Nearing the end of the Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman signed Special Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865, which promised to redistribute 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to emancipated Black families. This would have allotted 40 acres of land and a mule to 40,000 of the 4 million African people that were subjected to chattel slavery. However, promises were not delivered after Lincoln’s assassination, and another 124 years passed before H.R. 40 was first introduced in 1989 by Congressman John Conyers. This followed the passing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1987, which issued $20,000 reparations checks to Japanese Americans who were forcibly relocated to U.S. internment camps during World War II. While this is not the first instance in which the U.S. government has issued formal redress, Darity, an economist working with the California Reparations Task Force, suggests that the Civil Liberties Act of 1987 is one model for what reparations could look like for Black Americans. Considering that the objective behind a Black reparations program is to eliminate the Black-White wealth gap, “We see no reason for a Black reparations project to be any different,” Darity claims. 

Based on a 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances Report, the average white household has a net wealth of $800,000 more than the average Black household. While the issuing of $800,000 payments to every eligible Black American would not entirely remedy the harms and crimes of slavery, this increase in net wealth has the potential to dramatically improve Black educational outcomes, economic security, homeownership, and more. Darity and Mullen estimate this would cost the federal government $10 to $12 trillion at the minimum. 

While this is one method of calculating reparations estimates, Darity suggests that the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres of land and a mule could serve as another basis for calculations. If land in the U.S. is conservatively valued at $10 an acre in 1865, and 40 acres were promised to each family of four, that would imply the allocation of 10 acres per person, thus equating to $100 for each person who was formerly enslaved. This value, multiplied by the 4 million people who were formerly enslaved and discounted at a yearly rate of 6 percent (5 percent earned interest and 1 percent inflation) would come out to $1.3 trillion in 2008 dollars. Given that 15 years have passed since Darity’s original estimate, the total amount of reparations in 2023 dollars is expected to be greater. Other researchers have estimated ranges between $500 billion and $6 trillion in total reparations; when divided evenly among the 40 million people who identified as Black on the 2010 U.S. census, this amounts to $12,500 to $150,000 per person in reparations. 

Darity and Mullen explain that it is the federal government’s responsibility to pay for reparations. Although many argue that such a large-scale federal expenditure would require the government to raise taxes, the issuance of COVID-19 relief payments in recent years has proved otherwise. Instead, Darity and Mullen caution against the inflationary effects this could yield. To minimize inflation risk, Darity and Mullen advise for reparations payments to be spread out over several years (but for no longer than a decade), and for them to be issued in the form of assets (i.e. annuity, endowment, or trust account), which are less liquid and cannot be spent all at once. This would restrict the amount that recipients would be able to spend at a time, but recipients would still have full discretion over how to spend their funds. With these risks accounted for, reparations have the potential to not only close the Black-White wealth gap, but also to advance racial equity and begin the process of community healing.