[Congressional Bills 119th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 414 Introduced in House (IH)]
<DOC>
119th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 414
Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to
provide reparations for the crime of enslavement of Africans and its
lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United
States.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
May 15, 2025
Ms. Lee of Pennsylvania (for herself, Ms. Pressley, Ms. Tlaib, Ms.
Omar, Mrs. Ramirez, Mr. Thanedar, Mr. Jackson of Illinois, Ms.
Crockett, Mrs. Foushee, Mrs. McIver, Ms. Simon, Ms. Williams of
Georgia, Mr. Johnson of Georgia, and Mr. Green of Texas) submitted the
following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the
Judiciary
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to
provide reparations for the crime of enslavement of Africans and its
lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United
States.
Whereas Black people are, and have always been, human beings, yet the Federal
Government has historically failed to recognize our dignity and
humanity;
Whereas reparations are defined as a victim-centered process by which survivors
of atrocities and serious human rights violations, and their
descendants, have the right to seek restitution, compensation,
rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition for past
and ongoing harms;
Whereas to meet the international legal obligation of reparations, the Federal
Government must compensate descendants of enslaved Black people and
people of African descent in the United States to account for the crimes
and harms of chattel slavery, the cumulative damages of enslavement, and
the epochs of legal and de facto segregation;
Whereas the Federal Government is responsible for--
(1) policies that led to the economic, political, and social erosion of
Black communities;
(2) failing to keep Black people safe from or actively sanctioning
White domestic terrorism and failing to prosecute it when it occurred;
(3) the impacts of government-imposed segregation leading to harmful
health outcomes and environmental racism;
(4) the ongoing harms of racialized mass incarceration and family
separation, oppressive and abusive criminalization, and the continued
impact of embedded historical harms of the criminal legal system on Black
people and Black communities; and
(5) banking, consumer, housing, health, education, and employment
discrimination;
Whereas reparations must be administered by the Federal Government to
descendants of enslaved Black people and people of African descent for
sanctioning the kidnapping and trafficking of human beings, creating and
maintaining a violent racial hierarchy, embedding slavery and other
methods of economic exploitation into the fabric of society, and
emboldening White supremacy with legal, social, and economic tools of
control;
Whereas the full length of legalized slavery's impact on Black wealth creation
and well-being today, including the nearly 300 years of chattel slavery
from the year 1502, when enslaved Africans were brought to Hispaniola
and later their descendants brought to United States territory, to the
year 1789, when the first Congress met, must be recognized and fully
accounted for;
Whereas, over the course of nearly 300 years, at least 12,500,000 Africans were
kidnapped from their homelands by European traders and forcibly brought
across the Atlantic Ocean in one of the largest forced displacements in
human history, and at least 2,000,000 did not survive the horrifying,
brutal, and grueling journey across the Atlantic, also known as the
Middle Passage and Maafa;
Whereas forcibly separating Black families, often with members being transferred
to the Caribbean, was a murderous and tortuous reality for millions of
enslaved people who had to endure separation from loved ones they could
no longer talk to or keep in contact with, perpetuating deep
psychological and emotional trauma;
Whereas Spanish colonizers brought enslaved Africans to modern-day Florida in
1565;
Whereas 1619, a year before the Mayflower arrived on American shores, marked the
first year White Virginians purchased around 30 enslaved Angolans from
Portuguese traders who were forcefully transported through the trans-
Atlantic slave trade, thereafter launching a violent system of racial
subjugation, exploitation, and genocide;
Whereas, from the Nation's founding in 1776, Federal policies produced and
sustained the institution of slavery, thus voluntarily accepting the
British legacy of the institution, and with it, the responsibility to
provide reparations;
Whereas the Founders in drafting the Constitution preserved slavery and
racialized social stratification through systemic measures, without
needing to explicitly mention harmful intent and racialized impacts;
Whereas the Founders and their contemporaries understood freedom and liberty in
direct relation to enslaved people and in their capacity to enslave
Black people;
Whereas the trade in and chattelization of human beings is referenced in 3
sections of the Constitution, namely article I, section 9, clause 1,
which expressly sanctioned the continuation of the international slave
trade for 20 years, article I, section 2, clause 3, which upheld the
further dehumanization of the African by relegating their status to that
of three-fifths of a White man, and article IV, section 2, clause 3,
which egregiously mandated the capture and return to enslavement of
fugitives;
Whereas the system of enslavement served to unite all Thirteen Colonies under
the banner of White supremacy;
Whereas, of the Nation's first 12 Presidents, 10 enslaved Black people;
Whereas President James K. Polk traded enslaved Black people from the Oval
Office;
Whereas enslaved Black people built the United States Capitol and the White
House;
Whereas more than 1,700 United States Congressional Members who served in the
18th, 19th, and 20th centuries had enslaved Black people, including the
first woman elected to the United States Senate, Senator Rebecca Latimer
Felton;
Whereas the Dred Scott v. Sanford legal ruling in 1857, which decided that
enslaved Black people were not citizens of the United States under
article III, was decided by 5 slaveholding Supreme Court Justices,
including Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Associate Justices John
Campbell, John Catron, Peter Daniel, and James Moore Wayne;
Whereas the horrors of chattel slavery are immeasurable and have led to
generational trauma for millions of Black people;
Whereas enslaved people were prohibited and denied the right to maintain their
indigenous languages, faiths, and cultural practices and traditions from
Africa;
Whereas the most productive enslaved people were often whipped the most
violently and were often used as breeders to save slave owners from
purchasing enslaved persons;
Whereas the ban on importation of Africans for enslavement was implemented in
1808, driving trade underground and increasing the numbers of enslaved
people through childbirth as the sole method available;
Whereas millions of enslaved Black adults and children were routinely raped,
sexually assaulted, and tortured at the hands of their White enslavers,
and others were purchased and forced to staff brothels, all of which
reinforced White male dominance and gender hierarchy;
Whereas the rape of enslaved Black women grew so routine that some have
calculated that over 60 percent of enslaved women and girls experienced
sexual coercion and rape in their lives, and that 1 out of every 6 Black
persons born into captivity in 1860 was born as a byproduct of the rape
of a young, teenage, enslaved girl;
Whereas infant mortality rates on plantations were incredibly high, and in the
South, 50 percent of enslaved infants were stillborn or died within the
first year of life in the early 1800s;
Whereas the enslavement of Black people became an indispensable economic driver
in the United States, allowing White Americans in both the South and the
North to enjoy the profit of unpaid and dehumanizing labor;
Whereas the enslavement of Black people and the country's commitment to using
unflinching violence and oppression created an endless supply of labor-
enriched White slave-owners and their descendants, fueled the country's
economy while suppressing self-determination and wealth-building for
enslaved Black people, and postemancipation, left newly freed Black
people with zero wealth and landless, with a lack of education, poor
health, and severed family and homeland ties;
Whereas the economy of the United States was founded on the production of
tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, all of which were planted, harvested,
and produced by enslaved Black people;
Whereas the economy of the United States, in both the North and South,
flourished as a result of Black trafficking, torture, and exploitation;
Whereas, while New York began to abolish slavery in 1799, New Yorkers invested
heavily in the Southern plantations, insured enslaved people as
collateral, produced the agricultural tools that were used in Southern
plantations, and funded the building of ships that were used to traffic
enslaved people;
Whereas, by 1831, the United States was delivering nearly half the world's raw
cotton crop as a result of chattel slavery;
Whereas, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved
person increased by 400 percent;
Whereas cotton produced by enslaved people accelerated worldwide commercial
markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts,
novel financial products, and modern forms of insurance and credit that
will define financial markets for centuries to come;
Whereas, in 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Black people
was $250,000,000, or more than $8,200,000,000 today;
Whereas the bodies of enslaved people, gorged and congealed in the name of White
supremacist hate, became the single largest financial asset of property
in the United States that were purchased through loans, repaid with
interest, and insured with exorbitant policies;
Whereas the vending, bartering, and selling of enslaved people, and with it the
forced separation of Black families, became a self-sustaining economy
bringing in trillions of dollars across the United States;
Whereas White slaveowners used enslaved people as partial to full collateral in
8 out of 10 loans to access more wealth and resources, often to purchase
more enslaved people;
Whereas enslaved people themselves became commodities that, by 1860, were valued
at over $4,000,000,000;
Whereas, in 1857, in the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, the Supreme Court held
that Black people were not citizens of the United States, and therefore,
had no rights to be respected, thereby further codifying White supremacy
into law;
Whereas the institution of slavery was so powerful and corrosive that it helped
to both create the wealth of the United States, and also threatened to
entirely destroy the fabric of the Union during the Civil War;
Whereas 78 percent of military-age free Black men served in the Union Army, and
200,000 Black men enlisted in the Union to fight during the Civil War,
accounting for 1 in 10 Union soldiers;
Whereas Confederate soldiers often killed Black soldiers rather than capture
them, and also enslaved Black war captives during the Civil War;
Whereas President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which by
1934, when the Act ended, had granted more than 270,000,000 acres of
land in the West to White people virtually for free;
Whereas, even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate States ignored
Lincoln's emancipation order and maintained the institution of slavery;
Whereas slavery did not legally end until 1865, with the close of the Civil War;
Whereas, while the 13th Amendment is known to have abolished slavery and
indentured servitude, it made an exception for those convicted of
crimes;
Whereas, rather than shrinking after the technical abolition of slavery,
Southern plantations increased in size, as for example, the number of
Louisiana plantations in selected parishes increased by 286 percent
between 1860 and 1880;
Whereas, following the Civil War, in 1865, Confederate veterans founded the Ku
Klux Klan, a group that would unleash genocidal violence and a reign of
terror across the country for decades to come;
Whereas the Federal Government provided reparations to White slaveowners in the
District of Columbia for the loss of human property through the
Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, while never addressing the need
for restitution to enslaved Black people and their descendants;
Whereas the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Bureau, also known
as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established to provide economic and social
aid to formerly enslaved Black people in 1865, but was eventually looted
and corrupted by White politicians and businessmen, resulting in its
demise in 1872, and in more than 60,000 Black people and organizations
losing their deposits and having to wait years for only a fraction of
them to be returned;
Whereas, Callie House, a formerly enslaved Black woman, alongside Reverend
Isaiah Dickerson, founded the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension
Association in 1898, in a mass effort to pass Federal pension
legislation for formerly enslaved people, and whose efforts were
ultimately shut down by Federal agencies;
Whereas an estimated 6,500 racial terror lynchings took place between 1865 and
1950;
Whereas, in a series of outbreaks of race-related violence, an estimated 39 to
150 Black people were murdered in 1917 in the East St. Louis ``Riots''
and another 6,000 were left homeless;
Whereas the East St. Louis ``Riots'' has been described as the ``worst case of
labor-related violence in 20th-century American history'';
Whereas more than 200 Black people were killed and another 6,000 were left
homeless during the 1919 attack and lynching in Moberly, Missouri,
costing $400,000 ($8,460,000 in 2022) in property damage;
Whereas White supremacists, deputized by Tulsa officials, raided, mobbed,
massacred, and completely burned down nearly 40 city blocks of Tulsa's
Greenwood District, a self-sustaining Black economy, also known as
``Black Wall Street'', in 1921;
Whereas the Tulsa Race Massacre is the most documented race massacre in the
history of the United States, and yet the 2 known living survivors,
Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Ford Fletcher, both over 100 years
of age, as well as descendants of the massacre have yet to receive
comprehensive reparations and justice;
Whereas White supremacists raided, mobbed, massacred, and completely burned down
a small but thriving Black community, Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, in
addition to countless other Black communities across the United States;
Whereas the massacres in Tulsa and Rosewood were only 2 of more than 100
documented White domestic terrorist attacks on Black communities that
occurred from the end of the Civil War to the 1940s;
Whereas Black voters and political candidates were intimidated, harassed,
violently suppressed, and sometimes murdered for simply exercising their
constitutional right to vote;
Whereas participation of Black voters in electoral processes were routinely
suppressed by poll taxes and literacy tests to preserve White supremacy;
Whereas the Supreme Court codified the ``separate but equal'' doctrine in Plessy
v. Ferguson in 1896, thereby allowing racial segregation laws to exist
and enshrining a racial caste system in the United States;
Whereas not only were enslaved people never granted any form of compensation
after the abolition of slavery, they were thrust into a near-century-
long epoch of legal segregation through Jim Crow laws;
Whereas, after emancipation, laws that governed slavery were retooled into Black
Codes to control free Black people, thereby establishing a criminal
legal system that sanctified the continuation of slavery by another
name;
Whereas so unbearable were these Black Codes and the brutality of Jim Crow, that
6,000,000 Black people were displaced and forced to migrate to the North
seeking some form of safety and political asylum within the border of
their own country during ``The Great Migration'', also known as ``The
Great Displacement'';
Whereas the Federal Government abdicated its responsibility to protect its own
citizens from relentless violence, resulting in the displacement of
millions of Black people between 1916 and 1970, many of whom were
refugees from White supremacist violence;
Whereas, from Mississippi to Minnesota, States began to criminalize any form of
resistance to racial hierarchies and expand their criminal codes as
``The Great Migration'' began to expose racial fault lines across the
country;
Whereas medical experimentation on Black people without their consent, including
forced gynecological experiments on enslaved Black women and the
Government-sponsored Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on Black men, led to
major medical discoveries, at the full expense of Black people's
humanity, dignity, and rights;
Whereas, at the end of World War I, Black veterans returned to their homes and
were assaulted for daring to wear the United States uniform;
Whereas Black people were intentionally and systematically excluded from Federal
social service programs;
Whereas, despite being disproportionately affected by unemployment during the
Great Depression, Black people were largely excluded from New Deal
programs;
Whereas Black people were excluded from the Social Security and Wagner Acts of
1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938;
Whereas 65 percent of Black people nationally and 70 to 80 percent of Black
people in the South were ineligible for Social Security when it was
signed into law by President Roosevelt in 1935;
Whereas Black neighborhoods have been divided and effectively destroyed by
Federal hi