Let Reparations Ring

As America celebrated its quarter-millennium, the words of the Declaration of Independence once again echoed:

“Created equal.”

“Unalienable rights.”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

But celebration—without repair—rings hollow. We believe that reparations are what justice looks like in the 21st century. As lawyers for the movement, we will defend these programs, not because reparations alone can solve every wound in this country. Neither because money alone can heal a nation that was built through enslavement, dispossession, racial terror, and systematic exclusion. We defend reparations because it forces the question the United States of America has avoided since its founding: What does justice require after a government has caused, sanctioned, or benefited from brutality against its own citizens?

That is why reparations advocates started to organize attorneys across the nation to defend spurious legal challenges from the current administration.

Reparations as Remedies for Recognized Harm

In 2021, the City of Evanston, Illinois, became the first US city to create a reparations program for Black residents who had been harmed by documented housing discrimination, through the adoption of Resolution 37-R-21. After naming the injury, the city quickly moved from apology to remedy. The Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program is a concrete effort to repair government-backed housing discrimination that historically had denied Black residents access to property, stability, and generational wealth. The city has committed $10 million and has distributed much of that money so far in reparations through the allocation of $25,000 per person to use towards a home purchase, mortgage assistance or home improvements.

[R]eparations forces the question America has avoided since its founding: What does justice require after a government has caused, sanctioned, or benefited from brutality against its own citizens?

Unfortunately, on May 23, 2024, the city was sued by the conservative group Judicial Watch and six other plaintiffs, under the pretense that the program discriminates against non-Black people.

The lawsuit against Evanston is part of a broader government-sponsored legal campaign against reparations programs across the country. In February 2026, San Francisco was sued by the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and two other plaintiffs over its reparations program, in March the Department of Housing and Urban Development began an investigation against Washington state’s reparations work, and in September the Justice Department threatened Buncombe County, North Carolina, with investigation over its reparations recommendations.

In Evanston, Judicial Watch dismissed the program in Evanston as “nothing more than a ploy to redistribute tax dollars to individuals based on race.” Opponents increasingly have framed reparative programs as unconstitutional racial preferences rather than remedies for documented government harm. The US Department of Justice moved to intervene in the lawsuit on June 14, alleging that “the City’s racially discriminatory program is not narrowly tailored to remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute, and through its actions, the City has violated the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.”

However, reparations are not without legal precedent. In 1892, the federal government paid reparations to the Italian government after the lynching of eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans; beginning in 1946, it created mechanisms to compensate Tribal Nations for treaty violations and the confiscation of lands; and in 1988, it provided redress to Japanese Americans who were relocated and incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. These examples show that US law has long recognized reparative remedies for grave state-sanctioned harms.

Reparations are remedies tied to recognized injuries. When a government studies its own conduct, documents harm, acknowledges responsibility, and designs a remedy specifically connected to that harm that took place, it is constitutional for the government to make things right.

If opponents can erase the record of harm, repair can be miscast as racial preference. If they can collapse reparations into the broader backlash against racial justice, they can turn a remedial program into a political target. And if they succeed, the law will once again become a tool that creates Black suffering but refuses to remedy it.

Having the local government acknowledge the legitimacy of its own record of harm plays a major role in making these programs legal. Evanston, for example, formally acknowledged that city policies and inaction contributed to housing discrimination specifically against Black residents from 1919 to 1969, then designed its first reparations program around that documented harm. Lawyers are important to this process because they can help local communities build similar records and connect reparations programs to the harms they identified in their research.

While reparations may include monetary compensation, it’s much more than that and can include restitution, rehabilitation, truth-telling, institutional reform, land, housing, health care, education, cultural repair, and guarantees that the harms will not be repeated. Lawyers can help craft those policies and tie the harms that took place in the past to changes that will make life better for all of us in the future.

Over the last 250 years, Black communities have organized, litigated, legislated, educated, and imagined beyond the limits the law tried to impose. Today, that struggle is taking a new form: communities across the country are building reparations into the work of local government, state policy, litigation, and international human rights.

Reparations Are Already Here

Reparations efforts are already underway in cities like Evanston, San Francisco, and Tulsa, where communities are demanding that city government and other local institutions move from apology to remedy. It is happening at the state level also in California, New York, Washington, Illinois, and Maryland, where task forces and commissions are documenting harms and designing reparative policy. It is happening federally, through the long struggle for H.R. 40 and a national reckoning with slavery and its generational consequences.

The movement also extends beyond government. Organizations such as FirstRepair, the National African American Reparations Commission, African American Redress Network, N’COBRA, and the Charles Ogletree Reparative Bar Association are helping communities, lawyers, scholars, and advocates build the infrastructure necessary to turn reparations from demand into durable policy.

This movement is local, national, and global. Just this year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the trafficking and enslavement of Africans as among the gravest crimes against humanity and “that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedy.”

Reparations for Black Americans people remain one of the clearest tests of US democracy.

If a country can celebrate 250 years of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then it can confront the lives it shortened, the liberty it denied, and the happiness it made impossible. If a democracy can claim equality as its inheritance, then it must account for the people it excluded from that inheritance by law and by force.

Reparations is not the only answer, but it is one way to make freedom ring true instead of hollow.

The repaired future is possible under the law. More than that, it is already underway. The question is whether the legal community will help build it, defend it, and make it durable.

Lawyers and aspiring legal workers can support this work wherever they live. Start the conversation in your city, bar association, law school, congregation, or community organization. Attend a town hall. Ask whether your local government has studied its own history of racial harm. Connect with reparations commissions, grassroots organizations, and national groups already advancing this work.

As Assata Shakur reminds us, we have a duty to fight for freedom. In this moment, we also have a duty to fight for repair. We have nothing to lose but our chains.