Andrea Levy (right) of Queens, New York, at a rally for reparations for slavery in Washington, DC in 2002Manny Ceneta/Getty Images
Fourteen trillion Dollar.
That’s the total amount the federal government owes blacks in America for the legacy of slavery, according to economist William Darity and his colleagues.
It is not an abstract number. As Darity explains in the final episode of our series “40 Acres and a Lie” – a groundbreaking collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, Reveal and Mother Jones— that number is based on a series of calculations, starting with the broken promise that newly freed people would receive 40 acres of land. That famous promise was largely broken. But in many cases, the betrayal was even more serious. Our two-year investigation, based on Reconstruction-era documents, identified 1,250 formerly enslaved black Americans who were given land by the government only to have it taken away from them shortly thereafter.
“I think there’s no doubt that the obligation to pay 40 acres is a form of reparations,” Darity says. It was a promise by the federal government – an institution directly responsible for the horrors of slavery – to help build what would have essentially been “a Black Belt coastal community” after the Civil War.
As Discover As moderator Al Letson puts it: “Darity believes that if this program had never been repealed, some four million freed people would have been able to settle on the vast tract of land reserved for them, stretching from South Carolina through Georgia to Upper Florida.”
It was a real, tangible obligation, and the government’s failure to meet that obligation had real financial consequences. According to Darity, the $14 trillion the government owes black people is “identical” to the wealth gap between black and white households today.
“This,” says Darity, “is the beginning of the racial wealth gap in the United States.”
