Claiming Reparations,Claiming the City

Abstract

Historians of the African American urban experience have revived scholarly efforts to document Black communities’ “right to the city.” These explorations have focused their attention on programs of reparative justice rooted in longer traditions of political thoughts and action. As the imagining of reparations for the the descendants of African slavery becomes more influential as a trend in the field, it will be important to ground this work in an understanding of the changing historical context of the past several decades, as well as the current realities of the shifting urban landscape.

Writing in the late 1960s—an epic moment of transition in the twentieth-century Black Freedom Movement—Detroit scholar-activist couple Grace Lee and James Boggs theorized that “The City is the Black Man’s Land.” Although framed in the masculinist terms pervasive during that era, the pronouncement made a strong case for a program of territorially based reparations. “Population experts predict that by 1970 Afro-Americans will constitute the majority in 50 of the nation’s largest cities,” they wrote, then argued: “In accordance with the general philosophy of majority rule and the specific American tradition of ethnic groups (Irish, Polish, Italian) migrating en masse to the big cities and then taking over the leadership of municipal government, black Americans are next in line.” ¹ Linking the cause of Black freedom to urban space, however, the Boggses embraced possibilities far beyond the existing modes of electoral machine politics. Viewing the establishment of Black urban governments as potential revolutionary beachheads in a larger global fight against the U.S. nation-state, the Boggses posited that the only alternative to Black self-rule in the cities was either “wholesale extermination of the black population through mass massacres or forced mass migrations onto reservations,” as had been the case with indigenous populations.

From this perspective, the “Black City” was, at least demographically, an emergent material reality. Yet, it remained to be seen whether this development would yield the organized political, social, and economic power that the Boggses envisioned, particularly in light of the “technological revolution of automation and cybernation” ² that was rendering urban-industrial production (and African Americans’ precarious status within it) obsolete. Notwithstanding the growth of vibrant Black urban enclaves and institutions throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, the late-century rise of African American urban mayors and other elected officials, and the coded associations among “inner city,” “urban,” and “Black” that persist in popular culture, the thesis of the “Black City” remains as complicated today as ever. Hence, prospects for reparations in the city should be informed by the changing political context of the past several decades, as well as the shifting urban landscape itself.

As captured in Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s 2023 Urban History Association Presidential Address, Black-led campaigns to achieve the right to the city have been anchored in calls for broader transformative changes like reparations. Indeed, the cause of reparations has long held a place in the Black imaginary for freedom, self-determination, and land-based autonomy. Such ideas were expressed through efforts like the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, created in the 1890s to petition for reparations for freedpeople; the American Communist Party’s “Black Belt” nation thesis focusing territorial claims on the U.S. South in the late 1920s; its revival in the 1960s via the formation of the Republic of New Africa, and the publicity surrounding the “Black Manifesto” demanding reparations from white religious assemblies; and, in the 1980s, the creation of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), as well as the high-profile work of Michigan Congressman John Conyers in introducing federal legislation supporting reparations for the African descendants of U.S. slavery. National discourse about reparations reached a zenith in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ³ culminating in its inclusion as part of the platform of the World Conference Against Racism, hosted in Durban, South Africa in late August and early September of 2001. This momentum slowed following the September 11 attacks on the United States, when the White House launched a global “war on terror” that cast immediate suspicion on varied forms of domestic dissent through measures like the USA PATRIOT Act.

For some, the breakthrough presidency of Barack Obama—a self-styled former urban community organizer who ascended in Illinois state and then national politics based on the strength of Chicago’s hypersegregated ⁴ “Black Metropolis” electorate—may have carried the possibility of fulfilling the Boggses’s deferred dream. However, the racial setbacks of the Obama years, and the local activism that continued during and after U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, again elevated reparations in the 2010s as a burgeoning subject of national debate and renewed scholarly attention. In 2012, for instance, the Journal of African American History (JAAH) published a special issue, “African Americans and Movements for Reparations: Past, Present, and Future.” ⁵ In 2014, JAAH joined The Black Scholar, Journal of Pan-African Studies, Review of Black Political Economy, and other Black Studies-affiliated periodicals in issuing a “Ten Point Program for Reparations for African Americans in the United States.” As part of this program, The Black Scholar called for manuscripts that “provide a scholarly analysis of any issue or problem whose legacy can be traced to enslavement or racial oppression since slavery,” or that offer “a rationale for reparations and specify how reparations payments could be used to reconstruct African American civil society so as to strengthen and democratize African American social institutions, improving the quality of life of African Americans in the United States, especially the economic and educational conditions for children and youth.” ⁶

As much as anything else, the reparations resurgence was driven by an upswing in white supremacist violence amidst the historic Obama administration, the rise of “Black Lives Matter” as an organizing discourse and movement, and—in the face of the first Donald Trump presidency—a growing necessity among African American communities to galvanize action beyond relying on the white public’s recognition of their humanity. This viewpoint was sharpened by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected Black urban communities and further exposed the extent of their social marginalization in U.S. society. This also paralleled two major events in 2021: the passage of legislation marking Juneteenth as a federal holiday; and the centennial of the 1921 urban race riot carried out by white civilians and government officials against Tulsa, Oklahoma’s prosperous Black Greenwood district. The commemoration of the latter, in particular, furthered a renewed national dialogue about reparations for the living survivors of that massacre and, by extension, Black America more generally.

Without question, then, the case for reparative racial justice rests on legitimate historical bases. ⁷ This history includes not only chattel slavery in America, but also all that has followed its demise. Among other legacies, this encompasses the accumulated, multi-generational, group-based disadvantages fostered by debt peonage and convict-leasing, the laws and customs undergirding U.S. racial apartheid (e.g., “Jim Crow” segregation in labor markets, education, and health), exclusionary practices in the electoral process, federally supported discrimination in housing markets that produced a sub-prime mortgage crisis and a continuing racial wealth gap, state-sanctioned terrorism and “racial cleansing” by white mobs, systemic harassment and abuse by law enforcement, the devaluation and demolition of Black communities through metropolitan redevelopment schemes like urban renewal and gentrification, and the persistent inequalities in the justice system that produced an unprecedented matrix of racialized mass incarceration and criminalization.

But if achieving urban-based reparations claims remains a goal, a few practical considerations matter. First, given the internal stratification of class, gender, sexuality, and nationality that have complicated Black identities in urban communities since the 1960s, effective reparations campaigns will benefit from practices of democratic participation and transparent decision-making beyond a small elite of trained professionals, elected officials, and private entrepreneurs who might otherwise craft reparations agendas based on their own specific prerogatives and interests. Amplifying the “bottom-up” focus of post-1970s Black urban historians like Trotter, Richard W. Thomas, Kimberley L. Phillips, Leslie Brown, Marne L. Campbell, and Jessica D. Klanderud, and integrating this literature with decades of social science on Black urban regimes, scholars could inform robust organizing efforts by excavating longstanding traditions of Black civil society that have challenged male, middle-class, heteronormative structures of authority and leadership. ⁸ As much as anything, a mass-based, popular approach to reparations could provide an opportunity for revitalizing traditions of collective civic organization, as well as cultivating concrete constituencies at the grassroots. This might include local community-centered research projects aimed at generating data on racial disparities in job markets, housing, education, child welfare and elder care, courts, land-use and tax policies, and neighborhood-level surveys to explore the depth of support for reparations and how diverse Black publics imagine them programmatically. ⁹

Second, reversing the trend that the Boggses identified in the 1960s, the Black population of the combined central cities of the one hundred largest metropolitan areas fell by three hundred thousand between 2000 and 2010. This decline was not confined to New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and other initial northern and midwestern urban destinations of the Great Migration, but also southern and western cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles. ¹⁰ Yet, as the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri brutally illustrated in 2014-2015, this outmigration was the result of late-century urban redevelopment schemes that displaced racialized poverty, and its attendant challenges, to the suburban fringes of shrinking urban centers like St. Louis. Perhaps this augurs a metropolitan-wide, rather than simply city-focused, reparations project, as metropolitan planning has become a locus of urban policy-making. Yet, third, an equally important transformation has been a simultaneous increase in Latino immigration to cities. In some recent cases, anti-immigrant elected officials cynically transported immigrants to mock political opponents, deride Black mayoral administrations in cities like New York and Chicago, and exploit simmering grievances among Black urban residents (many of them descended from Black migrants from the U.S. South) against more recent immigrant newcomers. Addressing such difficulties could benefit, in part, from engaging the research of urban historians like Lilia Fernández, Llana Barber, and A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, who have documented the existence of longstanding Latino urban populations and argued that—far from burdening the postindustrial city—the latest wave of “new immigrants” have helped to save it economically, culturally, and otherwise. ¹¹

This standpoint suggests that an urban-based program of reparative racial justice could benefit from a broad-based, state-directed strategy based in such measures as a fundamental reconstruction of neighborhood amenities and infrastructure; full employment at livable wages; affordable housing, quality physical and mental health care; and an accessible education that prepares students for competitive success in a Fourth Industrial Revolution ¹² driven by the fusion of artificial intelligence, augmented/virtual reality, robotics, and genetic engineering—in short, a domestic metropolitan Marshall Plan that would make the city habitable spaces across racial and ethnic lines. While this program could be targeted to urban Black America, it nevertheless would continue a long tradition of African American social movements—from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights struggle and beyond—expanding the boundaries of citizenship and the meanings of democracy for all.