Former US Representative John Conyers (D-MI) was first elected to Congress in 1964. Conyers was well known for introducing HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, in 1989. HR 40 did not pass, although Conyers continued to reintroduce the bill until he retired five decades later.
Conyers had been a representative for two decades before he first introduced HR 40. Why didn’t he propose the act in 1969 or 1979?
Because the harmful effects of slavery and segregation were being addressed through the Great Society programs of the 1960s and the affirmative action policies of the 1970s. These initiatives were not reparations, but they functioned similarly. Demanding reparations at this time would have been counterproductive.
When President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Conyers took notice. This law was a formal apology to over 100,000 people of Japanese heritage who were wrongly imprisoned in internment camps during World War II, with each surviving victim receiving $20,000 in reparations.
Conyers introduced HR 40 the following year. Conyers understood that reparations were given to victims, not direct descendants of centuries-old atrocities. That is why HR 40 did not seek direct payment to African Americans; rather, it asked Congress to appropriate $8 million to study whether there were any lingering effects from slavery and segregation that continued to harm African Americans, and if there were, could that harm be remedied through reparations?
Mainstream African American leaders and their liberal allies, who were completely committed to the Great Society programs and affirmative action, believed reparations were not implementable and doubted HR 40 would have been introduced if reparations had not been given to the Japanese.
For the next two decades, HR 40 received little attention.
This changed in 2014, when Ta-Nehisi Coates published The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic. Coates mainstreamed the debate over whether African Americans should receive reparations for not only slavery and segregation but also racist housing policies. During the 2015 Democratic primaries, Coates contacted the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign to assist Sanders in including reparations in his policy agenda. The Sanders campaign believed that reparations for slavery were unrealistic, divisive, and would damage the economy.
The Sanders campaign ignored Coates.
Sanders is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who may have been the most extreme, far-left presidential candidate in the twenty-first century, and if he didn’t believe reparations were possible, why would anyone else in Congress be willing to adopt a measure allocating millions of dollars to fund a study?
When US Representative John Conyers retired, no member of Congress stated that they would continue to introduce HR 40 in his honor. The media tributes to Conyers’ legacy also served as an obituary for HR 40.
In 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. The incident sparked nationwide protests and riots that had not been seen in the United States since the 150 riots of “The Long Hot Summer of 1967.” Politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suddenly endorsed studying reparations for slavery, while corporate America made commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in an effort to pacify the protesters.
Black Enterprise reported that Corporate America’s 50 largest public companies began proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” and pledged $49.5 billion toward racial equity. The Black Lives Matter protest movement received $90 million in donations, while Twitter’s CEO contributed $10 million to help professor Ibram X. Kendi establish a Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
With all of this money changing hands, no one considered privately funding the reparations study Conyers requested through HR 40. If an individual or organization’s spending habits reflect their values, then no one values studying reparations for slavery.
A year after the Biden/Harris ticket won the White House in 2020, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), inspired by Biden and Harris’ commitment to reparations, reintroduced HR 40. Lee’s bill asks Congress to appropriate $12 million. This time, HR 40 had more sponsors than before, but Politico reported that President Biden privately warned lawmakers not to expect much from reparations legislation.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died of cancer in 2024, after HR 40 failed once more.
Donald Trump was reelected president, and the Trump administration began 2025 by eliminating federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and establishing the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce unnecessary spending.
At the same time, Newsweek reported that Boston University had closed its Center for Antiracism, which was founded by professor Ibram X. Kendi. In the Center for Antiracism’s brief existence, they received almost $40 million in grants and gifts to undertake research, but no one completed the research HR 40 expected Congress to fund.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) recently held a press conference to announce she reintroduced HR 40. Pressley, flanked by colleagues, expressed concern about the rise of white supremacy and anti-black bigotry. She said, “We have a hostile administration actively seeking to reverse decades of progress, as well as recent progress, in the area of civil rights.” Pressley’s HR 40 bill asked Congress for $20 million to study if reparations were needed to redress America’s “original sin” of slavery.
Pressley and her colleagues are too concerned with self-righteous victimhood to recognize their cardinal transgression.
In the 1990s, journalist Tony Brown, best known for his TV show Tony Brown’s Journal, explained that “the original sin of Black leaders was to accept as fact the myth that white people would or could solve the crisis of Black people. Instead of attacking material poverty with education and economic self-determination for the masses, liberal whites and their socialist Black minions emphasized dependence on legislation and government intervention.”
Fortunately for Pressley, God forgives those who know not what they do.
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