Book
Getting to reparations : how building a different America requires a reckoning with our past
Audience Adults
Published [2026] by Crown, New York
ISBN 9780593593615
Bib Id 1563323
Copyright 2026
Edition First edition.
Description xxv, 242 pages ; 22 cm.
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Leader
cam a22 i 4500
ISBN
9780593593615 (hardcover) $30.00
0593593618
Call #
305.4889 B
Author
Title
Getting to reparations : how building a different America requires a reckoning with our past
Edition
First edition.
Publication Information
[2026] by Crown, New York :
Copyright Date
©2026
Description
xxv, 242 pages ; 22 cm.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-242).
Summary
The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history. When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 went into effect, wealthy slaveowners like Margaret Barber were compensated for the loss of their enslaved workers. Barber received $9,000--an equivalent to $250,000 today. When a group of Italian immigrants were lynched in 1892, President Harrison compensated Italy a total of $25,000 for their deaths--an equivalent to almost $766,000 today. The Indian Claims Commission, an arm of the federal government, paid Indigenous Americans $818 million for underhandedly stealing their land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--an equivalent to almost $350 billion today. Dorothy A. Brown addresses the glaring question: if reparations can be achieved for others, why not for Black Americans? If lynching can be remedied for Italian immigrants, and slaveholders compensated for losses associated with abolition and emancipation, then the government's failure to provide such remedies to Black communities harmed by similar violence, loss, and destruction is long overdue. The fight for reparations is truly a fight for the soul of America, to produce the country our founding fathers idealized but never achieved. Getting to Reparations makes a logical and necessary case for reparations for Black Americans. It lays out a path as to how we might achieve this, built on the frameworks used throughout U.S. history by the government to pay restitution. It is now time to do the same for America's Black population
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