For more than two decades, starting in the 1970s, former Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, led a group of officers in the Chicago Police Department, who tortured Black and Latinx men, women, and children in order to extract false confessions. The techniques they used included electrical shocks to genitals, cigarette burns, suffocation, mock executions, sexual assaults, and more. At least 65 known torture survivors are still incarcerated due to the confessions elicited from the torture these men inflicted. Some spent decades in prison, and some died behind bars.  

The legacy of police terror on the city of Chicago remains ever present and will continue to produce scars for years to come. The full magnitude of the practice of torture is still being revealed, and there may never be a full reckoning for the lives destroyed. Despite this, Chicago took an historic step forward in acknowledging the horrors committed by the CPD.

On May 6, 2015, the city of Chicago passed the nation’s first reparations ordinance for survivors of police torture. To date, this remains the only such legislation in the country. The ordinance provides five radically transformative elements:

1. Financial redress to torture survivors

2. Free access to the city’s colleges for survivors and family members

3. The creation of a public memorial

4. Mandatory teaching of the police department’s ring of torture to eighth graders and high school sophomores in Chicago public schools

5. The creation of a center on the Southside dedicated to addressing the psychological effects of torture.

This story exists as an example to the rest of the country of how reparations can be made reality right now for injustices that exist within and outside of our view. The Chicago reparations ordinance for survivors of racialized police torture is also an example of what reparations for survivors of the trans-Atlantic slave-trade in the United States could look like today. But to understand why reparations are necessary, it’s critical to read the survivors’ stories, some of whom are still fighting for their freedom.

read the full reparations series

On Jan. 25, 2019, Kilroy Watkins was freed from Lawrence Correctional Center prison after nearly 28 years having survived torture by Detectives Kenneth Boudreau and John Halloran of the Chicago Police Department, who forced him into signing a false confession in 1992.

Kilroy explains:

“Prior to trial, I testified during my suppression hearing that my alleged statement to police was the product of physical and psychological coercion applied by my detectives (under the command of Jon Burge from the Chicago Police Department). After both detectives denied inflicting such abuse, the trial court denied my motion to suppress, 'Finding the detectives to be more credible witnesses'. Without any other physical evidence, the trial court found me accountable of first degree murder, based essentially on the alleged confession. Since my arrest/trial, newly discovered evidence came to light of widespread and systematic pattern of torture and abuse of suspects by CPD-police officers, including my interrogating officers, which corroborate my longstanding claims that my confession was the product of physical and emotional coercion.”

While incarcerated, Kilroy filed a Freedom of Information Act request to access the police misconduct complaints against his torturers, Boudreau and Halloran. As a Chicago Tribune investigation in 2001 revealed, Boudreau had, as of that time, helped secure confessions from more than a dozen defendants in murder cases in which the charges were later dropped or the defendant was acquitted. Nearly 20 years later, the full scope of Boudreau’s torture is still coming to light. The true impact of his reign is still unknown.

“In Chicago, in particular, false confessions (are) a huge problem,” said Karen Daniel, director of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. “We are the false confession capital of the country.” Nearly 1 out of every 6 murder exonerations that has taken place nationwide over the past decade has occurred in Illinois. The National Registry of Exonerations reports that Illinois has a false confession rate more than three times higher than the national average of 12%. Of this amount, the majority of false confessions come from Chicago at a rate of 1 out of 4.

And there are many more stories like Kilroy’s.

In 1992, 15-year-old Sean Tyler witnessed a murder. The juveniles CPD charged with the murder were not the people Sean saw. Instead, they were five other young people, the youngest being 13-year-old Marcus Wiggins. Young Marcus was tortured by CPD Commander Burge and his cronies into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit, as detailed in his complaint filed a year later against the city of Chicago, Burge, and other police officials and detectives. During Marcus’s trial, Sean served as the sole witness. The detectives working the case harassed and taunted Sean so severely that Judge Earl Strayhorn issued a protective court order against the police, stating that no police on or about the case were to have any contact with Sean Tyler without first contacting Judge Earl Strayhorn.

Burge and his torture ring would get their revenge.

Two years later, Sean, now just 17 years old, was arrested and tortured by Detectives Boudreau, Halloran, James O’Brien, and William Moser, some of the same detectives involved in Marcus Wiggin’s murder case. These same detectives who Judge Strayhorn issued a protective order on, then attempted to pin another murder on Marcus Wiggins, now including Sean Taylor as an accomplice. Marcus was proven to have been out of town and therefore was able to avoid conviction on this case. Sean, however, was in town, and sadly those detectives were able to bring forth charges against him for which he was convicted.

Sean Tyler had no criminal record. He was sentenced to 58 years. On Feb. 15, 2019, Sean was finally released after serving 25 years, completing his sentence. Sean continues to fight for a new trial to overturn his conviction and clear his name.

Marcus Wiggins is now 40 years old and continues to fight for his release. Sean and Marcus and the many others who also remain incarcerated are owed reparations. These are only three stories out of who knows how many — some of whom undoubtedly did not live to tell their tales of horror at the hands of the CPD.

I first became aware of Burge when I was 14 years old. I was handed a flyer by a person who tried to impress upon me the importance of exposing this hidden horror. I thought surely, this was an exaggeration. Despite the CPD violence I had witnessed in my childhood — including the daily practices of CPD harassing, arresting, and kicking children as we made our way home from school — the minimization and normalization of systemic violence was already deeply drilled into me.

As the years went on, more and more reports of exonerations began to emerge. A fuller picture was beginning to be painted outlining the breadth of violence and injustice waged on the Black community by the CPD. The freeing of the “Death Row Ten” led to the current moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. In the last few years, we have witnessed the highest amount of exonerations in the history of Chicago.

This is good, but it’s not enough.

Jon Burge is a notorious household name in Chicago. But the detectives who Burge trained to inflict torture — like Boudreau, Halloran, and O’Brien — are not. Right now, Homan Square, a black site where over 7,000 people have been disappeared by CPD, sits and functions on Chicago’s West Side. The Torture Inquiry Relief Commission founded in 2009 has a backlog of over 480 cases from the Burge torture ring, and it has only successfully recommended approximately 38 evidentiary hearings, which allow for convictions to be overturned. As the Chicago Tribune reported, investigations often take many years, and so far, at least two men have died while waiting for their cases to be heard.

So much more work remains to be done. But it is essential to note that the work that has been accomplished so far has been revolutionary, necessary, and incredibly vital, paving the way to deepen our excavation of the trauma and pain that resulted from continued systemic violence.

Chicago has started to pay its debt. But it has not finished, nor has the harm inflicted by the state ceased. The process has involved legislative movement forward followed by municipal stalling and steps backward, as revealed by the actions of the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who rejected the proposal to finance the public memorial, a core tenet of the reparations ordinance.

Meanwhile, the city only guaranteed funding through the end of this year, 2019, for the Chicago Torture Justice Center — the therapeutic center for survivors — which was mandated through the reparations ordinance. Full funding must be secured for the public memorial and the center for survivors if the city is to be held accountable for the injustice, torture, and devastation of families, communities, and individuals. It is not only a question of morality. It is an issue of what is due.

When the state tortures, when the state murders, when the state harms, it is then responsible for addressing the trauma, the pain, the loss, and the misery that results. Apologies issued by politicians and government officials are ultimately meaningless without concrete material redress to account for the loss of years, loves, income, education, health — as well as familial, community, and individual care. In addition, the massive psycho-social consequences that result to the individual, family, and community cannot be ignored and must be included in any reparatory packages.

Torture serves to disrupt and destroy safety and agency. The function of torture is to bring the person so close to the threat of death that the only consciousness that remains is awareness of devastating pain. Within this new limited reality, the only ability to cease this persistent pain is to elicit a confession. Confession used as the only option of breath, the only option of survival, is the carrot used by the torturer to cease the progression of encroaching death.

Torture is not a new mechanism of state brutality. It has a long history in the United States and can be traced directly back to tools of subjugation vital to the maintenance of slavery and the application of genocide of the indigenous population.

Slavery and genocide by themselves are economic, political, and social forms of institutionalized torture. These systems of torture involve complicated executive, legislative, and judicial measures to maintain its functioning, much in the same way police torture and police impunity are maintained today. Within this framework, we can appreciate the link between the police torture inflicted on Black Chicagoans as existing within a continuum of state violence exhibited against Black people that began with the capture of Africans into the trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

Edward Baptiste, historian and author of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” writes:

“Okah Tubbee, a part-Choctaw, part-African teenager enslaved in Natchez, remembered his first time under ‘what they call in the South, the overseer's whip.’ Tubbee stood up for the first few blood-cutting strokes, but then he fell down and passed out. He woke up vomiting. They were still beating him. He slipped into darkness again.”

Baptiste goes on later to explain:

“(N)either their contemporaries then nor historians since have used ‘torture’ to describe the violence applied by enslavers. Some historians have called lashings ‘discipline,’ to ‘correct’ lazy subordinates’ reluctance to work. Even white abolitionist critics of slavery and their heirs among the ranks of historians were reluctant to say that it was torture to beat a bound victim with a weapon until the victim bled profusely, did what was wanted, or both. Perhaps one unspoken reason why many have been so reluctant to apply the term ‘torture’ to slavery is that even though they denied slavery’s economic dynamism, they knew that slavery on the cotton frontier made a lot of product. No one was willing, in other words, to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

Reparations are part of the process of revealing and exposing pain, violence, and misery made invisible. Reparations are an act of making conscious that which is denied name, denied voice, denied existence. Reparations, this side of revolution and after, are part of making possible a world where such violence is lessened and eventually eradicated. Reparations are also the acknowledgment that the consequences of trauma are complex, compounded, and have ripple effects across generations and communities. Therefore, the responsibility of the state to state-sanctioned violence must be vast, complex, and generational in its application.

The inclusion of a center dedicated to the psychological consequences of police torture and violence is a core part of the Chicago reparations ordinance, and it provides a glimpse into what a possible reparations plan for descendants of the slave trade could look like in the United States. By offering counseling in the traditional one-on-one model — as well as non-traditional methods, which reflect the center’s community counseling model through a politicized lens — the Chicago Torture Justice Center situates collective healing as part of a political, individual, familial, and community process that is not separate from existing political paradigms. Instead, it acknowledges that co-existing struggle for justice is a necessary and vital component to eradicating harm and fostering integration from traumas, which then enable the creating of spaces for healing to occur.

Descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade hold trauma within our bodies and our communities, which are then forced into suppression through continued unequal conditions that produce racialized disparities and poverty. Addressing these structural, governmental, and policy realities must be part and partial to any discussion of reparations, for as long as mass incarceration and policing exists, continued racialized state oppression will continue to enact further trauma producing ever further need to create reparative solutions. A first significant act of reparations for descendants of slavery is to abolish prisons and policing, which exist as some of the most dramatic sites of racialized present-day violence today.   

CPD torture survivors Ronald Kitchen, Stanley Howard, Marvin Reeves, and Mark Clements, authors of the book, “Tortured by Blue: The Chicago Police Torture Story,” write:

“Burge and other cops in Chicago have long known they could do whatever they wanted to black men and anyone in the black community; however change is coming now, and justice cannot continue to be denied and delayed. Except for the short prison term Burge served, all the other torturers, city and police officials, prosecutors and judges got away with either participating in, turning a blind eye to, or covering up the torture scandal. It is our collective hope that history will continue to expose and shine light on their involvement in helping to create one of the largest police corruption scandals in US history.”

Reparations are a standard form of redress that already exists in many historical examples from survivors of the Holocaust, South African apartheid, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, Japanese concentration camps during World War II, indigenous populations, and many more. Let the example of Chicago lay the framework for more reparations ordinances across the country. Let these stories of survival and struggle encourage more survivors to come forward and even more supporters to stand in solidarity. Let this conversation of reparations push forward deeper concepts of understanding and reparative responsibility to state-sponsored violence and expand our conceptions of freedom-making.

Together, we will win.

SEND YOUR MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SUPPORT OF H.R. 40

Aislinn Pulley is a co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center founded out of the historic 2015 reparations ordinance for survivors of Chicago police torture.

At the 2001 United Nations Conference on Race and Xenophobia in Durban, South Africa, it was evident that the reparations struggle would evolve into the greatest and most transforming political and moral movement of the 21st century. The evidence rises like the morning sun every day to solidify this truth. Enlightenment follows where ever this discourse is raised and demands are made. The world it seems, after centuries of hosting and harboring the greatest human crimes and criminals, is now ready to make up its mind.
 
Chickens of this character never come home to roost. They have to be pursued and forced to face the light of the new dawn. There is no container on Earth large enough to conceal the dust and debris of the crime. Beneficiaries enriched by slave-based economies and societies and their descendants and inheritors have always wished to discredit and bury the evidence. But there is no containing the truth that everywhere in the enslaved and colonized world where white folks made fantastic fortunes, the presence of brutalized Black folks cannot be denied. 

This 21st-century reparations movement is the Fourth Rising of Black folks. In the First Rising, we resolved with righteous indignation as a people to overthrow the crime of chattel enslavement, that unprecedented toxic system of social and economic plundering that polluted the world in the aftermath of Columbus' Atlantic adventures.

In the Americas, from Alaska to Argentina, every white-controlled society was determined to genocidally dispose of Indigenous people and to proceed to build social and production systems on the basis of African chattel enslavement. Uprooting these systems by force of arms was the resolve of the enslaved African. The result was a 400-year war — one protracted struggle across a continent — to end the abomination and barbarity and to allow freedom to reign. It took near 100 years to secure the legal uprooting of the evil. First in Haiti in 1804, then through most of the Caribbean and the United States in the mid-19th century, and finally in Brazil and Cuba in the last quarter of that century, as legislators sought to extract liberty from slavery. 

read the full reparations series

The Second Rising came in the century after emancipation legislation. Enslavers, by legislation, had transformed the status of Africans from chattel property to a chased and chastised community without equal civil rights. They were converted into persons to be racially persecuted, politically pushed aside, and continually plundered for their labor. Emancipation enunciations suggested that enslavers believed black folks had fought their way out of the fire and jumped into the pan. 

Everywhere freedom was achieved, a new war of laws was passed to limit the liberty of the liberated. The purpose of political and social containment was to continue the economics of extraction from the Black community. The nature of public institutional life in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Brazil, and beyond was the same; Black folks were held back by governments, federal and municipal, while white folks entrenched themselves through wealth extraction from the Black community. In so doing, they soared to hegemonic heights as controllers of corporate entrepreneurship and political leadership. 

Thus began the eruption of the first stage of the Third Rising of Black civil rights struggles led by a committed core of Black youth sworn to tear down the most visible barriers to collective progress. From Frederick Douglas and W.E.B. Dubois to Marcus Garvey, the struggle against the continuation of plantation America, including its urban incarnation, knew no boundaries. 

The second stage of the Third Rising, and immediate extension, in the 1960s was a watershed that had as its mission the final uprooting of the vestiges of enslavement. Including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Kwame Ture, this struggle continues today in multiple forms, with Black Lives Matter and other grassroots movements, small and grand. Together they confront legacies of racist legislation with a new sense of community indignation.

And here we are today, preparing the groundwork for the Fourth Rising. Determined descendants, with backs against the walls of this living past, are looking into a seemingly unyielding future, demanding reparations from those intergenerational beneficiaries of this crime against humanity. Participatory governments, corporations, institutions, and private citizens, beneficiaries of the bounty, now ponder their stance in the face of the call for reparatory justice. Once again, the enigma of time, and the certainty of its logic, is calling upon our doubtful majority to rise to the emerging enlightenment.

Black peoples’ courageous struggle for freedom post-Middle Passage, and their persistent demand for reparations, are more than sequential streams flowing toward an inevitable sea of justice. The mighty Atlantic that separates the old and new worlds could not absorb so much Black blood and remain just an ocean. No planet could absorb that much pain and remain the same. The global crime of Black enslavement converted the Atlantic into a theater where the epic drama for reparations will be staged. 

The Fourth Rising is a calling to cleanse souls within toxic societies across the seas. The demand for reparations are now heard everywhere the hurt was felt. It is the sound of people in an emerging century looking for legitimacy and respect. The enslavers’ lies have been laid bare. As the crime of racial slavery becomes better understood, its dimensions discovered, and its truths more clearly revealed, the calls of the Fourth Rising will further resonate.

There were no surprises in the responses of enslavers. France, for example, defeated by Toussaint L’Ouverture’s army, without shame, framed its response to reparations with the argument that self-liberated Haitians should pay reparations to their defeated enslavers. For a century, the French, supported by the Americans, bled Haiti’s economy with reparations payments they demanded.

Britain followed, legislating a reparations plan for enslavers, within the emancipation act, in which the enslaved paid 52 percent of the cost. This racist act, in which enslaved Africans were defined as property and their owners worthy of property compensation, further raped and plundered the enslaved. Freedom without reparations, liberty without land, and an illusion of equality without a reality of equity became the norm. Governments forged a new kind of slavery that spawned racial apartheid as the social model for the 20th century.

Sir Arthur Lewis, Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a 1939 publication, “Labour in the West Indies,” that the centuries of unpaid labor enslavers extracted from Africans remains a debt to be repaid. The reparations movement now embraces and celebrates this fundamental truth. There can be no sustainable global order or healing without acknowledgment and action around this truth and the implementation of a global reparations economic plan.

The 21st century will know no greater mass movement. Reparations is no longer a matter of if, but when. Mandela said it best: It is always impossible until it happens; it is always “never in my life time” until it comes and enlivens my life and time. History moves slowly across the terrain of freedom, and then without notice, it moves suddenly, swiftly, and irretrievably. The volcano rumbles in the distance then it erupts in our presence. Reparations represent reason and resolution. The word calls upon the reasonable to be resolute, to write and to speak, and, critically, to contribute. 

SEND YOUR MESSAGE TO CONGRESS IN SUPPORT OF H.R. 40

Hilary Beckles is the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, a chairman at the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and the author of many books, including “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide.”

Many have been surprised and confounded by the appearance of “reparations” as a point of serious discussion for the 2020 presidential debate. For a few, those whose personal family histories intersect with chattel slavery and/or who have served as next generational holders of the demand for reparations, this is a moment in history whose time has finally come.  And let us not miss the symbolic meaning of a long overdue U.S. congressional hearing on reparations occurring on Juneteenth, 2019.

Juneteenth is the remembrance of the day of African-American freedom, in which many heard for the first time the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. And 2019 is also the 400-year anniversary of the slave ship, “White Lion,” landing at “Point Comfort,” Virginia, with 20-plus surviving enslaved Africans aboard. Finally, for my family, 2019 is the centennial in which our family was again dismembered, seeking refuge from the terror of the 1919 Elaine, Arkansas, race massacre. My great uncle fled the U.S. and expatriated to Brazil with his young family. We now have six generations of family members in Brazil. 

With this much injustice still unresolved, the quest for healing and reparations must go on.

Reparations, as a point of faith and law, is not a new conversation. In 1894, Callie House, the mother of the reparations movement in the United States, said, “We deserve for the government to pay us as an indemnity for the work we and our fore parents was robbed of from the Declaration of Independence down to the Emancipation” and that“[m]y whole soul and body are for the slave movement and I am willing to sacrifice for it.”

Mrs. House, the Rev. Isaiah Dickerson, and the Rev. Augustus Clark founded the National Ex-Slave and Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association. Ms. House had been born in a camp of freed slaves. Between 1894 and 1915, there were over 200,000 members throughout the South and active chapters in Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and New York.  The organization introduced some five bills and claims against the U. S. government and the Treasury Department, including a $68 million suit. In 1917, after a 10-year postal investigation in which she was exonerated, she was sentenced to one year for fraud for using the mail to distribute one leaflet.

read the full reparations series

Since the late 1800s, many have attempted to promote the claim for reparations. Though seldom quoted, in 1963, Martin L. King noted: “While no amount of gold could provide adequate compensation for the exploitation of the Negro American down through the centuries, a price could be placed on unpaid wages.”

In May 1969, Rev. James Foreman, supported by other African-American faith leaders, walked down the church aisles at the historic Riverside Church in New York City and read a “Black Manifesto” that had been adopted in April of the same year by the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit. The manifesto demanded $500 million as a “beginning of the reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed and persecuted.”

In 1989, U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) took the question of American slavery to the heart of the national political process with the proposed resolution to establish a study commission on American slavery. H.R. 40 remains a resolution, introduced into this Congress by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). Moreover, I along with many other U.S. citizens of African descent went to South Africa and not only witnessed America’s refusal to officially participate in the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, but we also experienced the unsuccessful U.S. efforts to derail African and Caribbean nation-states from supporting the declaration that “the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was a crime against humanity.”

And, here we are June 19, 2019, in the halls of Congress, pricking the mind and soul of America to do what is right about the human rights of people of African descent in this nation in the ongoing quest for reparations! In the words of the legendary lawyer and jurist, Thurgood Marshall, “Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.”

In his classic novel, “Juneteenth,” Ralph Ellison tells a story of a former jazz musician preacher, Rev. Hickman, and the son he raised who betrayed his commitments. Powerful words in the novel speak to today’s time: “Blood spilled in violence doesn’t just dry and drift away in the wind, no! It cries out for restitution, redemption.” Ellison also had questions that continue to haunt us today: “How can the many be as one? How can the future deny the Past? And How can the light deny the dark?”

These poetic words penned from the hand of Ralph Ellison are a glimpse into the culture, faith, and hope that propelled Thurgood Marshall and so many others over the years to speak life into the movement that has brought H.R. 40 to the forefront of today’s American political debate. These poetic words prophetically captured the significance of me being able to organize a pilgrimage several months ago of over 700 clergy leaders to visit the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama. There the sacred spaces and grounds of the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorated those African Americans — men, women, and children — who were lynched. Yes, we celebrated the vision and tenacity of attorney Bryan Stevenson to make America look at itself.

In an era in which xenophobia and divisive, hateful, and racialized rhetoric and policies are spewing from national, state, and local centers of power, H.R. 40 is creating a path to e pluribus unum (out of many, one) and shedding the light upon centuries of denial and the real fake news of America’s past: U.S. prosperity is the result of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism.

As general secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference (SDPC), a United Nations nongovernmental organization, I have engaged other faith leaders and traditions in multiple convenings on four continents in the past six months, interrogating the efficacy of reparations to transform and help bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. At the heart of these conversations is the acknowledgment that reparations are more than a matter of money. True reparations also involve a process of intentional healing for those who experienced the harm and for those who were enriched by the harm, which sets right and repairs the institutional structures, policies, and practices which sustain the harm.

In a time of intensified Afrophobia and xenophobia, many faith communities are turning inward to identify, name, and seek reparatory justice for their complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the damage it has wrought on generations of people of African descent. The late theologian, Dr. Katie Geneva Canon echoes Justice Marshall’s words: “Even when people call your truth a lie, tell it anyway.”

As the trans-Atlantic slave trade system and its aftermath were global, so have been the documentable consequences. SDPC just held a truth-telling commission in Elaine, Arkansas, around the consequential damages and harm done to generations of Black families after the Elaine Massacre of 1919. The poignant stories of killings of scores of Black people in a church, continued massacres throughout the county, acres of land and cotton theft, federal troops being complicit in the murdering, false imprisonment, and fake trials of the victims undergird the facts and oral narratives impacting multiple generations.

Indeed, as Callie House and Rev. Dr. King said, there is no amount of money that can ever compensate for the dismembering of families, cultures, histories, and opportunities. There is no amount of money that can fully atone for the terror and trauma that has been endured and passed on through generations. What can happen is that all of us embrace a call whose time has come. What can happen is that we break the silence and stand for right and the rights of others. That is why I stood at the border in McAllen, Texas, and why next month I will join others for the “Year of Return” to Ghana, West Africa. Many argue that the reparations issue is too complex, and therefore remedies and restitution cannot be implemented through the judicial system.

I beg to differ!

Where we go from here is being discussed at the global, national, and local levels in ecumenical and interfaith circles. In the Christian sacred text, the narrative of the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19: 8-9) informs faith leaders and communities, offering parallels and possibilities for remedy. Zacchaeus found peace by giving away possessions to the poor, atoned for cheating others, and paid back four times what he gained.

The Zacchaeus narrative has transformational impact by acknowledging real transgenerational harm done, owning up to benefits inured, and seeking to lead the way to reparatory justice and reparations. At the intersection of faith and the law in today’s context, advocating for tax justice and connecting the social and ecological damage and debt that continue to manifest are principles of justice that can lead down pathways of reparatory justice, reparations, atonement, and human rights protections for ever more.

The late theologian, James Hal Cone said: “black people will not be silent as our children are thrown into rivers, blown into eternity, and shot dead in the streets. Black lives matter. God hears that cry, and Black liberation theology bears witness to it.”

I will continue to bring truth, light, and healing to my Black and white students who often feel cheated, betrayed, and disillusioned when they understand how America’s refusal to acknowledge its past makes them heirs to a nation at war with itself.

Indeed, it behooves all of us to stay woke, show up, be truthful, be courageous, and be prepared to create new paths. At local, national, and global levels, the SDPC and I are challenging the faith community to establish entrepreneurial development, solicit contributions, and distribute trust and investment funds in ways that support the 10-point plan for reparatory justice of the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC).