08 February 2021
Below is a reference library of materials on reparations, which will be necessary to make our nation and our world more whole and more just.
It is surely far from comprehensive, but I will add resources here as I find them or as they’re shared with me. I hope you, too, find them useful.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” [The Atlantic] [PDF]
Shennette Garrett-Scott, “What Price Wholeness?” [New York Review] [PDF]
Katherine Frank, “Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations” [New York Review] [PDF]
James Forman, “The Black Manifesto” [The Black National Economic Conference] [PDF]
Jerry Frye, “The “Black Manifesto” and the Tactic of Objectification” [Sage Publications] [PDF]
Republic of New Afrika, “New Afrikan Declaration of Independence” [Black Perspectives] [PDF]
African American Reparations Commission, “The Ten Point Plan” [NAARC] [PDF]
Andrea Ritchie et al., “The Reparations Now! Toolkit” [M4BL] [PDF]
N’COBRA, “The HR40 Primer” [N’COBRA] [PDF]
California Reparations Task Force, “Interim Report on Developing Reparations Proposals for African Americans” [SF Chronicle] [PDF]
William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, “From Here to Equality”, UNC Press. [Green Apple] [SFPL]
Boris Bittker, “The Case for Black Reparations”, Random House. [Green Apple] [SFPL]
Daina Berry, “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh”, Beacon Press. [Green Apple] [SFPL]
Martin Luther King Jr., “Why we Can’t Wait”, Beacon Press. [Green Apple] [SFPL]
Malcolm X, “By Any Means Necessary”, Pathfinder Press. [Green Apple] [SFPL]
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America [N’COBRA]
African American Intellectual History Society [AAIHS]
National African American Reparation Commission [NAARC]
Institute for the Black World 21st Century [IBW21]
Movement for Black Lives [M4BL]
Black is Back Coalition [BBC]
“Our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal … Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Post header image via the Intersectional Environmentalist.
