NAACP Recommends Reparations Policies for Black American Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States

WHEREAS, The persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, even food security, and environmental and climate injustice between African Americans and the rest of the United States population, reflects the level of structural and institutional discrimination that creates de facto barriers for people of African descent to fully exercise their human rights; and

WHEREAS, The United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, remains extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans. In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency; and

WHEREAS, The appalling evidence of racism embodied as disproportionate COVID-19 incidence and mortality for Black Americans should add to moral, historical, and legal arguments for reparations for descendants of people enslaved in the U.S.; and

WHEREAS, African American families were able to obtain land as promised to the American enslaved of 40 acres and a mule. Due to white supremacy and an unjust American system that allowed land to be robbed. The NAACP demands the land unlawfully stolen be deeded back to those families at today's value of the land and/or the land/property itself. 

WHEREAS, After being reintroduced annually since 1989, H.R. 40, The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act was approved, ordered favorably, as a single amendment by the House Committee on the Judiciary on April 14, 2021; and

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the NAACP reaffirms its previous positions on reparations, (2016): "Creation of Commission to Study and Recommend the Appropriate Remedies for the Descendants of African American Slaves" and (2007): "Reparations for Unpaid Labor Rendered by Enslaved Persons of African Descent."

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED the NAACP demands the 117th U.S. Congress and President Joe Biden utilize all available procedural options to immediately establish a commission to study and recommend a comprehensive program of compensatory reparations policies for Black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S. for harms originating in chattel slavery and ongoing through multifaceted institutional and structural forms of anti-Black racism and discrimination.