The Case for Reparations

www.theatlantic.com
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole….

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote–a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it in the night before the election.” → Read the full article.

 

Thanks go to The Atlantic for their generous permission to allow the Consortium to republish this piece, thereby introducing our readers to this critical essay. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for and senior editor of The Atlantic. An American writer, journalist, and educator, Ta-Nehisi Coates is also the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

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