The Illinois city has become the first to compensate black Americans for historic wrongs, and it is not only Republicans who oppose the scheme, writes Will Pavia
The first time Louis Weathers heard the idea of reparations for black Americans, he did not take it seriously. “We were supposed to get forty acres and a mule,” he said. “I thought it was a joke.”
Forty acres and a mule was the promise made by General William Sherman in 1865 to the generation freed by the Civil War from slavery. It was not fulfilled.
Weathers is old enough to have known a member of that generation in his own family. “My great-grandfather was enslaved,” he said. He met the man, as a child. Still, he thought the idea of reparations was fanciful, even as it gained broader support on the left and became part of the fraught conversation about race in the United States.
Please remember to donate to Blazingcatfur’s fundraiser.
