Hundreds of U.S. communities are making reparations for slavery and colonization

These efforts show how working locally to grapple with the complexity of land-based reparations is a necessary and feasible part of the nation’s healing process.

Ever since the United States government’s unfulfilled promise of giving every newly freed Black American “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War, descendants of the enslaved have repeatedly proposed the idea of redistributing land to redress the nation’s legacies of slavery.