Sec. 2. Findings and purpose
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The Congress finds that— approximately 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865; the institution of slavery was constitutionally and statutorily sanctioned by the Government of the United States from 1789 through 1865; the slavery that flourished in the United States constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans’ life, liberty, African citizenship rights, and cultural heritage, and denied them the fruits of their own labor; a preponderance of scholarly, legal, community evidentiary documentation and popular culture markers constitute the basis for inquiry into the on-going effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the United States; the brutal overthrow of Reconstruction, which represented a significant but constrained moment of advances for Black rights as epitomized by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 and the Freedman’s Bureau, failed African Americans by failing to ensure their safety and security; following the abolition of slavery and end of Reconstruction the United States Government, through laws enacted at the Federal, State, and local level, continued to perpetuate, condone and profit from practices that continued to brutalize and disadvantage African Americans, including share cropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, unequal education, and disproportionate treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system, resulting in stolen labor and ultimately forestalling landmark contributions in science, arts, commerce and public service; the civil rights movement, and other efforts to redress grievances arising from systemic inequities, were sabotaged, both intentionally and unintentionally, thus rendering the accomplishments of those efforts transitory and unsustainable, and further embedding racial inequality in society; examples of discriminatory Federal Government actions directed against African Americans include— the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, which adopted specific policies designed to incentivize residential segregation; the enactment of legislation creating the Social Security program, for which most African Americans were purposely rendered ineligible during its first two decades; the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights; 58 Stat. 284, chapter 268), which left administration of its programs to the States, thus enabling discrimination against African-American veterans; and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which allowed labor unions to discriminate based on race; and as a result of the historic and continued discrimination, African Americans continue to suffer debilitating economic, educational, and health hardships including but not limited to having nearly 1,000,000 Black people incarcerated; an unemployment rate more than twice the current White unemployment rate; and an average of less than 1/16 of the wealth of White families, a disparity which has worsened, not improved over time.
The purpose of this Act is to establish a commission to study and develop Reparation proposals for African Americans as a result of— the institution of slavery, including both the Trans-Atlantic and the domestic trade which existed from 1565 in colonial Florida and from 1619 through 1865 within the other colonies that became the United States, and which included the Federal and State governments which constitutionally and statutorily supported the institution of slavery; the de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present, including economic, political, educational, and social discrimination; the lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery and the discrimination described in paragraphs
(1)and
(2)on living African Americans and on society in the United States; the manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent in the United States; the role of Northern complicity in the Southern based institution of slavery; the direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, religious, and associational; and thus, recommend appropriate ways to educate the American public of the Commission’s findings to advance racial healing, understanding, and transformation; and thus, recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Commission’s findings on the matters described in paragraphs
(1)through (7); and submit to the Congress the results of such examination, together with such recommendations.
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Sec. 2
Findings and purpose
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