Does the United States owe Black Americans compensation of some kind for the brutality of slavery and the lingering effects of segregation and other forms of racial discrimination?

That question has divided U.S. politics and public opinion since the end of the Civil War, when Gen. William Sherman authorized the distribution to formerly enslaved Black people of 400,000 acres of land seized from white slave owners, only to see his order rescinded by President Andrew Johnson.

Today, those in favor of reparations argue that slavery was the foundation of much of the nation’s antebellum wealth. By 1836, almost half of U.S. economic activity derived directly or indirectly from slave-produced cotton, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.” At emancipation, enslaved people represented the most valuable asset in America, “$3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined,” Mr. Coates told a House panel in 2019 testimony.

Yet enslaved people and their descendants have never been compensated for their economic contributions, say reparations proponents. Black Americans have struggled to overcome the wealth gap between themselves and white Americans – about $278,000 on average, according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

Meanwhile, Black Americans have suffered lynching, Jim Crow laws, and de facto segregation caused by federal highway and home-lending policies.

In the past, the U.S. government has paid reparations to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, and even compensated some former slave owners. Proponents ask, why not Black Americans?

“We’re talking about acknowledging what has happened ... owning up to the harms that have been committed against Black Americans from the time they were brought here forcibly,” says folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen, co-author with Duke University public policy professor William A. Darity Jr. of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”

Expensive and unmanageable

Those who oppose reparations argue that such a broad approach is politically untenable, difficult to design, unaffordable, and perhaps unconstitutional, particularly given the current conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

Central to the opposition is the idea that guilt should not pass down the generations. Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell said in 2019, when he was Senate majority leader, that he does not favor reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible.”

Monetary payments would cast Black Americans in the role of eternal victims, according to Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah who is Black himself. Reparations would propagate the notion that “Black Americans are a hopeless, hapless, and oppressed race who need pity and handouts to succeed,” he said in January.

How would the government determine eligible recipients? Any plan aimed at all Black citizens would perhaps be struck down under the equal protection clause, opponents say. Limiting payments to descendants of enslaved people might pass legal muster, but proving lineage could be difficult.

Reparations would also be extremely expensive. Payments under the draft plan recently released by California’s Reparations Task Force would run into the billions for just one state.

A variety of efforts

Polls show Black and white Americans are far apart on the issue. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that 77% of Black respondents supported reparations for descendants of enslaved people, with 18% of white respondents saying the same. Overall, 30% of U.S. adults back reparations, Pew found.

Given such numbers, the chances for a national reparations plan passing Congress appear very slim. Meanwhile, a widespread conservative “anti-woke” movement has targeted programs, such as reparations, that call for racial and social justice. Under pressure from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other GOP politicians, the College Board this year removed the topic of reparations for slavery from its Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum.

Yet some reparations efforts have moved forward. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to approve reparations for Black residents – housing-related stipends. Detroit, among other cities, has created a task force to study the subject. 

Georgetown University, pushed by a 2019 student vote, has established a Reconciliation Fund to pay for projects at descendant communities linked to Maryland Jesuit plantations. Harvard University has set aside $100 million for an endowment aimed at closing racial economic and social gaps.

Some see advantages in the scale and variety of such efforts.

“I could ... make an argument that a million small actions by individuals and institutions are equally important if not more important than government action because it would signify a tremendous amount of buy-in from all quarters – and that is what we need,” emailed Anne C. Bailey, a professor of history at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

Even before any dollar amount was suggested for reparations for Black people in California, Donald Tamaki knew some residents would get up in arms over the price tag. He had heard cynical commentary from the Bay Area to San Diego.

But as a member of the state’s Reparations Task Force, he, as well as eight other Californians, has been tasked with crafting a wide-ranging proposal to compensate Black residents for historical harms ranging from Jim Crow laws to redlining to institutionalized racism. The task force wrapped its deliberations in early May and is scheduled to meet one more time on June 29 before delivering its recommendations to the Legislature.

Early drafts of the final proposal sent pundits to calculators. They found that plan could total more than $500 billion for California, with some estimates much higher than that. Individual allocations could amount to as much as $1.2 million for eligible Black people in the state who are proved to be descendants of those once enslaved, or of free Black people living in the state before 1900.

That figure has caused state legislators from both parties to note the challenges in making such payments, especially with the state facing a budget deficit. But the task force submitting the proposal was not charged with figuring out how to pay reparations, only with recommending what they should be and who should receive them. The group also noted the importance of educating the public about the reasons reparations are justified.

“If the narrative is that the playing field is level and if you can’t make it in America, it’s your own fault, ... and [if] information about what’s happened as a result of this racial pathology is buried, suppressed, not discussed, or forgotten, then the narrative is that this is welfare to an undeserving, aggrieved population, and they don’t deserve it,” Mr. Tamaki says from his law offices in San Francisco. “It’s very important for us to shine a light concurrently on what has happened.”

What happened was horrendous and the cost of it is enormous, says Mr. Tamaki, an attorney who specializes in value-driven legal counsel and was one of five task force members appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom; four additional members were picked by the State Legislature. The group was tasked with studying the effects of slavery and the lingering societal ills of other discriminatory practices within the state.

For the past two years, members have met monthly and heard from economists, historians, scholars, and everyday citizens in town hall meetings to gather insight for their final recommendations. 

Mr. Tamaki, the only non-Black member of the group, says he thought he knew a lot about American history, but serving on the task force opened his eyes to the totality of slavery and racial injustice toward Black people in the country and in California in particular. The state should not only make direct cash payments to people, he says, but also invest in ongoing policy initiatives in the areas of housing, education, criminal justice, and other issues negatively affecting the Black community.

One task force recommendation is that California draw up a formal apology for its role in perpetuating the effects of slavery, discrimination, and racial harm toward Black people. Task force members say that although California was admitted into the Union in 1850 as a free state, gold rush opportunists from the Southern United States brought those they had enslaved with them. California also enacted its own Fugitive Slave Act in 1852 and created laws that prevented Black people from testifying against white people in court, so they couldn’t argue for their freedom.

Additionally, California had so-called sundown towns, where danger awaited Black Americans if found there after dark. The state was also a hotbed for Ku Klux Klan members, practiced eminent domain seizures of land belonging to racial minority groups, and perpetuated a system of discriminatory housing, education, health care, and employment opportunities.

Mr. Tamaki acknowledges that all groups of color have faced discrimination in the Golden State, but “Black Californians are at the bottom of every metric,” he says. “Maybe Natives are there with them,” he adds. 

Mr. Tamaki knows about the harm done to marginalized groups. Both of his parents were incarcerated in camps during World War II. His family lost property in San Francisco’s Japantown, similar to the way Black San Francisco residents were removed from the Fillmore District and Black Los Angeles residents were displaced from the Sugar Hill neighborhood. All this was being done while the U.S. government transferred $120 billion in wealth almost entirely to white families via programs like the GI Bill.

“I did not know that 98% of those loans went to white people,” he says. “That is a huge transfer of wealth.” 

Mr. Tamaki says these stories have to be told to alter the minds of opponents of proposed reparations – from everyday citizens to state legislators, who will eventually vote on the task force’s recommendations.

Serving on the task force “has changed me ... because I’ve learned so much in the process,” says Mr. Tamaki. “But one thing that’s motivated me is I now realize how important this is to America as a whole.” 

He hopes the literature that task force members studied from historians becomes recommended reading.

“This buried history is very important to shine a light on,” Mr. Tamaki says. An apology is needed because potential was cut down for Black Americans at every turn, he adds.

Peter DaSilva/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

“It has always been said that as California goes, so goes the nation, so ... we’ve got to set this bar high, and we’ve got to set it with sense.” – The Rev. Dr. Amos Brown, senior pastor of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, who was catapulted into the Civil Rights Movement by Emmett Till’s murder in 1955

Another fight in the struggle

For the Rev. Amos Brown, it’s important that California get reparations right. That is why he agreed to join the task force at Governor Newsom’s behest. 

“It has always been said that as California goes, so goes the nation, so ... we’ve got to set this bar high, and we’ve got to set it with sense,” says Dr. Brown, who has seen a lot of well-intentioned legislation die from disinterest.

Dr. Brown is the senior pastor of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. Not a native Californian, he moved here in 1976 to assume his current post. He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder by a white mob, for allegedly speaking to a white woman in a store in Mississippi, catapulted Dr. Brown into the Civil Rights Movement.

“That freaked my mind when I picked up that Jet magazine and saw that mutilated head. That forced me into the struggle,” he says.

In his youth, the struggle included starting Jackson’s first youth group for the NAACP, being a Freedom Rider, and getting arrested for leading a kneel-down in an Atlanta church after the pastor wouldn’t let Black college students worship there in the early 1960s. He learned from watching Medgar Evars, his mentor and a civil rights activist, organize. He met Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, A. Philip Randolph, and a host of others whose names are etched in history books. Now, in 2023, it is his turn.

“It’s just another phase in my life’s commitment,” he says thoughtfully from his home office.

Dr. Brown says everything started with the denial of 40 acres and a mule, which were promised to 40,000 newly freed Black people after the Civil War ended. Having that would have created generational wealth, and there wouldn’t be a need to have such contentious discussions now.

“Those are the specifics that people ought to be cognizant of when you talk about reparations. It was a matter of land, health, and education,” he says. “Black people live six or seven years less than the majority culture because of bad nutrition and bad medical care. You don’t have the opportunity to talk about making some money or spending money if you are the sickest.”

Dr. Brown says what the task force envisions is that redress can be put into programs that can be paid for over time, such as physical, mental, and environmental health programs. The state needs to get rid of toxic communities and give Black people their fair share of housing opportunities, Dr. Brown adds.

“When people don’t have a sense of identity, presence, and belonging, it’s psychologically injurious to their spirit,” he says. “When the system does not see us, it’s an insult to our humanity, so that’s why we need to make repairs for the harms that were done and the lies that were told.”

It is of utmost importance to Dr. Brown that Black Californians not focus on monetary reparations but take this as a chance to have a stake in the social engineering process of creating opportunities for themselves. Working with people and making sensible recommendations is how legislation gets passed and funds are appropriated, and it is what people must learn, he says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

People enjoy Bruce’s Beach park, near the Pacific Ocean, June 23, 2021, in Manhattan Beach, California. In 2022, Los Angeles County returned two beachfront lots to the great-grandsons of the original owners.

What redress might look like

A chilly breeze permeates the air in Manhattan Beach, California. Atop a hill on Highland Avenue on a stretch of land between 26th and 27th streets, an older couple are parked on a bench with two leashed dogs at their feet, talking and staring out into the ocean’s abundance. A cargo ship passes in the distance. Near them a young couple sit on a blanket in the grass smiling at each other.

Below them is a parking lot and a lifeguard station in front of the Strand, where passersby jog, walk, hold hands, and zip through on skateboards or bikes.

Charles and Willa Bruce used to live there. They built a booming resort for Black Angelenos, like themselves, to visit and revel on the same beach where teenagers now pass, set, and attack a volleyball on the sand. The town of Manhattan Beach took the Bruces’ property in 1924 via eminent domain. The problem was the color of their skin. Those who instigated the Bruces’ property seizure were white.

“The generational wealth that’s been lost and the consequences of people’s attitudes that persist to this day – there’s so much damage that’s been done that it’s not an easy fix,” says Teri Kirkwood, an attorney who occasionally travels to the beach from her home in the city of Inglewood, near Los Angeles.

Last year, Los Angeles County returned the two beachfront lots that had belonged to the Bruces to their great-grandsons, who sold it back to the county for $20 million early this year. Many, like Ms. Kirkwood, celebrated the return of confiscated land. 

That move, supported by Governor Newsom, could be a precursor of what is to come if the task force’s recommendations are accepted by the California Legislature.

“I would be in favor of it, but it needs to be done correctly and it needs to be done on a wide-ranging basis, because just throwing money at it isn’t going to help,” Ms. Kirkwood says. 

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

As with many of us, Robin Proudie’s daily routine includes checking her mailbox and sifting through the usual assortment of bills, advertising circulars, and requests from charitable organizations to find that rare missive that might be of special interest. She found one on a July morning in 2019. Ms. Proudie, who has since retired from a federal government position, was unfamiliar with the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation Project, but she was familiar with the city from which the letter came – St. Louis – her childhood hometown. 

Once inside her Maryland home, she opened the envelope and read: 

I write today with information about people we believe to be your ancestors. Through the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation [SHMR] Project, we are trying to learn more about the lives of the people who were held in slavery by the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, including your ancestors, in order to tell their stories and connect with their descendants in a meaningful way. ...

Ms. Proudie was stunned by the news from the SHMR Project, initiated by the Jesuits’ USA Central and Southern Province and Saint Louis University. 

“From my own research, I already knew that I was a direct descendant of an enslaved woman, Henrietta Mills; she was my great-grandmother three times removed,” says Ms. Proudie, who has long been interested in her family’s genealogy. “What I didn’t know was who had enslaved her: the Society of Jesus.”

Ms. Proudie cried. 

“I knew the significance of this letter,” she remembers. “I knew what it would mean to our family.”

The Rev. Gregory Holley, also a descendant of Mills, experienced what he describes as shock and awe when he received his letter from SHMR. “You mean a Catholic school is saying that some of our ancestors were enslaved by them?” he recalls asking his wife. “I had to process that. ... You mean they got our history?”

Riley Robinson/Staff

A ledger, kept by the Jesuits of the Missouri Mission, lists payments that Matilda Tyler, Henrietta Mills’ aunt, made to purchase her freedom from Saint Louis University in 1847.

Piecing together family ties

Within months, Mr. Holley, pastor of Grace Fellowship Church Center, and several other descendants of Mills were seated at a table at Saint Louis University with people from SHMR. Since 2016, the group’s researchers had been digging through Saint Louis University’s archives and other historical record sites. 

“One of the first records they found was some type of Communion certificate for [Mills],” says Ms. Proudie, who stayed abreast of what the researchers were sharing. “[Mills’] marriage record stated that she was owned by Saint Louis University, and her husband, Charles F. Chauvin, was the slave of a St. Louis woman. They got married in the upper colored chapel of St. Francis Xavier College Church on June 28, 1860.” 

Countless documents that few Black Americans get to see offered a glimpse into the lives of Ms. Proudie’s and Mr. Holley’s ancestors. They learned about Proteus Queen and Anny Hawkins Queen (Mills’ grandparents). Between 1823 and 1829, this couple and several others, along with some of their children, were forced to leave relatives and friends at the Jesuits’ White Marsh Plantation in Maryland. Betsy Queen, Mills’ mother, was 10 years old when she made the trek to St. Louis. 

The families lived together, while cooking, laundering, building structures, and cultivating the land for their enslavers. “They labored as slaves during the day and rented themselves out at night to earn money,” says Ms. Proudie. “My dad would have loved to have known all this. ... He was a history buff. ... When you know your history, it allows you to feel a sense of belonging. ... African Americans know our ancestors were slaves, but it’s difficult to know too much beyond that because you hit the 1870 brick wall.”

Riley Robinson/Staff

The St. Francis Xavier College Church, on the Saint Louis University campus, is the site where Henrietta Mills and Charles F. Chauvin were married in the upper colored chapel on June 28, 1860.

That brick wall is the fact that federal census records before 1870 didn’t identify enslaved persons individually. They were aggregated in the total number of enslaved people owned by an individual. That number was used for taxation purposes and the allotment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In some cases, slave owners listed enslaved persons by gender and age range. The Jesuits, however, kept detailed records of the people they enslaved. 

Finding cousins across the country

In 2021, Ms. Proudie connected with descendants of people who were enslaved by Jesuits in Maryland, where her ancestors had once lived. “You could say we’re cousins because we really are,” she says. 

Through the Maryland descendants, the St. Louis descendants were able to trace their lineage to Mary “Poppaw” Queen, their first ancestor to arrive on American shores in 1715. A woman of African and Ecuadorian heritage, Queen was an indentured servant when she came to Maryland from Ecuador. 

Descendant Imani Pope, a college student in St. Louis, has always taken pride in her family’s history. Her family passed down to her the achievements of several of her ancestors, including two of Henrietta and Charles Chauvin’s 10 children. Louis Chauvin was a pianist who, along with Scott Joplin, composed the ragtime song “Heliotrope Bouquet,” and Sylvester Chauvin was a team captain for the St. Louis Black Stockings, a Negro League baseball team. “It makes a difference every day because knowing about them makes me want to be honorable to my ancestors and what they fought for,” says Ms. Pope, Mills’ granddaughter five times removed. 

Yet, learning about family members from an earlier era also makes her angry, Ms. Pope reveals. “I can’t believe they treated my ancestors like that,” she says. “Yeah, I know it happened a long time ago, but it’s still around today.” 

Riley Robinson/Staff

Robin Proudie, founder of the Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved, holds a meeting with other descendants in St. Louis, May 6, 2023.

One of the things still around that could be remedied is the racial wealth gap. “History, more than current choices, best explains the racial wealth gap today,” writes Ray Boshara, senior adviser at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. 

White Americans, he explains, were included in “major wealth-building policies such as the [1862] Homestead Act (which granted 160 acres of land, mostly west of the Mississippi River, to families willing to work it); the GI Bill of 1944 (which helped returning soldiers go to college, start a business, or buy a home); and robust 20th-century policies to promote homeownership. Black Americans, though, were largely excluded from those policies,” he writes.

Giving descendants their due

For Mr. Holley, financial compensation has a place in reparative justice conversations. Slavery, as he sees it, was a for-profit business that economically empowered some people at the expense of others. “Now people just want to talk about scholarships for kids and stipends for our elderly,” he says, “but back then, a lot of people were making a lot of money. Some people didn’t get any. I’d like to see us get some of that fruit.”

Nonfinancial recognition matters, too. 

In March of this year, Ms. Proudie and other descendants of the people enslaved at Saint Louis University finalized the formation of the nonprofit organization Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved. Their purpose is to honor and preserve the history of their ancestors and help repair the historical harms caused by their enslavement.

“We want our ancestors to be acknowledged for their contributions to the founding of Saint Louis University and the expansion of the Jesuits’ presence in the Midwest,” says Ms. Proudie, the founder and executive director of DSLUE. 

Riley Robinson/Staff

“It makes a difference every day because knowing about them makes me want to be honorable to my ancestors and what they fought for.” – Imani Pope (left), Henrietta Mills’ granddaughter five times removed, outside Grace Fellowship Church Center in St. Louis, holding a photo of her ancestor Louis Chauvin, and standing with her relatives the Rev. Gregory Holley and Robin Proudie, who hold a certificate honoring Louis’ father, Charles F. Chauvin

“They labored without compensation to build the university,” she continues. “We’re not saying we want to take any names off any buildings, but we are saying that we’d like to see the names of some of our ancestors go up. They are part of the university’s history. ... We are living testaments ... [that] they were here and are not nameless.”

Ms. Proudie says acknowledgment should include “a memorial on the campus that honors our ancestors; and for their descendants – educational, business, and financial literacy opportunities; and health care services and facilities for our elderly descendants.” 

In 2021, Ms. Proudie learned of a residential facility being built on the university’s campus for Jesuit faculty. “What caught my attention in the news story was when it said that there’s been ‘a Jesuit community at St. Louis University since 1829. And so this is just an opportunity for us, both the university and for the Society of Jesus to assert that the Jesuit community is part of the fabric of the university,’” says Ms. Proudie. 

Riley Robinson/Staff

A person walks near the clock tower at Saint Louis University. After a student protest in 2014, the university agreed to the Clock Tower Accords, committing to improve diversity, access, and equity on campus and in the larger community.

“That’s fine,” she continues, “but our ancestors were in this community just as long as the Jesuits have been, and they were the ones doing the heavy lifting. The Jesuits didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they pulled themselves up by our ancestors’ bootstraps.” 

An unanswered appeal

Among the many revelatory documents that have been shared with the St. Louis descendants is a letter kept at the Georgetown Slavery Archive. It was written in 1833 by Thomas Brown, a member of one of the first families, along with Ms. Proudie’s ancestors, to move to St. Louis from Maryland between 1823 and 1829. An enslaved man, he labored for Jesuits in Maryland and at Saint Louis University for nearly 38 years. His letter to the Jesuits in Maryland told of his mistreatment and that of his wife, Molly. 

Advanced in age, the couple were living in a “rotten logg house” and would soon find themselves moving into “the loft of one of the outhouses.” Concerned about their health and safety, Mr. Brown offered to buy their way out of slavery. He enclosed $50 (approximately $1,800 in today’s dollars) in the letter and promised to pay another $50 when he could. 

To date, no response to that letter has been found. One can only hope that, 190 years ago, someone opened that letter, realized its significance, wept, and then rectified a long-standing injustice.

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

Ross Yednock swam in a sea of American middle-class well-being all his life. He grew up in 1980s Midwestern suburbs, enjoyed high school football stardom, and graduated from Michigan State University without debt. He’s had a career in Michigan Democratic politics and state government while exercising his business chops on the side in profitable real estate investments. 

But as the modern American racial reckoning heated up, the temperature of that sea of privilege grew uncomfortable for Mr. Yednock. He fell into intense self-interrogation about that life, and how much of it he owes to being white.

Speaking about it with furrowed brow, carefully editing his words, he tries to capture the essence of the civic responsibility he feels to repair what he calls a history of “brutality” to Black people that continues to this day.

With the recent crescendo of the reparative justice movement into the mainstream, Mr. Yednock’s is an examination playing out in pockets of white America. It’s seen in California’s consideration of financial payments to the descendants of Black residents discriminated against in the 19th century; in the housing reparations program passed by Evanston, Illinois; in corporate and higher education efforts; and in countless faith-based programs shifting church assets to the Black community. 

“It’s been a slow build, and it’s really kind of rapidly increased in the last five to 10 years,” Mr. Yednock says of his own stir over historical racial injustices from slavery to lynchings, mass incarceration, police brutality, and segregation. 

It culminated in his decision last fall to give voluntary reparations to the Black community. 

Divorced and without dependents, save two ebullient pit bull rescues, he rewrote his will to give all his assets – cash, home, investments, life insurance – to the Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan. Plus, he gives 1% of his monthly income to that faith-based reparations organization, which has made more than 35 presentations here promoting reparations in the past year and a half. 

This is what is called “practicing a lifestyle of repair,” says Robin Rue Simmons, the former Evanston alderwoman who led the push for the nation’s first municipal reparations program there. The movement must have white allies to succeed, she and other activists say. And that ally group is growing, she adds.

Evolving views

Nonetheless, the topic is explosive.

Baptist minister Michael Woolf, of Lake Street Church of Evanston, rakes his hair anxiously, recalling a few “very nice church ladies” spewing invective at him when his congregation decided last year to offer joint ownership of its building to a Black congregation that felt pushed to break away from the church decades ago.

The Rev. Jason Poling, who oversaw reparations discussions at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Maryland, acknowledges, “There are very good reasons why ... absolutely good-hearted people ... can believe it is not a good idea.”

Mr. Yednock, for example, says that his initial reservations about reparations included such questions as economic feasibility, accountability for funds – and even the validity of the notion that Black Americans monolithically support reparations. 

Indeed, only 30% of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center in 2021 supported repayment of some sort to descendants of enslaved people – with 80% of white Americans and majorities of Hispanic and Asian Americans against the idea. And Pew reported a statistically significant decline in the percentage of white adults who believe that the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in America today “a great deal” or “a fair amount” – from 58% in 2019 to 50% in 2021.

And yet, there is a growing body of reparations plans that could only be happening with white support – and the stories of shifting thought behind it.  

Shafkat Anowar/AP/File

Robin Rue Simmons, the former Evanston, Illinois, alderwoman who led passage of the city’s housing reparations program, holds a photograph of her mother, aunt, and grandmother in her Evanston home, April 9, 2021.

A national survey by historian Cane West for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., found 48 reparations efforts formed since 2015 in such institutions as churches, corporations, and universities, most of which aimed to provide some type of financial compensation.

The African-American Redress Network documents 463 instances of reparations and redress, 85% of which are not financial repair, but historical analysis, commemoration, or memorialization.

An “aha moment” and self-reflection

Mr. Yednock’s path to voluntary reparation was equal parts history study he didn’t get in school and a searing exploration of what he considers his own unconscious complicity in modern racism.

One powerful example of making historical connections, he notes, is the fact many white people cite as their “aha moment”: that only a small fraction of Black World War II veterans were able to receive the GI Bill education and housing financing that was the foundation of the modern white middle class. 

Mr. Yednock gets choked up recounting some experiences in his personal racial reckoning. Like the head-spinning question a Black acquaintance once posed, “When did you realize you were white?” Or his ill-chosen college karaoke performance of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” in front of a mostly Black audience that included his biracial girlfriend; or uneasily standing by as his fellow high school football players racially razzed a Black teammate. 

Reparations are “a cycle, not a journey with an end point,” writes the Rev. Peter Jarrett-Schell, author of “Reparations: A Plan for Churches.” He chaired the Reparations Task Force of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, which produced a resolution of apology, repentance, and commitment to reparation this year.

Advocates have various approaches, but all start with education that answers what Mr. Jarrett-Schell calls “the moves people make”: such assertions as “slavery was not that bad, ... it’s the past and doesn’t pertain to us, ... we didn’t participate, ... it’s undoable ... with too many sticky questions involved [such as] to whom is it owed?”

Perhaps nowhere is the gut-wrenching recognition of harms done more transformational for individual white people than in church communities, where it’s not uncommon to uncover forgotten racist histories. One Baltimore-area white Episcopal church had to face the fact that in 1932, it took the proceeds from the eminent domain takeover of its sister Black church nearby and used the funds to pay off its own debt. That left the penniless Black church congregation to scatter with no invitation to join the other.

The humbling recognition of such harms, says Mr. Jarrett-Schell, suggests repayment is “necessary but insufficient.”

The Rev. Grey Maggiano, rector of Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore, says he watched individual “changes of heart” in his congregation as it moved last year to devote $50,000, or 10% of its endowment, to reparations. That was a response to the acknowledgment that one of Memorial’s founding directors funded the church while enjoying the profits of work by 400 people he enslaved, including ancestors of a current deacon. 

“I know it’s tough to acknowledge some of this history,” explains Dr. Woolf, in Evanston, “but we can get past the initial sort of anger at being challenged by it; then we have an immense opportunity for white members to have a redemption arc, to be able to talk frankly about race in a way that can be useful.”   

Finding the right fit

One of the biggest hurdles in his own reparation conversion, says Mr. Yednock, is “how you get over the narrative that reparations will negatively impact white people.” Further, the no-strings-attached philosophy that most reparations programs embrace was counter to his basic business intuition.

“You want to be sure there’s accountability,” he says, “[but] is that a natural thing or is that controlling, white-supremacist patronizing, [even if] the intent is not racist? I had to get over the desire for directing the payments.”

Ultimately, the Justice League of Greater Lansing’s reparations structure was a comfortable fit for him, with its endowment fund managed by an all-Black advisory council that will direct money to support education scholarships, homeownership programs, and business startups.

“I have close friends who don’t agree with me on this. They get why I’m doing it, but they say, ‘You’re a white guy with no connection to the Black community.’”

Building a genuine connection between Black and white communities, he and many reparations supporters say, is the insurance against the pay-to-make-this-go-away gesture. 

Mr. Yednock hopes Americans, at heart, are better than that. 

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

Kim Howard made her way to the Barbados National Archive last month in search of family history – and answers. Delicately paging through fragile tomes in the sparsely decorated, coral-stone former sanitarium, she found herself face to face with a document naming her enslaved great-great-great-grandfather: Cato, 5. 

The record was from 1796, so Cato would have been about 9 years old, says the marketing professional, who remembers wondering why it had him listed as 5. 

Then it hit her: “This 9-year-old, my relative, was valued at £5,” she says. 

The West Indies were home to hundreds of years of a brutal system of enslaved labor, which funded the European Industrial Revolution and much of its subsequent wealth and development. More than 65% of enslaved Africans in the Americas worked on plantations in the Caribbean. Referred to as “Little England,” tiny Barbados was one of the most valuable British colonies, where it enslaved an estimated half-million people who were used to plant, grow, cut, and process sugar cane – white gold. It “perfected” reliance on slave labor for plantation crops by instituting one of the first slave labor codes, a legal framework England exported to its colonies, including the United States.

Nearly 200 years since emancipation and 60 since independence from England, Barbados has emerged as a leading voice for reparations for slavery. Activists and academics feel their work has finally gained traction: This year alone, the Church of England and University of Glasgow issued formal apologies and pledged monetary reparations for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. Descendants of those who profited from enslavement are advocating governmental reparations and setting an example for making individual amends. One family publicly apologized and pledged £100,000 – about $125,000 – to nearby Grenada in February. And since Barbados’ move to become a republic in 2021, no longer recognizing the British monarchy as symbolic head of state, there’s renewed pressure on the crown to take a formal stand. At the ceremony in Barbados, then-Prince Charles became the first of the royal family to formally lament the “appalling atrocity of slavery.”

Still, the reparations conversation doesn’t come easily for many Barbadians.

“I feel torn and mixed up,” says Ms. Howard, who moderates a Barbadian genealogy Facebook group. “Was there an injustice done? Absolutely. Do we have examples in history where people wrongly done by got reparations? Yes.

“My question is, what would it look like?” she adds. 

Unlike in the U.S., where discussions trip over putting a price tag on what’s owed to individuals, the emphasis here is on the communal. As part of the Caribbean Community, a 15-state organization, Barbados has called for a “full and formal apology” from European governments. And it’s put the monetary emphasis on investments that would benefit the entire, majority-Black population, regardless of an individual’s links to enslaved people or enslavers. That includes areas from public health and education to technology and infrastructure. The approach says much about the structures of inequality and racism that endure.

“Our story is the story of resistance,” says David Comissiong, Barbados’ ambassador to the Caribbean Community and deputy chair of the regional reparations task force. “We’ve done tremendous things with what little was left to us. But at the same time, because of that history, that hundreds of years of looting and plundering of resources, there are material gaps in our state of physical development that need to be corrected. 

“This is the era of reparations,” he adds.

Whitney Eulich

Thick sugar cane sways in a field in St. Philip Parish, Barbados. It is the “white gold” crop in which more than a half-million enslaved Africans were brought to toil during the colonial era.

Meaningful connections

Barbados has made a name for itself, creating a national reparations task force in 2012 and participating in the Caribbean Community’s groundbreaking 2014 reparations plan. It landed in the international spotlight recently for calls targeting wealthy Britons for individual reparations – like movie star Benedict Cumberbatch and conservative member of Parliament Richard Drax, whose family still runs its 17th-century plantation here. 

Reparations are millennia old, created as a way of ending conflict between clans by paying blood money, says Luke Moffett, an expert on reparations and human rights law at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “It was a way of settling the past and not letting it fester.” 

In the modern context, reparations are largely political. When the public does get directly involved, it can carry its own form of healing, says Dr. Moffett: “Citizen involvement can help chart a way forward rather than being burdened with the past.” 

In Barbados you don’t have to look far to see structural injustices carried forward since slavery – from an overstretched public health system to the changing climate that’s brought longer hurricane seasons and sargassum seaweed. Officials here directly link these repercussions of global warming to actions of industrialized nations, like former colonizers. 

While governments chip away at calls for reparations from Europe, “we as individuals can seek self-reparations – through genealogy and the reconstitution of families, reconnecting with our history, repairing trauma,” says Pedro Welch, a historian. He built a home on the sliver of land miraculously purchased and passed down by his formerly enslaved great-great-great-grandfather, John Thomas Brewster. Dr. Welch gestures to a mammee apple tree that he suspects could have been there since Brewster’s first taste of freedom. 

On a recent, breezy evening, a pounding African-drum beat seeps out of the Haynesville Youth Club rehearsal space where young girls stand three lines deep. Their dance instructor calls out, “Tell yourself, ‘I am important. I have purpose.’” 

The girls understand: They tuck their bottoms, push back their shoulders, and stand tall in first position. “You can’t fake it. You have to believe it,” he continues, calling on the group to move into second position while young boys sit along the wall banging out the unconventional ballet soundtrack.

Whitney Eulich

Tyron Trotman uses traditional Afro-Caribbean rhythms to connect his young dance students with their cultural heritage at the Haynesville Youth Club.

These are all lessons meant to go far beyond biweekly classes, addressing negative stereotypes that persist around African culture and descendance, particularly in low-income zones, like this one. This community center used to be a police outpost, with a bird’s-eye view to surveil the community of candybox-colored single-family homes.  

“The legacy of the Barbadian people is that of our ancestors. The very fact that, with all they were facing, they fought back, stood up and resisted slavery and all the horrors: They were resilient people,” says Rodney Grant, a member of Barbados’ reparations task force. “These were some of the things they passed on to us – the people who then, when they were free to form a government, even though still under colonial rule, did so with pure resilience. It was the same energy to fight back, create something from nothing.”

The youth club and other grassroots groups on the island work to empower and unite communities through academics, entrepreneurship, culture, and the arts. 

“Using arts, sports, and culture as a means to transform society is another way of emancipating people. This is a form of repair,” says Sophia Greaves-Broome, CEO of the Pinelands Creative Workshop, a community-development organization. “[Local] reparations are already underway.”

Damian, the father of one of the young dancers, waits outside. He wants his daughter to feel proud of where she comes from. “Information is passed down through culture. Whether it’s drumming or dance, there are always traces of slavery in that,” he says, asking that his last name not be used. 

He firmly favors reparations. But he works in the service industry and fears that his mostly white clients could be offended by the idea. “I don’t know how whites think about reparations,” he says, though he acknowledges the term is better understood here now than even a decade ago. 

Barbados is 96% Black or multiracial; 2.7% of the population identifies as white.

Giving a history of Barbados to a group of Black and white foreigners on a recent morning, a tour guide in downtown Bridgetown said that “she wanted to be sure to mention” it wasn’t just Europeans participating in the slave trade, but Africans as well. “I don’t want to offend anyone,” she later explained. “[Reparation] sounds nice, but we’re so [racially] mixed on the island, I don’t see how it would be fair.”

For Justin Went, a young Black businessperson, slavery ended too long ago to keep bringing it up and asking people “who had nothing to do with it” to repent. 

“Blacks built Barbados,” says Kazziah, a school monitor who declined to give her last name. “But today I think we’re too busy trying to make ends meet to really think much about getting reparations for what was taken,” she says, sipping spiced sorrel at a sunset picnic.

Whitney Eulich

Historian Pedro Welch built this home on a piece of land inherited from his great-great-great-grandfather John Thomas Brewster, who was enslaved in Barbados.

Making the “ask” mainstream  

Part of the work of Barbados’ reparations committee is to make the topic more familiar and mainstream. It’s a work in progress, say members of the committee, past and present. But even before the town hall meetings, TV specials, and social media campaigns, there was the need to talk more openly about the history of slavery itself.

“Discussing the past means we remember what happened to our people,” says Dr. Welch, a previous chair of Barbados’ reparations task force. “There was a time when our people were considered inferior, and some of our older Barbadians aren’t too interested in bringing up that past.” 

As a British colony, Barbados created the first slave laws, which codified violence against enslaved people, defining them as chattel property. Slavery legally ended in British colonies in 1834, but an “apprenticeship” program, which said enslaved people had to learn to be free citizens, meant they weren’t fully emancipated until 1838. Structural limitations persisted, universal suffrage wasn’t introduced until 1950, and it wasn’t until 1980 that renters on plantation outskirts were able to purchase land.

Following emancipation, Britain raised funds to pay enslavers for their “lost property” (freed slaves), a tab of billions of pounds in today’s currency, which the British government only finished paying in 2015. 

“You don’t have to look very hard to see we are only recently emerging from the shadows of the enslavement period,” Dr. Welch, the historian, says.

On a sweltering afternoon, historian Kevin Farmer dribbles rum on the sacred grounds of the Newton burial site, paying respects to 600 enslaved Barbadians interred here. A sun-crisped, grass hill near Bridgetown, it’s the only slave burial site discovered in Barbados. Experts have identified family plots and individuals interred with personal objects, like jewelry and earthenware that pin personal details to a population deliberately stripped of its humanity. 

“It’s allowed us to knit back together some of the understanding and intimacy slavery erased,” says Mr. Farmer, deputy director of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society. “To know where we’re going, we need to understand the past.” 

How slavery is taught in schools has changed dramatically, moving away from the narrative of European “discovery” and cash crops to one that includes chronicles of local slave rebellions and resistance. The increased awareness has led to tangible shifts, like the removal of a statue of Lord Horatio Nelson in 2020, which stood in Bridgetown’s National Heroes Square for two centuries. He was a pro-slavery British war hero. 

A new monument designed to take its place celebrates the breaking of slavery’s shackles, reunification of families after emancipation, and national heroes who represent Barbadian resilience and resistance. 

Hugh Holder and Vincent Jones – designers of the new work – hope the project sparks conversations. 

“We want every Barbadian to see themselves in the monument. But like any country, Barbados is constantly changing,” says Mr. Jones. “There were generations of people who put up with the Nelson statue and didn’t see anything wrong with it.” 

Starting a bigger process 

At dusk on a recent Friday, Ms. Howard cautiously walks a gravel road on the Chapel Plantation, part of present-day Carrington Estates Ltd. Thanks to historical documents, she knows her great-great-great-grandfather Cato toiled here when he was 9 years old. When she thinks about her enslaved relatives like Cato, she doesn’t let her mind wander too far into how they suffered. That part’s a given.

“Was he a nice man? Was he kind to his wife and kids?” she asks. “I don’t have the answers to those questions. What did he look like?”

Identifying ancestors and piecing together their stories has made her more aware of the possibility of reparations. A genuine apology for enslavement would be a start, but investment is important, too, she says: “It could go toward another university or funding for a series of schools, or simply a way to provide better training for teachers. 

“It would be a good, just way to help everyone.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

When Doug George-Kanentiio was taken from his people’s native land in the 1960s at age 11, he was sent to a residential school in Brantford, Ontario. 

Marjorie Kaniehtonkie Skidders’ mother was taken from the same territory in the 1930s when she was just 8, but she was sent to an institution south of the border instead: the Thomas Indian School in New York.

Today, Mr. George-Kanetiio and Ms. Skidders work on the committee for Akwesasne Mohawk residential school survivors, as chairperson and a board member respectively, to identify which Akwesasne Mohawk children never returned home because they died in such schools.

Their work spans the modern U.S.-Canada border just like the Indigenous territory itself, situated along the St. Lawrence River in parts of New York, Ontario, and Quebec. But they face two historical perpetrators that are in very different stages of acknowledgment and apology.

While Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the residential school system in 2008, the United States has never done so publicly. It has only recently begun a thorough examination of the harms wrought by forced assimilation of Native Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Some people don’t put any weight on an apology, but I do,” says Ms. Skidders.

Like many here, she doesn’t distinguish between Canada and the U.S. She says her identity is Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk), and she doesn’t think either government has come close to any kind of true reparation for Indigenous peoples. For many, reparations dictated by governments, without justice for those wronged and their heirs, are of limited value. “But you need to acknowledge what has happened here, the trauma that has so severely affected a whole generation of people, and also the next generation that came after them.”

Riley Robinson/Staff

Doug George-Kanentiio, a residential school survivor, today advocates for the repatriation of remains found at residential schools.

The U.S. government has officially apologized to Native people in the country, but almost no one is aware of it.

That’s because instead of being read at the time it was issued in 2010, the statement sits as an amendment to a Department of Defense budget bill, between an appropriation to counter drug trafficking and a section about agency reporting requirements.

The apology came out of a prayer meeting in 1996 between then-Sen. Sam Brownback and Negiel Bigpond. The Kansas Republican, descended from homesteaders who settled on lands promised to tribes in federal treaties, met the member of the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma, who is a boarding school survivor. After praying over the Bible and a book of the 370-plus treaties – many broken – between tribes and the U.S., they agreed that an official apology was needed.

“We’ve got obvious racial divisions,” Mr. Brownback says. “You’re [not] going to see healing and racial reconciliation without an acknowledgment of past wrongs, and an asking of forgiveness.”

But his efforts to pass an official apology through Congress failed for years. So in 2010, in a classic Washington move, it was tucked inside a larger bill that Congress would eventually pass. But the apology has never been publicly read by a U.S. president.

The country’s hesitation to apologize stems from questions of liability, guilt, and simple unknowing. Robert Miller, a professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, says that many Americans genuinely ask themselves why they are responsible for what happened 200 years ago, from the stealing of Native lands to forced schooling. “We don’t really want to know what happened in the past,” he says.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Two pairs of geese and their goslings float on the St. Lawrence River, May 17, 2023, in Akwesasne.

Yet an apology now to Native Americans, says Mr. Bigpond, would “heal this land, and the people, and change the nation.”

Mohawk territory once spanned over 9 million acres across New York up to Montreal. Today Akwesasne, which means “Land Where the Partridge Drums,” counts only some 27,000 acres on both sides of the border. 

Amid the loss of territory and the suppression of culture, the limits of apology are clear to many Akwesasne Mohawks. 

For Mr. George-Kanentiio, Mr. Harper’s words were practically meaningless. Mr. George-Kanentiio stands along the St. Lawrence River, where he spent summers as a boy swimming and fishing before he was taken away. His mother died when he was 10 and his father couldn’t care for 12 children, so Mr. George-Kanentiio was sent to the Mohawk Institute Residential School, originally operated by the Anglican Church.

“It wasn’t a school in the Canadian sense in that you were praised,” he says. 

Instead he, like all the children, was assigned a number: 4-8-2-738. He experienced mental and physical abuse from the start – a common experience across more than 130 residential schools that operated in Canada, where children were forbidden from speaking their native languages or practicing their spiritual beliefs.

“The first act is kidnapping. And then it’s alienation, separation. And then that builds up in the child,” Mr. George-Kanentiio says. “You feel resentment and anger towards your family and towards the community, because they failed to come to your aid when you were there.”

Canada’s residential school system was established in the 19th century as a network of government-sponsored religious schools, the majority of them Roman Catholic, aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society. But according to the 2015 findings of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it amounted to “cultural genocide.” An estimated 150,000 children from three Indigenous groups in Canada – First Nations, Inuit, and Métis – were removed from their homes. The last school did not close down until 1996.

Carlos Osorio/Reuters/File

Shoes and toys sit on the steps of the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Ontario, Nov. 9, 2021.

“An apology without an absolutely unqualified commitment to justice to me doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. George-Kanentiio says. Instead, he is channeling his work into the Akwesasne residential school survivors committee, formed a year ago, to find any graves where students were buried. “Getting the kids home, that’s our overwhelming priority.” 

An apology is also seen as just another colonial imposition, where the federal governments set the terms, says Waylon Cook, an Akwesasne Mohawk who works for the Akwesasne Freedom School. “The damage is done. Whatever they do, it’s too late.” Instead, he sees the solution in initiatives like the Freedom School, an elementary school that teaches Mohawk language and culture.

For Mr. Brownback, however, all forward movement must start with the apology. “[Apologies] really only begin the process,” he says. “You can’t get to [reconciliation] without doing this.”

Upon becoming governor of Kansas in 2011, he apologized “on behalf of the people of Kansas to all Native peoples” for the violence, maltreatment, deception, and neglect inflicted on them. Nearly 30 tribes were forcibly relocated to the area in the 1830s, according to the Kansas Historical Society, and after another round of forced relocation decades later, there are now only four tribes remaining in the state. 

Those relocations, like Native boarding schools and other historical injustices, were engineered by the U.S. government, not states. The U.S. government is only just beginning a reconciliation process. In 2021 the Department of the Interior announced an initiative to investigate the legacy of federal American Indian boarding schools. The Native American Boarding School Coalition, an advocacy group, had been conducting its own investigations of U.S. boarding schools since 2012. Drawing on official records and firsthand accounts from survivors, the coalition reported that 83% of Native children were in boarding schools in 1926, with the schools “directly responsible” for physical and sexual abuse as well as loss of tribal culture.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Waylon Cook stands in front of a quilt block-pattern mural painted by his sister at the Akwesasne Freedom School.

While the DOI initiative is seen as “an important first step,” the coalition wants a congressional probe into U.S. boarding schools too.

“As we have seen in Canada, the truth will eventually emerge about what is buried on Indian boarding school grounds,” it adds. “A Congressional Commission will help ensure that accounts of Indian boarding schools – told by survivors, families, and presently undisclosed records – are preserved.”

Demands for reparations for Indigenous peoples take many shapes, ranging from acknowledgment and apology, to cultural revitalization, to financial compensation, to what’s called the “land back” movement to reestablish Indigenous sovereignty.  

Canada has framed justice for Indigenous peoples around “Reconciliation,” including “94 calls to action,” or demands for policy change, issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In January, the federal government and 325 First Nations agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit for the loss of language and culture due to residential schools for $2.8 billion (Canadian; U.S.$2.08 billion).

In the U.S., more focus has also been placed on justice for Native Americans in the past decade. But it is the land that is seen as the key reparation for many Indigenous peoples. That demand ties directly to the residential schooling system, argues Taiaiake Alfred, a Kanien’kehaka author who wrote the upcoming book “It’s All About the Land.” 

“If from the beginning you cap this process at an apology, or individual compensation, even if that includes some very worthy projects on healing and counseling and trauma, you’re still dealing with it only at the individual level,” says Dr. Alfred, who received C$10,000 for being an Indian Day School survivor. “The initial driving force for residential schools was to remove the coming generations of Indian people from their land so that it could be used by industry or settlers. And so it’s always about the land.”

Riley Robinson/Staff

Doug George-Kanentiio (left) chats with Marjorie Kaniehtonkie Skidders while she pours coffee in the Indian Time newspaper office, May 18, 2023, in Akwesasne.

Two years ago, the suspected unmarked graves of 215 children discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, marked a pivot point for both individuals and nations.

“It brought everything to the head,” says Ms. Skidders, who knew her mother went to a residential school, but only then set out to learn the details. “It was in my head all the time and you just ... you can’t figure out what it is. And as horrible as it was, it helped to explain who we are and what we’ve gone through and where we are right now.”

The news of unmarked graves in Canada also spurred the U.S. to action. A month later, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, launched the DOI initiative. 

The first report from the investigation, released last year, details over 400 boarding schools the government operated, including “at least 53 burial sites,” which had the goal of cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession of Native people. The report is “only a first step,” its authors write, but it “can help begin a healing process ... from the Alaskan tundra to the Florida [E]verglades, and everywhere in between.”

One person pushing for an apology in the U.S., one that acknowledges guilt and punishment, is Mr. George-Kanentiio. He hopes the U.S. will go further than Canada, providing transparent access to records that helps paint a full picture of accountability. “The president issues an apology – and a commitment to justice. That’s what [former Prime Minister] Harper did not do,” he says. “No one ever asked us, what do you want? What would help your healing? ... I believe Joe Biden will do it.” 

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

REUTERS

Ukrainian servicemen unload aid for local residents June 12 after the Nova Kakhovka dam was breached near Kherson, Ukraine.

Many famous Russians living in exile and who are opposed to the war in Ukraine have begun to connect with each other, says Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the hit novel “Metro 2033.” “The tragedy that we are now experiencing together is drawing us closer,” he told Worldcrunch news. “We are helping each other with moving abroad, with surviving.”

Some are also preparing a new identity for a postwar Russia without Vladimir Putin in power. “We have the feeling that we must create an alternative ... to what Putin is doing with our country,” says Mr. Glukhovsky.

Inside Russia, where few people go beyond official propaganda for news, such introspection may be rare. Yet the self-reflection seen among exiled Russians is exactly what leaders in Ukraine and the West are counting on inside Russia – once Ukraine claims victory.

“Future co-existence based on sustainable peace is impossible without a change in the public consciousness of Russians,” states a manifesto of Ukrainian activists issued in March. “The Ukrainian victory will not be complete unless there is an internal transformation of Russia.”

To help drive the process of repentance and reform in postwar Russia, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution in November holding Russia liable for the costs of Ukraine’s reconstruction. Then in May, more than 40 states in the Council of Europe set up a registry in The Hague to record all the damages that Russia has caused Ukraine.

The ultimate goal of such steps: obtain reparations from a postwar Russian government or from Russian assets frozen in Western financial accounts after the invasion. The latter amount is estimated at $300 billion to $500 billion.

While Ukraine certainly needs money to repair its society, reparations would also send a signal of accountability to Russians, forcing them to remedy the harm done and encouraging them to end a history of Russia invading its neighbors.

“Reparations perform a political function, by providing a medium for wrongdoers to rehabilitate their image and standing, reintegrating them into society or the international community,” writes Luke Moffett, an expert on reparations at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “In the end, reparations are a way to secure balance between warring parties, to settle their grievances and find a new way to move forward.”

The end of the war is far off, as are reparations from Russia. Yet at least some Russian artists and dissidents in exile are starting the repair work needed for their country’s atonement. If or when Russia must pay for Ukraine’s repair, perhaps more Russians will do the same.