♪
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Frederick Douglass, 1880.
"When the Hebrews were emancipated,
"they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians.
"When the serfs of Russia were emancipated,
"they were given three acres of ground upon which they could live
"and make a living.
"But not so when our slaves were emancipated.
"They were sent away empty-handed,
"without money, without friends,
"and without a foot of land to stand upon.
"Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the open sky,
naked to their enemies."
♪ somber theme playing ♪
This is The 1619 Project.
♪
When I think about equality,
I think about the story that is often told in this country.
And according to that story,
Black Americans have struggled to achieve equality,
but that struggle has mostly been overcome.
To hear many tell it,
America is, by and large, an equal opportunity society.
We point to The Emancipation Proclamation,
or the wins of the Civil Rights Movement...
- The only limit to a man's hope for happiness
and for the future of his children
shall be his own ability.
NIKOLE: ...or the election of a Black president
as proof of justice.
- Change has come to America.
NIKOLE: But that narrative ignores
the persistent and vast racial wealth gap
that decade after decade
is the most glaring marker of Black inequality.
Today, the average white household has eight times the wealth
of an average Black household.
MAN: ♪ Who'll pay reparations on my soul? ♪
♪ lively piano playing ♪
NIKOLE: Wealth, assets and investments minus debt,
is peace of mind.
Wealth is what allows you to buy a home in a safe neighborhood
with better-funded schools,
what allows you to send your kids to college
without saddling them with debt,
and what enables you to weather emergencies.
Wealth accumulates over time.
Seldom something we build alone, it is often inherited.
And in this country, Black people, more than any other group,
have been systematically deprived of building generational wealth.
More than 50 years since the bloody and brutally repressed protests
and freedom struggles of Black Americans
brought about the end of legal discrimination,
so much of what makes Black lives hard,
what takes Black lives earlier,
what steals opportunities,
is the lack of wealth that has been a defining feature of Black life
since the end of slavery.
And so, if we are truly serious about creating a more just society,
we must get down to the root of it.
We must talk about what is owed.
SINGERS: ♪ Who'll pay reparations on my soul? ♪
♪
JADON RELAFORD: My name is Jadon Relaford.
I'm from Riceboro, Georgia,
which is, um, it's in Liberty County,
uh, southeast Georgia in between Savannah and Brunswick.
I started JD's horse ranch,
and it's a place where we do trail rides and we do lessons.
I initially started it because I wanted to expose our people and our culture
to something different
than the typical things that they say that we're supposed to be.
I think the main thing
that's actually holding me up right now from growing my business
is having land,
being able to be on my own property with my own horses.
Uh, right now, where I am, I have to pay to keep my horses there.
NIKOLE: Many Americans struggle to achieve their dreams,
but what makes Jadon Relaford's story so unjust
is that his family once had land along the coast of Georgia
in a small secluded community called Harris Neck.
Today, the community's land would likely be worth more than $100 million.
But before Jadon was born, the federal government took it.
And while he often visited Harris Neck as a child,
that is a story that Jadon only learned as an adult.
JADON: I first started hearing about the land that was taken
probably about 15 years ago.
And I heard about that directly from my grandmother,
by way of prayer request in church.
I didn't really understand what was going on,
but I do remember, distinctively,
her asking for us to-- to keep that in prayer.
It wasn't until right before my grandmother had passed away
where I really started to dig in
and-- and get a better, a deeper understanding
of what had happened to her, um, as a child in Harris Neck.
♪
NIKOLE: W hen you arrive on the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge,
about an hour outside of Savannah,
there's really no sign of what it used to be.
It's lush and humid.
Birds and cicadas provide the soundtrack.
♪
But for the Harris Neck descendants a few generations older than Jadon,
the memories of what was linger just beneath the surface.
WILSON W. MORAN: My name is Wilson W. Moran.
And, uh, born in 1942 in a lean-to shack
on the side of the road,
outside of Harris Neck Road
after we were forced off of Harris Neck.
NIKOLE: In 1942, the federal government cited eminent domain
when it told the Harris Neck community
that the government needed their land for the World War II effort.
♪
So, tell me about this place. - This is--
WILSON: This is the runway to the air base.
- So when the military came what would have been here at that time?
What would we have seen if we were here? WILSON: The houses.
Uh, the community.
Uh, a thriving community of about 72 families
on 2,687 acres of land.
NIKOLE: So, in this desolate area now
would have been a bustling community? WILSON: Of course, yes.
NIKOLE: Children playing-- WILSON: Yes.
A post office. We had our own school in walking distance.
Uh, own fire station.
We had everything here.
♪
OLIVE W. SMITH: Olive W. Smith.
Age 94.
I finished the seventh grade in Harris Neck.
[rooster crows]
- [chuckles] I had to get up--
had to get up in the morning, feed them chickens,
and gather them plums.
That was my job before I go to school.
I had to get up time enough to do that.
Everybody was nice and loving with each others.
And if you needed help, they would help each others.
That's the way they was. Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Get in the field and work.
If they needed help, they would help.
♪
NIKOLE: But almost overnight,
a loving and thriving community that had taken decades to build
was scattered and destroyed.
♪
- Harris Neck is a stunning 3,000 acres on the Georgia coast.
And to the 75 families who used to live there,
it is the promised land.
Well, 40 years have gone by now,
and their promised land has never been returned.
The Harris Neck folks have tried and tried to go back home.
NIKOLE: Harris Neck descendants
have been fighting to get their land back for decades,
a fight their parents and grandparents struggled to wage.
- I still don't understand why your folks would give up
without a fight.
- One reason would be because, uh,
they've had total faith in our government.
Uh, the other reason is they are Black.
And in the '40s,
um, who, or why, or how could they fight?
MIKE WALLACE: A Black person... WILSON: Right.
MIKE: ... in Georgia... WILSON: Exactly.
MIKE: ...in the early '40s... WILSON: Exactly.
MIKE: ...had no weapons with which to fight.
WILSON: Exactly.
NIKOLE: Harris Neck is just one of countless Black communities
that, over the centuries, have been taken or destroyed
by white terrorism and government policy.
In New York, city officials seized the Black enclave of Seneca Village
to make Central Park.
White mobs burned down prospering Black towns
such as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Rosewood, Florida,
and massacred their citizens.
Cities like Detroit and Saint Paul, Minnesota,
ran highways through Black neighborhoods
like Black Bottom and Rondo.
And in Harris Neck, just like all the rest,
it is nearly impossible to calculate the financial losses across generations.
WILSON: They started in slavery. You had nothing.
You were a zero.
So, now you have these things,
so you begin to accumulate and, uh, build wealth.
And, uh, build wealth for your children and your grandchildren,
you know what I mean?
And all of a sudden, in-- in two weeks, it's gone.
NIKOLE: Some families reportedly received small payments from the government,
but they said they were only a fraction
of what the land and businesses were worth.
Others maintain they got nothing at all.
For the people of Harris Neck, owning their own land
symbolized the hope and the freedom their enslaved ancestors had dreamed of.
And both Jadon and Wilson can trace what they lost
directly to their ancestor, Mustapha Shaw.
Mustapha's story is so remarkable that it sounds more like lore.
Your great-grandfather was a man born into slavery,
gets his land at a time when Black people are fighting just for basic rights.
So talk to me about-- What-- What kind of person was he?
WILSON: Well, you-- you gotta go back to why he ran away
and joined the Union Army.
- Uh-huh. - It was something instilled in him
that he wanted to be a man. NIKOLE: Yes.
- And he wanted to be a man to be reckoned with.
♪
NIKOLE: W hen we talk about equality,
and what is owed to Black Americans,
we must start with the fact that slavery and the Jim Crow era that followed
were, at their essence, systems of economic exploitation.
Throughout his life, Mustapha Shaw defiantly resisted those systems
in an effort to acquire wealth for his family.
But even a near-mythical man could not hold back the tide.
DR. ALLISON DORSEY: I often feel that,
when I'm doing other things, that Mustapha is sitting on my shoulder,
saying, "Don't. You have other stuff you should be doing.
You're supposed to be telling people my story."
NIKOLE: How did you come across him?
- I was doing some research for another project,
and I encountered an arrest warrant.
- So you know that he was a formerly enslaved man
by the time you find him in the records, but what was his life before that?
ALLISON: According to the family lore,
he was born to an enslaved Muslim woman who was given the name Catherine.
He was enslaved on the Delegal Plantation in McIntosh County
from which he escaped to join the US Colored Troops.
NIKOLE: Mustpaha Shaw was one of approximately 200,000 Black men
who served in the Civil War.
Black soldiers made up roughly 10% of the Union Army
and have been credited with helping secure the Union victory
that ended the scourge of slavery.
We don't hear as much about the enslaved people
who were escaping and serving in the troops.
How much of a big deal was it that he ran away,
um, not too far from where he was being enslaved
to-- to join this effort?
- To my mind, a very big deal.
What I discovered about Mustapha Shaw and some of his compatriots
is that they tended to leave in groups of three or four or five or six at a time.
So Mustapha and four of his compatriots leave,
you know, one winter night when they've got the right kind of moon
so they can see where they're going,
and they take off and head to the Union Army.
NIKOLE: Mustapha fought for the Union Army for nearly three years.
And in January 1865,
as the Civil War raged to its final battle,
General William T. Sherman attended a meeting
with a delegation of Black leaders,
and he asked them, "What do you want for your own people?"
Rev. Garrison Frazier, the group's leader, made it clear:
"The way we can best take care of ourselves
is to have land to turn and till by our own labor."
Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order 15,
calling for the federal government
to seize as much as 400,000 acres from the Confederacy
and split it among the thousands of newly emancipated people.
That order would become known as "Forty acres and a mule."
And to this day,
it is the only real effort this nation ever made
to compensate Black Americans for 250 years of chattel slavery.
But that effort didn't even last a year.
Just months after Sherman's order, Lincoln was assassinated.
His successor, Andrew Johnson,
a former slave owner and known white supremacist,
rescinded the order and returned the confiscated land
to the same white men who had fought against the Union.
And yet, at the same time the federal government failed to make good
on its 40-acre promise to Black Americans,
it began providing 160-acre land grants to white Americans
and Europeans enticed to immigrate to the country.
The policy was known as The Homestead Act.
And from 1868 to 1934,
246 million acres, nearly 10% of the nation's land,
much of which was stolen from indigenous people,
was given to white families.
It is estimated that there are more than 46 million white Americans,
a quarter of the US population,
who are still the beneficiaries of The Homestead Act.
These patterns of explicit government policy
that helped white people
and largely excluded the formerly enslaved and their descendants
would be repeated over the next 100 years.
When the federal government stripped the freed people of their land,
many were forced, once again, to work for white people on plantations.
But Mustapha Shaw refused
and threatened those who were returning to those plantations.
Ultimately, the federal government issued a warrant for his arrest.
- And what's amazing about the arrest warrant, um--
- This is it right here? ALLISON: This is the arrest warrant.
They explain that they are unable to retrieve him
because he meets them armed.
The text is--
- So he's ready for them? ALLISON: He's ready for them.
"Shaw then took with him one Pauldo Brown, one Robert Delegal, one Lee Delegal
"and armed themselves with three guns.
"And Shaw also had a Bowie knife and a pistol.
And all of the armed parties threatened the officers."
So the image I create in my mind
is the knife in his teeth and guns in both hands.
So I made him about 6' 3",
chocolate, very muscular, and Idris Elba good-looking.
- Okay.
- The description from his pension file was not that.
- It was... Lenny Kravitz good-looking? ALLISON: It was--
ALLISON: No. - Oh, okay.
[both laughing]
- It was, 5' 5" or 5' 6",
sandy-haired and gray-eyed.
Complexion, light brown.
And, I had to sit with myself a minute,
that my hero didn't match my outsized imagination.
- Hmm. That's history, right?
♪
Dr. Dorsey found Mustapha in historical records again
when she discovered the 1868 deed for land he had purchased in Harris Neck.
Land that ultimately got passed down to his descendants.
ALLISON: Mustapha Shaw's story represents, to me,
ferociousness, a determination to live free on the part of Black men.
What Mustapha's descendants are left with,
to me, is the spirit of Mustapha, right?
But it's not wealth, it's not material resources,
it is not what Mustapha worked for.
And so, in that sense, it's a reality of having been cheated.
NIKOLE: After World War II,
when the federal government decided it didn't need Harris Neck anymore,
they gave it to McIntosh County, not to the families who'd owned it.
After the county allowed the land
that had been so precious to Mustapha's descendants
to be used for illicit gambling, drag racing, and prostitution,
the federal government took it back,
and in 1962, they turned it into a wildlife refuge.
- The key word here for me is trauma.
- Mm-hmm.
WILSON: But, uh, we were able to get through it.
But then you go to the cemetery,
you'll see a lot of our people died in the '40s
because, uh, their hope, their dreams, their freedom
were taken from them abruptly and they could not recover.
Slavery, segregation, Jim Crow.
Bam!
So what am I gonna do?
I'm in my late age, I-- I may as well die.
- What is this community owed for what happened?
[chuckles]
- There's no, uh, there's-- There's not a price you can put on that,
uh, for the harm,
uh, the hurt,
uh, the dislocation of people.
But what I'm saying this is, "You owe me my land back."
And, uh, you wanna talk about reparations, then you'll talk about slavery.
And we were enslaved also.
NIKOLE: Reparations is not a new idea.
Black Americans have been fighting for various forms of it
from as early as the late 1700s.
Starting in 1783,
a formerly enslaved woman named Belinda Sutton
filed several petitions to the Massachusetts Legislature,
demanding a pension from the estate of the man who once owned her.
Belinda Sutton won the case.
By the late 1890s,
Callie House, a formerly enslaved washer woman from Tennessee,
organized hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people
to push Congress to pass a bill to provide slave pensions,
just as it did for Union soldiers.
The pensions would be paid from the taxes
the federal government had collected on slave-grown cotton.
The audacity of a Black woman demanding payment for the stolen labor of her people
brought down the full wrath of the federal government.
Despite the fact that there was no evidence,
no witnesses, and no named victims,
Callie House was convicted of mail fraud and served a year in prison.
The case for reparations began with slavery,
but it does not end there.
After slavery ended, Black Americans were subjected
to nearly a century of violently enforced economic and political subordination
that prevented them from building wealth.
Decade after decade, the unpaid debt has continued to accrue.
♪
NIKOLE: When the federal government
burned and bulldozed the people of Harris Neck
out of their homes and businesses,
many left rural Georgia all together.
SINGERS: ♪ ...will serve until I die ♪
♪ I am on the battlefield for my Lord ♪
♪ Lord, there's a young man here with me ♪
♪ He needs... ♪
OLIVE: A lot of people move away.
Some went up north, some went to Savannah, some went Florida.
They went different places, mm-hmm.
They took their family up north where they was.
Yeah.
Yes. There.
♪
NIKOLE: The torrent of Black migrants out of the South
would be called the Great Migration.
And at its essence, the historic movement was a quest
to collect on the unmet promises of the Civil War.
A search for physical, emotional, and economic freedom.
A freedom that did not seem possible in the apartheid South
in places like the Whittington Plantation, just outside of Greenwood, Mississippi,
where my family is from.
♪
SYLVESTOR HOOVER: My name is Sylvester Hoover,
and I was born in 1957 on the Whittington Plantation.
And I'm a deacon here at Little Zion MB Church
where we are today.
If you was Black in the Mississippi Delta,
we was always feared that somebody going to come and do something to us.
If you didn't honor white peoples back in those days, you could get lynched.
You could get a year in jail.
You could end up getting thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
NIKOLE: At the heart of the brutal violence of the Jim Crow South
was political and economic control.
Within years of emancipation,
Black Americans were largely barred from land ownership.
As a result, they were forced into another system of coerced labor
known as sharecropping,
where they worked the land owned by white people
for an alleged share of the crops.
SYLVESTER: We was, uh, sharecroppers.
That means the boss man buy the seeds
and we worked the land to produce the cotton.
But the only thing that we never could make a profit.
They never let us get out of debt
because we got everything from the commissary
and we didn't keep any books
and you couldn't dispute whatever the person-- the boss man says.
That mean you can't leave the plantation.
It's just like you're a slave.
NIKOLE: Many Black Southerners
were forced to sign labor contracts with white landowners,
and sharecropping trapped hundreds of thousands,
including my own family,
in generational poverty.
- And your father was born on this plantation, right?
- That's what I was told by my Aunt Charlotte.
She said, somewhere out there in a little shack,
my father was born... - And so was I.
- ...in the middle of the cotton plantation.
- During that time,
I'd say, they probably had, I would say,
2,000 people on this plantation. - Wow.
- And when I grew up here in the '50s and '60s,
we had 660 peoples on this plantation.
NIKOLE: Wow.
My family sharecropped on the Whittington Plantation
for at least three generations.
And both of my great-grandparents are buried there.
- We'll just have to walk right around here.
- Is some snakes over here?
SYLVESTER: Uh, no, they-- they over there.
NIKOLE: How you know? [Sylvester laughing]
NIKOLE: What you talking about? I'ma let you go first.
- See, this is Percy Paul. - Mmm.
SYLVESTER: That's Percy Paul right there.
1885, died 1972.
And Percy Paul,
he was the first person I know to have a cab for Black people.
And he would bring Black peoples back home
when they go to town and buy their grocery.
He had two cars on his cab stand,
and he would charge people money to bring them back out here
with their grocery. - So you--
You taught me this, because I never knew
that my great-grandfather owned a little cab company.
- Yep, he did.
NIKOLE: That's kind of amazing. SYLVESTER: He did, and it was famous.
It was famous 'cause, see,
it was, uh, the Black Cab Company and the Collin's Shoe Shop,
them the only two buildings on Johnson Street
were ran by Black peoples.
NIKOLE: Wow. So when we drove from Baptist Town across the river...
SYLVESTER: Right.
NIKOLE: ...and then we were in that splendid white part of town...
SYLVESTER: [chuckling] Yep.
NIKOLE: ...and all of that wealth was built by our ancestors...
SYLVESTER: Yep.
NIKOLE: ...who don't share any of it. SYLVESTER: Right.
But, see, that's the way it were here.
I mean, it was-- it was like that
up until '71, '72, up in that area
before we could see any change here,
because change here in the Delta comes slow.
♪
NIKOLE: My grandmother, Arlena Paul Tillman,
couldn't wait for that change.
In the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings,
two kids in tow, and joined the flood of Black Southerners
hoping to find the Northern promised land.
Grandmamma, as we called her,
got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa.
But there would be no promised land for her.
She would instead find both old prejudices and new ones,
in federal policy designed to keep Black people from building wealth.
NEWSCASTER: We struggled vainly to regain our bearings
while depression, fear, and failure stalked the nation.
NIKOLE: The Great Depression toppled the US economy.
At its height, the nation's unemployment rate
soared above 25%.
The entire banking system had collapsed,
factories were closing, and families were losing homes.
In an effort to revive the spiraling economy,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted the New Deal in 1933.
- You saw an expansion of government
like we've never seen before.
Many of the programs that we know to be entitlements today
were established during the New Deal.
We were subsidizing, um, farmers,
Social Security was established,
unemployment insurance was established.
There was a swelling of government interventions
that actually had a significant impact, a positive impact, on the economy.
Now, that sounds great.
But Black people were largely shut out of the New Deal.
NIKOLE: In a compromise with white Southerners,
Roosevelt agreed to exclude farm workers and domestics
out of critical social safety net programs
like Social Security and unemployment insurance.
That exclusion left out 60% of all Black workers.
NEWSCASTER: Basic problems, unemployment, and the right to organize
were still unsettled.
NIKOLE: The New Deal also empowered American labor unions.
The Wagner Act ensured workers the right to organize and strike,
and as a result, working conditions improved
and wages increased.
But those unions often barred Black workers from joining,
keeping Black Americans from many of the benefits
white Americans had gained.
- You know, in many ways, the New Deal represented
the first affirmative action policy for white people.
That-- it said, "Hey, when you're suffering,
"we're going to not only remedy that,
we're gonna provide security for you and your families for the future."
Now a-- a significant portion of that,
where it really showed up in the New Deal
was housing policy.
NIKOLE: The Home Owners' Loan Corporation,
a federal agency founded under the New Deal,
adopted segregated housing policies from local municipalities
and created a national system that used color-coded maps
to tell banks which loans it would insure.
The federal government marked the most desirable areas for lending in green.
Blue stood for still desirable.
Yellow indicated areas that were declining.
And a bright red marked anywhere Black Americans lived
or even lived nearby as too hazardous to lend to.
This practice, created by the federal government
and adopted by lenders as well as cities, was called redlining.
The federal government created these maps in 239 cities across the country.
ANDRE PERRY: Redlining was not a evaluation tool
based upon the quality of the housing.
It was based upon the share of Black people in the neighborhood.
So there were roadblocks at every step of the way,
preventing Black people, um, from gaining wealth and opportunity
and-- and-- and, more importantly, from gaining power.
NIKOLE: 98% of the loans
the Federal Housing Administration insured
from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans,
excluding nearly all Black Americans out of the government program
credited with building the modern American middle class.
43% of my hometown was redlined.
And when my grandmother arrived to Waterloo from Mississippi,
she moved into the segregated east side of the city
and took the jobs that were most available to Black women,
whether they lived in the north or the south:
she cleaned.
One of the things that Dad told me about,
we used to talk about how the family ended up migrating up to Waterloo,
was that Grandmamma told him when they were very little--
- They wouldn't be picking cotton.
NIKOLE: She decided they weren't gonna pick cotton. - Yeah.
- That-- That was too hard of a life for her kids.
- She'd been through that.
So she wouldn't-- wouldn't wanna send her kids
through the same thing she's been through.
NIKOLE: I think about this a lot. - Mmm.
NIKOLE: Uh, Grandmamma getting on that train...
- Yeah, yeah.
NIKOLE: ...leaving the South... - Right.
- ...cleaning white people's houses, cleaning the courthouse.
MONROE TILLMAN: Yeah, yeah. - I remember, uh, me and Dad would go down there
and she'll be cleaning the front doors. MONROE: Washing the windows. Yep.
- And I remember how people would walk past her like she was invisible,
like she was just nothing. - Yeah. That's how it is.
That's how it was back here.
NIKOLE: Yeah, it's kind of amazing
to think of-- of a woman with two young children
to leave behind everything she knew,
because she was determined to build a better life for her family.
Despite the odds, by the mid-1960s,
my grandmamma's dream of a better life for her children
seemed to be coming true.
Her oldest son, Nashuel Hannah, had graduated college
and with his help,
she had managed to purchase an old Victorian in East Waterloo.
So let's talk about 330 Irving Street,
which was the only house I ever remember...
MONROE: That's right, that's right. NIKOLE: ...uh, Grandmamma livin' in.
LARRY TILLMAN: Everybody was secure there.
As far as the house,
that was the only thing she had. MONROE: Yeah.
LARRY: It was the house.
NIKOLE: I mean, I remember she had the garden in the back of the house,
and then she had that plot of land over--
- She fed us and the neighborhood.
NIKOLE: 330 Irving Street was a worn Victorian
in a distressed, redlined neighborhood.
But for me and my family, it was home,
a symbol of all my grandmamma,
a Black woman born into the apartheid South
with just a fourth-grade education, was able to accomplish.
♪
NIKOLE: From the moment we were brought here in bondage,
Black life in this country has been defined by hard work.
And our labor has generated success stories
that deserve to be celebrated.
But these cases camouflage the truth,
that life for so many Black Americans continues to be defined by struggle.
Today, Black people remain the most segregated group in the country,
and are around five times as likely as white Americans
to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.
And it's not just because Black Americans are more likely to be poor.
For example: Black families earning $75,000 or more a year
live in poorer neighborhoods
than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year.
And housing opportunities as a whole are decreasing for Black Americans.
In fact, while every other group has experienced a rise in homeownership,
Black homeownership is the lowest it's been in a decade.
Hello, Dr. Darity, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.
- It's my pleasure. NIKOLE: Um, it's been a long journey
since the first time we met
when I was just a-- a graduate student here in-- in North Carolina.
- Yeah. Yeah. It's been quite a while.
NIKOLE: It's been-- It's been a journey.
So we live in a vastly unequal country.
Um, all Americans are suffering from the inequality in the United States.
But when we look at the racial wealth gap,
it's-- it's a cavern.
Talk about some of those statistics.
- I think one of the most telling statistics is the following:
uh, Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States
constitute about 12% of the nation's population
but have less than 2% of the nation's wealth.
NIKOLE: In contrast, white Americans
constitute about 60% of the population
but hold nearly 90% of the nation's wealth.
- And so, yes, we have a maldistribution of wealth,
uh, across the entire population,
but there's a particularly stark maldistribution
that's associated with race in the United States.
[indistinct background speech]
NIKOLE: When the idea of reparations is presented
as an instrument for equality in this country,
the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the larger Civil Rights Movement
are cited as proof that equality by law has been achieved
and so nothing else is needed.
But making school segregation illegal did little to repay Black families
for generations of being denied access to education.
Making unemployment discrimination illegal
did not come with a check for Black Americans
for the jobs they were barred from,
the promotions they didn't get.
The Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in housing
but did not reset real estate values in redlined communities.
In the end, civil rights legislation merely guaranteed Black people
rights they should have already had.
It did nothing to correct the harm that had been done,
and had not a shred of impact on the racial wealth gap
that has largely remained unchanged since King was murdered.
So much of the way that we talk about, um, the lack of wealth
in Black communities and in Black families
really centers on this narrative of Black dysfunction.
So I'm just going to say each of these arguments,
and then I want you to tell me what is the reality.
Um, does marriage close the racial wealth gap for Black Americans?
- Apparently not.
Uh, we know now that the average white family
that's a single-parent family
has about two times the wealth of the average Black family
that has two parents.
- So cross that off. DR. WILLIAM DARITY: Yeah.
- Um, does, uh, going to college close the racial wealth gap for Black Americans?
- Well, I'm definitely a fan of going to college...
NIKOLE: As am I. - ...but it doesn't close the racial wealth gap.
Uh, a Black head of household with a college degree
has two-thirds of the net worth of a white head of household
who never finished high school.
- Cross that off. WILLIAM: Yeah.
NIKOLE: Uh, what about savings?
Black people should just stop buying Jordans and save their money.
WILLIAM: Yeah. - And if they did that,
if they saved all their money and, and were better savers,
they could close the racial wealth gap.
- Right, so if-- if Black people weren't so attracted to bling,
we'd eliminate the racial wealth gap.
Well, the evidence suggests that that's not true either.
Uh, if anything,
uh, if we were to take into account the income of the household,
Black households save as much as white households.
And in fact, in some income categories,
Black households actually have a higher savings rate
than white households.
- So if the actual facts don't back up this notion
that Black people just need to change our behavior,
and we could eliminate, um, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans,
why are these myths so persistent?
- Well, I think part of it is, uh, ignorance.
Uh, I think that people have misperceptions about a number of things
and, uh, some of these misperceptions are-- are about American history.
Similarly, I think people have misperceptions
about the sources of the racial wealth gap.
NIKOLE: Lack of wealth in Black families too often means
that the hard-earned successes of one generation
don't translate to the next.
There's still a big family rift
over what happened to Grandmamma's house after she died,
but in the end, there wasn't enough money
to live, send kids to college, and keep it up.
Over the years, it fell into disrepair,
and eventually, the property was seized by the city
and a lifetime of memories bulldozed away.
All of the hopes and dreams my grandmamma carried on that train
from Mississippi to Waterloo,
couldn't contend with the harsh racial realities of this country.
A defining feature of Black life in America
is that there seldom ever exists a margin for error.
And there's no amount of work or ambition
that can make up for the chasm
that is the racial wealth gap in this country.
[church bell tolling]
[reverend singing]
- ♪ And then he will direct your path ♪
♪ Ain't the Lord all right? ♪
♪ We thank God this morning ♪
♪ And may he never ♪
♪ Did you hear me, church? ♪
NIKOLE: Harris Neck's first African Baptist Church
was the only building to be salvaged
when the federal government razed the community in 1942.
♪
NIKOLE: The community was able to dismantle and rebuild the church
to where it stands today.
And the current reverend, Edgar Timmons Jr.,
is the grandson of the man who saved it.
REV. EDGAR TIMMONS JR.: My family have been in this area over 125 years.
It started with our grandfather, uh, William Timmons.
He built and operated the oyster factory for years.
For years, employing from 35 to 48, um, members of the community
during the oyster season.
NIKOLE: In the early 1970s,
Reverend Timmons, Wilson Moran, and other descendants of Harris Neck
began to meet to discuss their birthright.
EDGAR: We all got together, talked about it.
Wait a minute, you know, we went overseas,
putting our life on the line,
serving our country with pride and-- and honor.
And, um, here was our homeland, our heritage, locked behind a fence.
So Elliot Campbell, Chris McIntosh, Wilson Moran, and my-- myself,
we called a meeting.
- So this is 1971.
That's when the Harris Neck movement started.
So we started, uh, talking to anybody who would hear us,
that we want our land back.
NIKOLE: They formed a group called The People Organized for Equal Rights,
and by 1979, they made a bold decision.
- We met and decided that it was time to move back home.
And whatever happened, it happened.
NEWSCASTER: More than a dozen people came to Harris Neck,
to land, they said, the government took from them
during World War II to build an airstrip.
They said the government promised to return the land they once farmed,
but instead, created a wildlife refuge.
So the families came back to take what they claim was theirs.
EDGAR: One of the greatest days of my life.
We gonna stay here until we die! WOMAN: Amen.
- This is ours. WOMAN: Amen.
- This is my testimony.
♪ Jesus, he will never... ♪
We were asking for the return of the property
and reparation of $50 million to re-establish our-- our community.
Really, you know, feeling very justified
because the community was destroyed,
people were displaced,
hearts and lives were destroyed.
WILSON: After a week or so,
uh, the federal government said "We got enough of this."
So they told us that we had to leave
or face jail.
EDGAR: We said, "Well,
"um, if that's the case, then we would just be arrested,"
because we were not going to leave.
We were home, you know, where we belonged.
Our hearts were racing.
I'd never been to jail in my life.
NIKOLE: Members of the group were sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Undeterred, in 1980, they filed a lawsuit against the federal government.
But the judge ruled that the statute of limitations had run out
and that because the federal government owned the land,
only an act of Congress could give it back.
In total,
the People Organized for Equal Rights introduced four bills to Congress
but all died in committee.
By the mid-1980s,
the organization had run out of money and the fight came to a standstill.
♪
- Just imagine if-- if, um,
if the government never took the property,
um, where we would have been now.
Our grandfather's oyster factory would've been--
would've been handed down to us.
Yes, our family is still in the oyster business.
But what Granddaddy had for us to take off with,
once he handed it down to us,
uh, is no-- there's no comparison.
Comparison, none. None.
So, um...
we-- we feel like there should be some reparation, um, granted.
It's only the right thing to do.
NIKOLE: The modern-day fight for reparations is often traced to 1987
with the formation of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
or N'COBRA.
- Reparations is an opportunity for us
to decide as a people what is required
to remove the impediments that are the result of slavery.
REP. JOHN CONYERS: The whole concept of reparations,
we get into a non-dialogue.
Silence.
NIKOLE: In 1989,
the late representative John Conyers of Michigan introduced Bill HR-40,
calling for a federal committee to study the case for reparations
for Black Americans descended from slavery.
Conyers would go on to introduce the bill every year for the next 30 years
until his retirement in 2018.
He died in 2019 without the bill ever making it out of committee.
Still, the call for reparations remains,
and captured the national spotlight in 2021
when the last survivors of the Tulsa massacre
testified in Congress.
- I still see Black businesses being burned,
I still hear airplanes flying overhead.
I hear the screams.
I have lived through the massacre every day.
Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.
NIKOLE: The testimony symbolized the core truth
that justice has not been realized in this country.
We all know people who have done, quote-unquote, "everything right."
People who have done all of the things that society has said they should do,
they still have no wealth.
This is the reality of why you are calling for reparations.
- Because that's the only significant way that we can close the racial wealth gap.
- So the extraction of generational wealth
has to be remedied by a transfer of wealth.
- The federal government's policies created the racial wealth gap.
And so the federal government has an obligation
to take the steps to eliminate the racial wealth gap.
- Why is this controversial?
It just seems like it makes both moral sense but also logical sense.
- I think that there is a historic resistance
to any set of policies that would give Black Americans
the conditions for full citizenship. - Mm-hmm.
- And this resistance is a consequence of the legacy of the Confederacy.
- So if we base the case for reparations off of the racial wealth gap,
what is the total amount that would be owed?
- If we use the racial wealth gap as our standard,
each individual should receive about $350,000.
Since there are 40 million Black American descendants of US slavery
out of a total of 45 million Black people in the United States,
that would mean that the-- the total bill would be approximately $14 trillion now.
NIKOLE: Okay. WILLIAM: Yeah.
- That's a big number.
- Yeah. There're-- There're bigger numbers.
- Is there? - Yeah.
- It's a big debt though. - It is a big debt.
But, uh, you know, I've seen estimates of the bill
that have run as high as 6.2 quadrillion dollars.
So... you know?
- Yeah, I do think it's helpful to think--
- Fourteen trillion might be letting, you know, America off a little bit easy.
- I mean, uh, pretty much any number you put on it
would be letting America off easy, probably.
♪
Despite the lack of political support for reparations,
there has been some change in public sentiment
over the last few decades.
ANDRE: The activity, really, that's promising
is these efforts at local reparations for cities.
What we're seeing in Evanston, Asheville, Maryland and others
are saying, "You know what?
"We had a role in discriminating against Black people.
We're gonna offer some form of reparations."
- The Chicago suburb is set to become the first city in America
to fund reparations for some of its Black residents.
REPORTER: A prime piece of Manhattan Beach real estate
was taken from a Black family by the City of Manhattan Beach.
Los Angeles County gave the property back to their descendants.
- It's surreal.
And it's almost like being transported to the other side of the known universe.
- Now those efforts will never be comparable
to the federal government, um, redressing the injuries
caused by slavery and Jim Crow racism and housing discrimination.
But we can create a reparative culture
by creating local reparations programs
that work their way up to the federal government.
NIKOLE: Leading up to the 2020 election,
reparations became a talking point on the campaign trail.
REPORTER: Where do you stand on the issue of reparations?
- It is the-- It is the original sin.
The truth of the matter is that I, from the time I've gotten involved,
I've been trying to do things
that deal with the systemic racism that still exists.
- When Biden was on the campaign trail,
and he was struggling,
it was Black issues that allowed him to rise up.
JOE BIDEN: And especially those moments where this campaign was at its lowest ebb,
the African-American community stood up again for me!
[crowd cheering]
- You've always had my back, and I'll have yours.
- Now you start to see them start to go by the wayside.
These issues of wealth equality are central
to white politicians getting elected.
It should be central in the legislative packages they deliver.
NIKOLE: The Biden Administration has publicly supported
the study of reparations,
but has yet to make any significant movement beyond that.
And neither President Biden nor Vice President Harris
were willing to sit down with us.
In 2021, HR-40, now led by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas,
finally made it out of committee.
But whenever the issue of reparations bubbles to the surface,
Republicans in power have made it clear where they stand.
- Yeah, I-- I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago,
for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea.
- I just, uh, I just think [clears throat] we're so far removed from the event.
- I don't think any-- any person, Black or white,
is responsible for what someone else, Black or white, did 150 years ago.
And, uh, I think most Americans feel the same way I do.
NIKOLE: And while some politicians are eager to shut down
any conversation concerning reparations,
they are not as willing to discuss
how their own families benefited from slavery.
This viewpoint ignores that debt is inherited, just like wealth,
and also that reparations is not just about slavery,
but about decades of government-backed legal apartheid
deployed against the descendants of the enslaved.
What are the odds that we will ever see a reparations bill
or, um...
law passed that allows for this to happen?
- I have no idea when or if this will actually happen.
Approximately 30 years ago,
when I was a reparations skeptic
and-- and had my, uh, road to Damascus moment
and became a reparations advocate,
I decided that I would do that regardless of how low the odds were,
because this is absolutely the right thing to do.
And it's the only way in which we could eliminate this enormous racial wealth gap.
- I know you hear this
where white Americans are saying,
"Why should we have to pay reparations?"
And they're taking this idea of reparations
as, uh, an individual debt that white Americans are having to pay,
but that's not the case.
- The federal government would pay the reparations bill.
So it's not a matter of taking a dollar out of a white person's pocket
and putting it into a Black person's pocket.
It's a matter of the federal government financing it
in the same way that it financed, uh, the expenditures for the stimulus package
for, uh, the great recession
and the way in which it has financed the American CARES Act
and the American Rescue Plan,
which is essentially to spend the money
but without raising taxes.
- I mean, if anything, uh, the Black experience teaches you,
is you have to have room to believe
that the impossible can be made manifest, right?
- Absolutely. I mean, if-- if it was 1819,
uh, we probably would think that the odds of slavery ever coming to an end
were extremely low,
but does that mean we shouldn't have fought
to try to end slavery?
And so, similarly, I think reparations is the right thing.
It-- It's a debt that's overdue for 156 years.
It needs to be paid.
And we need to struggle to have it happen.
NIKOLE: Generation after generation,
our elders pass on without knowing the justice
their elders hoped to see in their lifetime.
Ms. Olive Smith, and Ms. Mary Moran, Wilson's mother,
were two of the last surviving members of Harris Neck,
and they didn't live long enough to see justice served.
Both died during the making of this documentary.
And while it's been a decade
since Ms. Anna Overstreet, Jadon Relaford's grandmother, passed,
what she suffered is still with him.
JADON: She grew up her whole life living with that,
with that pain, with that hurt.
The part that really, really bothers me
is that she died not having that land back.
I'm happy that, you know, she's buried there,
but I would've been more happy
if she was able to have that land when she was still alive.
When I think of restitution,
first thing that comes to my mind, generally, is correction.
Uh, righting a wrong,
as it relates to what happened in Harris Neck.
What it looks like for me is returning the land.
NIKOLE: The fight has continued in Harris Neck,
but it will still take an act of Congress to return the land.
And so far, there has been very little movement.
How often do you come out here?
WILSON: Well, uh, maybe once a month,
I come here to talk to my ancestors,
and let them know that we are still here and we're still fighting
and we have not given up hope.
And long as there's life, we're gonna have hope.
NIKOLE: Do you think they will be proud of you?
WILSON: Of course. They already are.
- And how does that make you feel?
- Just about what I feel now.
And I can't put that into words.
♪
NIKOLE: It might be hard to imagine
what Black life would be like in this country
if we were to close the racial wealth gap.
But everywhere we look,
there are indicators of how fragile things can be if we do not.
Black Americans, along with indigenous people,
remain the most neglected beneficiaries
of the America that would not exist without us.
This unacknowledged debt, all of it, is still accruing.
And it will continue to accrue
until we, as a society, decide to take action.
We cannot change the hypocrisy upon which we were founded.
We cannot make up for all of the lives lost
and dreams snatched,
for all the suffering endured.
But we can atone for it.
We can acknowledge the crime.
It is time for this country to pay the debt
it began incurring 400 years ago,
when it first decided that human beings could be purchased and held in bondage.
What happened in 1619 set in motion
the defining struggle of American life
between freedom and oppression,
equality and racism,
between ideals of democracy and the fight to make them real.
We must confront this 400-year war between these opposing forces
and then we must make a choice
about which America we want to build for tomorrow.
We must, finally, live up to the magnificent ideals
upon which we were founded.
♪