Op-Ed: Reparative Justice for DC: Why Reparations are Due and How to Pay for Them
By Sarah Jane Shoenfeld
The following is an op-ed by Sarah Jane Shoenfeld, the cofounder of Mapping Segregation in Washington, DC, a public history project.
More than 125 people signed up to testify at last month’s D.C. Council hearing on reparations.[1] Introduced by council member Kenyan McDuffie (I-At Large), the bill would create a reparations fund for Black District residents and a task force to determine who is eligible, how much they should receive, and what form reparations should take. It calls for redressing 400 years of slavery as well as “discrimination…from the end of the Civil War to the present.” Federal and state laws, redlining, underfunding of schools, and “predatory financial practices” are listed as examples of historic wrongs for which reparations are owed. Indeed, racist housing policies implemented long after slavery ended here in 1862 are a primary driver of today’s vast racial wealth gap.
I testified for McDuffie’s bill as a public historian who has spent much of the past decade documenting segregation and the serial displacement of Black DC residents over the course of the 20th century. Mapping Segregation in Washington DC, the project I cofounded in 2014, has become a standard reference for showing the widespread use of racial deed covenants, which once covered much of the city and were upheld by the courts until 1948. A resource for policymakers, activists, and educators across the city and beyond, the project has notably gained traction with ANCs and civic associations west of Rock Creek Park and has helped build a case for reparations.
Racial covenants barred Black citizens from purchasing property, a primary means by which Americans accumulate wealth. They were used by real estate developers who, along with all-white citizens associations, exercised enormous influence in a city that lacked an elected government until 1975.
Racial covenants signaled to potential homebuyers that the value of their property would not be threatened by the “infiltration” of nonwhite people. In other words, they embedded race into the value of housing and whole neighborhoods, and were therefore recommended by the Federal Housing Administration as a criterion for underwriting mortgages. Nationwide, only 2% of federal mortgage loans went to black homebuyers.
By artificially enhancing the value of areas where only white-identified people lived, covenants contributed to the taking of Black land by eminent domain for the development of white-only neighborhoods, parks and schools. At Meridian Hill, nearly 40 black families were required to sell their homes to the Department of Interior for the creation of what we now know as Malcolm X Park, beginning in 1911. As intended, the park became a central feature of an elite residential enclave that would become blanketed with racial covenants.
In Chevy Chase, eminent domain was used in 1928 to displace a community of families who had been there since 1840 for a whites-only school and recreation space. Again, racial covenants proliferated, barring Black occupancy in a beautiful and amenity-rich section of the city near Rock Creek Park.
Nearby at Fort Reno, a growing Black community of almost 400 residents lost their homes in the 1930s for the development of a park and schools to serve another new white subdivision. By the time Black children were allowed to attend these schools following their court-mandated integration, most had to travel long distances to get to them. The Ruppert Real Estate firm evicted the last remaining members of the community from their Tenleytown homes in 1973. In Brookland, Black homeowners refused to sell their homes in 1945 for the construction of the Lucy Diggs Slowe Elementary School. As in previous cases, landowners fought to be paid fairly for their property, but were forced to accept what was offered and their houses were demolished. Homeowners in Southwest DC were among the thousands of mostly Black residents displaced by eminent domain for urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s. As recently as 1963, Black homes that backed up to Fort Slocum Park were taken for Rabaut Junior High (now Capital City Public Charter School) at Kansas Avenue and Blair Road NW. Houses there are now valued between $600,000 and $1.5 million.
The devaluation of places where Black people resided also led to the taking of large lots in Southeast DC’s Barry Farm, where families who had been there for generations were displaced in 1941 for public housing. Nearby, another public housing project replaced at least 80 people living on land purchased by an ancestor who had bought his family out of slavery in 1813. In 1943, six hundred people were displaced for Suitland Parkway with just 20 days notice. As the outcome of housing policies implemented long after slavery ended, these events are examples of the myriad injustices for which reparations are due.
The losses of the last three decades have also been considerable. Increasing numbers of Black Washingtonians experience poverty and homelessness and must live in segregated neighborhoods with limited access to basic amenities like grocery stores. Continued over-investment in policing and punishment has extracted wealth and resources from already vulnerable communities, while also inflicting violence, psychological harm and generational trauma. Taxpayer-subsidized real estate projects have redeveloped areas like Shaw and H Street NE, where nearly 100% of residents were Black, into wealthy and whiter neighborhoods where property taxes have soared. While some have argued that longtime Black homeowners have been able to cash in on DC’s lucrative real estate market, the devaluation of their houses means that Black sellers have been paid far less than they should have been. This is why, as of 2014, DC’s Petworth neighborhood was the most profitable place in the U.S. to flip a house. And this is why even the descendants of families who owned homes can no longer afford to live in the city and many have been saddled with debt.[2] As of 2021, a third of all houses sold in a 91% Black section of Ward 7 were purchased by investors seeking to profit from rising values as gentrification pushes east of the Anacostia River. All of this is essential context for understanding why providing reparations in the form of subsidized homeownership, as is being done in Evanston, Illinois, may do little to restore Black wealth.
McDuffie’s bill proposes to support reparations with sales tax and with revenue generated by the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. However, as brought to national attention by the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2015 Ferguson report and confirmed locally in 2021 by the DC Police Reform Commission, fines and fees disproportionately impact Black people and contribute to their over-incarceration. In addition, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities cites sales tax as a creation of racist lawmakers in states with large Black populations, noting that Mississippi was the first to adopt a such a tax in 1932. In DC, sales tax was codified in 1949 when our 35% Black city was controlled by white federal appointees and Congressional committees rather than elected leaders. This is because Congress had stripped our increasingly Black city of the right to self-governance in 1874 and barred home rule for an entire century, including nearly two decades after we gained a Black majority in 1957.
I would urge that for funding reparations, we look to the 1,500 District taxpayers who hold 46% of the District’s wealth, as reported in a recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Together these households control at least $45 billion. Establishing a reparations tax that hits these residents the most, but that is also paid at a graduated rate by all who possess more than than their proportionate share of the the city’s wealth, would directly address the racial wealth gap, a fundamental legacy of slavery and its aftermath. Rather than evenly distributing the burden of paying reparations, such a program would hold accountable those who have most benefited from policies that have enriched white Americans at the expense of Black citizens; certainly if we can pinpoint who is owed reparations, we can define who is responsible for paying them. While this may saddle wealthy Black residents with the burden of paying a reparations tax, they may also be eligible to receive reparations based on race or genealogy, in accordance with standards established by the task force to be created. Many have argued against obligating anyone to pay reparations, since none of us are responsible for the sins of our ancestors, but this seems akin to knowingly acquiring property that was stolen from someone else and refusing ever to compensate the former owner, even after the property has greatly increased in value. A truly reparative response to the racial and economic injustice embedded into the history of our nation and our city should address not only what is owed to Black Americans, but also demand something from those who have inherited their stolen wealth.
[1] Bill no. B25–0152, “Reparations Foundation Fund and Task Force Establishment Act of 2023”Committee on Business and Economic Development, June 15, 2023. See public hearing notice for a link to bill and a video feed of the hearing. A witness list is also available.
[2] See also Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of the award-winning 2019 book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, excerpted in “Against Black Homeownership” in Boston Review, Nov. 18, 2019, at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/keeanga-yamahtta-taylor-keeanga-excerpt.
