On Tuesday, April 30, The Community Foundation is hosting the 2024 Health Equity Summit - With Equity & Economic Justice For All at Riverside Church. Click here to Register!
Editor’s Note: In this guest post, Dr. Marla Dean, Senior Director of the Health Equity Fund shares her point of view on what health equity for all means to her and why it’s important for funders and community partners to come together on this issue.
As a Detroit native, I am proud that my late Congressman John Conyers (D-Detroit) introduced a reparations bill into Congress every year since 1989. He did this for nearly 30 years until he retired from Congress. Many towns, and even a state or two, have reparation taskforces. A very few have distributed some form of reparations to the descendants of those who were enslaved, faced Jim Crow, and suffered under de facto segregation. The point is the call for reparations ain’t new.
I have always had a marginal relationship with the call for reparations. I have never spoken against them, but I have also thought they would never happen in my lifetime. Completely understanding that reparations are the only true remedy to make my people whole, I thought of reparations like my 98-year-old grandmother thought of a Black president: it could never happen in her lifetime. But it did.
So, I kept my eye on reparations, while preferring to work on issues that seemed closer in proximity and had a greater probability of being solved like poverty, racism, and sexism. And as I watched from my side eye, the movement gained momentum. I even had the audacity to attend a symposium co-hosted by Harvard Public Health Magazine and Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights titled, Can Reparations Close the Racial Health Gap? There I learned that if African Americans had the same health outcomes as our white peers there would literally be 8 million more African Americans alive today in these United States of America. This is when and where I decided that reparations were a matter of life and death, and I would no longer have a marginal relationship with the call for them.
Then, I learned that white DC slaveowners were the only class of people to receive reparations from the federal government for slavery through The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. President Lincoln signed the bill into law on April 16, freeing enslaved people in the District and compensating owners up to $300 for each freed person. This act maintained the wealth of the slaveholders and left all the formerly enslaved barren except for a few.
One such man was Gabriel Coakley. Coakley, a former slave, was able to purchase his family from their white slaveholders. And because he technically owned them at the time of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, he was one of the rare Black people who received reparations. From his “windfall of riches,” he was able to set his family on a path to intergenerational wealth that holds until today.
Imagine if all the formerly enslaved had the same opportunity that Coakley did. What would be our collective lot today? Would there be an 81:1 racial wealth gap? Would there be 8 million more African American souls walking around this country? Would our health outcomes mirror those of our white peers? Would we all be free from the shackles of oppression? The opportunities and possibilities are endless.
That is why it’s all the more important for us to accelerate the push for reparations. Because our pursuit for liberation for all can only be realized when we all are free, and reparations have been made and paid.
For more on the story of Gabriel Coakley, listen to MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee’s Podcast: “Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations.” 22 February 2024, MSNBC.com. https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/uncounted-millions-take-s-owed-rcna139059