Tennessee County Considers Using Federal Covid Dollars For Reparations Programs

The idea of paying Black Americans for hundreds of years of their ancestors’ free labor used to build wealth for white Americans has been around for a long time.

Every legislative session from 1989 until he retired in 2017, Michigan congressman John Conyers introduced a failed bill to study, among other issues, how much compensation that would entail. In 1993, Harper’s Magazine pegged it at $97 trillion. Pope Francis apologized for slavery. So did the Southern Baptist Convention. At least nine states have joined them, led by Alabama in 2007.

More recently, studies on the wealth gap between Americans of different races, and the realization of the importance of generational wealth in that national disgrace, have reinforced the idea that although no living American has been directly involved in the enslavement of Africans, the “peculiar institution” and the decades of Jim Crow segregation that followed have repercussions that echo today.

In the latest attempt at narrowing the gap, local lawmakers in Shelby County, Tenn., will consider a proposal to use $5 million in federal Covid-19 funds to help reduce disparities between Black and white residents in wealth, healthcare outcomes and homeownership. The amount is a fraction of the $182 million the county has received in American Rescue Plan Act funding.

“This is not going to be a process that is issuing checks to Black people in Shelby County,” county commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. told Forbes. “This process of community reparations provides an ecosystem to intentionally track and promote Black wealth while providing access to assets and infrastructure.”

Shelby County, which includes Memphis, is the largest county in Tennessee with a population of about 924,000, according to the latest Census data. Roughly 55% of its residents are Black.

Ford, a Democrat, said a committee vote on the measure is scheduled for February 22 and a full commission vote may take place that day as well. The board has nine Democrats and four Republicans, and Ford said that so far he’s secured the support of seven other Democrats. He said he doesn’t expect the backing of the board’s Republicans, none of whom responded to requests for comment from Forbes.

The proposal makes Shelby County the latest municipality to consider, study or launch reparations programs, joining cities including Evanston, Ill., Asheville, N.C., and St. Paul, Minn. In 2021, Evanston became one of the first cities in the country to implement a reparations program, and its plan targets $25,000 housing grants to descendants of Black residents impacted by racist housing policies in the city between 1919 and 1969.

This summer, California state legislators are scheduled to consider recommendations from the state's Reparations Task Force. Those are expected to include monetary and non-monetary programs designed to remedy harms suffered in five areas: housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, the devaluation of Black businesses and healthcare. For instance, the task force said the impact of housing discrimination in the state could warrant compensation of $223,000 per person, or roughly $569 billion.

“I think what unites all of these efforts is a growing understanding of the impact and longstanding legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation,” Rachel Swarns, a New York University journalism professor who studies the ties between slavery and contemporary institutions, told Forbes. “But there are many, many different approaches that are being taken at this moment. People are really wrestling with it in different ways.”

Black American families had on average $316,000 in accumulated wealth last year, according to figures cited by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. White American families had about four times that, or $1.3 million.

A 2020 study by researchers William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen estimated that the federal government would have to compensate Black households about $800,000 each, for a total of $10 trillion to $12 trillion, to effectively close the Black-white wealth gap.

Ford said his goal is to establish reparations programs based on five pillars: housing, mental health, criminal justice, business ownership and financial literacy. The feasibility study will help focus on what those programs would look like, Ford said, but part of his vision is to have a centralized website for people to access resources related to those areas.

Asked about the use of Covid-19 funds, Ford pointed to federal guidance that lists eligible uses such as “assistance to households and communities” and aid for addressing “healthcare and educational disparities.” Ford acknowledged that while the programs funded by Covid-19 money likely can’t exclude any ethnicities, they can be targeted to predominantly Black Census tracts or ZIP Codes.

“I want people to know that this is one-time money to lay the foundation for the purposes of us having the study,” he said, “and to identify, as we go forward, a dedicated funding source.”

Swarns said it’s not just governments that have been mulling or starting reparations programs. Virginia Theological Seminary in 2021, for instance, began writing $2,100 checks annually to the descendants of Black Americans who worked there during the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. Georgetown University has launched a plan to raise $400,000 annually for projects that will benefit the descendants of the enslaved people whose labor supported the college. Swarns is writing a book on the subject.

The word “reparations” can be polarizing, she said, so some are avoiding it in name if not in deed.

Georgetown’s fund uses the word “reconciliation,” Swarns said. “People are being very mindful of wanting to address the history while not wanting to alienate important constituencies.”