palm Springs, California, recently agreed to pay out $6 million in reparations for its part in the destruction of a mostly Black and Latino neighborhood during the 1960s.

But reparations advocates say those gains could be imperiled and future plans stymied by President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.

Trump has been skeptical of reparations, as well as other initiatives aimed at racial equity. “I think it’s a very unusual thing,” Trump said of reparations in a 2019 interview with the Hill. “It’s been a very interesting debate. I don’t see it happening, no.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, he called for dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs designed to address slavery and government-sanctioned anti-Black discrimination. Trump and his allies have also discussed directing the Justice Department to use civil rights laws, many originally designed to protect Black Americans, to dismantle DEI programs and other initiatives that they say constitute anti-White racism.

At a recent convention in the Chicago suburbs, reparations advocates said they were increasingly worried that the progress they had made over the last few years could be in danger.

“Everyone in this room is nervous and wondering if their work is going to get attacked,” said Amity Paye, vice president of narrative change at Liberation Ventures.

A Trump transition spokesperson didn’t respond to multiple requests seeking comment about his plans.

Reparations advocates said they are also concerned about a push by conservative activists to challenge reparations programs in court after a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring affirmative action in college admissions. Democrats may back away from the racial justice pledges they made in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as fewer Americans prioritize those issues, some activists worried. In 2021, 45 percent of Americans said racism was a “very big problem,” according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. That fell to 29 percent this year, according to Pew.

“I know it looks bleak, and there are certainly political, legislative, judicial barriers ahead of us,” said Robin Rue Simmons, executive director of FirstRepair, a nonprofit working with activists to build reparations programs across the country. “But that just means strategy and innovation is more necessary than ever before.”

Opponents of reparation argue that the harms caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws are in the distant past, and that it’s unfair to make citizens who have no family ties to slavery or were not involved in racist government policies pay for the misdeeds of others.

Reparations advocates say Black Americans continue to suffer from the lingering effects of racist government policies. Spreading that message will be key to building broader public support for reparation programs, they say.

About 25 percent of Americans support the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, according to a 2023 Washington Post-Ipsos poll. The poll found large racial gaps in support for reparations. While 75 percent of Black Americans support federal reparations, only 15 percent of White Americans and 36 percent of Hispanic Americans agree.

Increasing that support is essential to the longevity of the reparations movement, advocates said.

“What polls have shown is that folks are better able to understand the need for reparations when you can point them to concrete, specific harms, particularly ones that are more recent,” said Jean-Pierre Brutus, head of the New Jersey Reparations Council. “That’s the work we are doing in New Jersey.”

It’s also important, advocates said, to continue to replicate programs such as those that have already launched in communities like Evanston.

Evanston has spent more than $5 million on $25,000 grants to more than 200 Black people who either lived in the city or whose direct ancestors lived there between 1919 and 1969. During that period, Evanston officials have acknowledged, it enforced discriminatory housing policies that deprived Black residents of opportunities to build wealth.

This year, Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group, filed a class-action lawsuit to end Evanston’s reparations program, arguing that it discriminates against the city’s non-Black residents. That case remains pending.

And the movement has faced other challenges.

In June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by the remaining two survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre when a White mob killed as many as 300 Black residents and left 10,000 homeless. The survivors were seeking reparations from the city of Tulsa for its role in the destruction of the once-thriving Greenwood district, which had been known as Black Wall Street.

Reparations for the massacre were put back on the table in August, when the mayor of Tulsa announced the establishment of a city commission tasked with creating a plan for reparations for its victims.

Facing a challenging legal landscape, reparations supporters should be cautious about pursuing their cases in court, said Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University.

“We have to start to have a more rigorous analysis on a case-by-case basis of what our argument for reparative justice is,” he said. “A lot of your argument is going to emerge from the reports that you draft. The stronger your report, the stronger your case.”

Given those concerns, Hansford and other proponents say Palm Springs may be a potential model.

City officials there recently approved a reparations program for former residents of Section 14, a mostly Black and Latino area of the city that was razed in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for commercial development.

Under the deal, the city will establish a $6 million reparations program for families who lost their homes. The city also agreed to spend $10 million each on a first-time home-buyer-assistance program and a community land trust for affordable housing.

“There is hope for our movement even under a Donald Trump administration,” said Areva Martin, who represented the families in Palm Springs. “Stay encouraged, because there are possibilities for us to continue to do this work and impact the lives of millions of Black folks around this country.”

Instead of filing lawsuits, reparations activists should focus on public information campaigns, Martin said. Key to their success in California, she said, was the potential impact of their effort on Palm Springs’s reputation.

“We put up billboards of pictures of Black and Brown people standing next to their burning houses, and that was becoming the image of Palm Springs – not the palm trees and beautiful people lying by the pool,” she said.

Martin said she is hoping to replicate her success in Palm Springs in other local communities. “We need to find those elected officials who are not aspiring for higher offices, who are not under pressure to do what’s politically correct but will do the moral and ethical thing,” she said.

Even as they prepared for the potential challenges posed by the incoming Trump administration, some activists said they haven’t given up on clinching another win through President Joe Biden, who they hope will sign an executive order, before his departure in January, creating a federal reparations study committee.

Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he supported studying reparations for Black Americans. A White House spokesperson didn’t respond to an email requesting comment on whether he was considering creating a commission.

“Black communities across America are disadvantaged and have been disadvantaged for centuries, so the time is now,” said Miranda Alexandria, co-chair of the Chicago chapter of National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “Why not have a legacy in righting America’s greatest wrong?”