Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past

by Dorothy A. Brown

A bold manifesto arguing that there is a clear precedent for paying reparations to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, offering a compelling legal strategy to achieve this goal—from the acclaimed author of The Whiteness of Wealth.

The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history.

When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 went into effect, wealthy slaveowners like Margaret Barber were compensated for the loss of their enslaved workers. Barber received $9,000—an equivalent to $250,000 today. When a group of Italian immigrants were lynched in 1892, President Harrison compensated Italy a total of $25,000 for their deaths—an equivalent to almost $766,000 today. The Indian Claims Commission, an arm of the federal government, paid Indigenous Americans $818 million for underhandedly stealing their land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—an equivalent to almost $350 billion today.

Dorothy A. Brown addresses the glaring if reparations can be achieved for others, why not for Black Americans? If lynching can be remedied for Italian immigrants, and slaveholders compensated for losses associated with abolition and emancipation, then the government’s failure to provide such remedies to Black communities harmed by similar violence, loss, and destruction is long overdue. The fight for reparations is truly a fight for the soul of America, to produce the country our founding fathers idealized but never achieved.

Getting to Reparations makes a logical and necessary case for reparations for Black Americans. It lays out a path as to how we might achieve this, built on the frameworks used throughout U.S. history by the government to pay restitution. It is now time to do the same for America's Black population.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Race, Social Justice, Historical

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2026

Reviews

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Getting to Reparations approaches the issue of reparations by first presenting four instances in history when the United States paid cash compensation to nonblack people for unjust harms similar to those experienced by black people. These four examples included; (1) Reparation payments to enslavers in Washington, DC, (2) Payments to families of Italian workers lynched in Louisiana, (3) Payments to native Americans under the Indian Claims Act, and (4) Payments to Japanese-Americans interned during WWII.

Then in Part II the book catalogs the harms experienced by black people after chattel slavery ended. Examples include labor exploitation of sharecropping, convict leasing, sundown towns, lynching, Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” system, and the so-called War on Drugs and the school-to-prison pipeline. Also examined are the unfair distribution of loans and benefits from the GI and FHA home loan programs and the farm support programs.

Finally in Part III the book outlines the practical steps to getting reparations for black Americans. The author describes the results of some opposition research that she and her colleagues performed which showed that an average American focus group when informed of the history contained in Parts I and II of this book their sentiments shift towards being more positive toward the concept of reparations for African-Americans.

Based on these findings she makes the case for creating a commission, by executive order from the president, to collect evidence and testimonies, publicize its findings through a series of televised hearings, and finally issue recommendations, building public support along the way. The author assumes those recommendations would include reparations that are both monetary and systematic reforms.

Then the author responses to the most frequently heard objections, along with her legal argument for how reparations could be declared constitutional. She concludes by addressing a question, what happens after we get reparations for black Americans.

The following are excerpts from the book. This first excerpt is included because it refers to land in eastern Kansas which is where I live. (The first named owner on the title records of the property upon which my house is located is a Shawnee Chief.)

The Absentee Shawnee Tribe, for example, submitted a claim based on two treaties they had entered into with the United States—one in 1825 and one in 1831—for more than one million acres of land located in what is now eastern Kansas. But by the 1850s, the federal government had decided it wanted white Americans to resettle in the territory. Therefore, on March 3, 1853, Congress authorized the president to take the land back. The government proceeded to "negotiate" with the Shawnee Tribe through the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who began by telling the Shawnee that they had no choice but to sell. The final price "agreed" upon was $829,000. When their claim was brought before the commission under the 1946 claims act, officials agreed that the amount the Tribe had been paid could be considered "unconscionable" — a term defined by the court of claims as "so much less than the actual value of the property sold that the disparity shocks the conscience." In 1971 the commission awarded the Shawnee Tribe additional compensation of $300,000 (worth a little more than $2.3 million today) for two broken treaties and unconscionable contract terms.

It was a long time ago, so we forget where a lot of today’s wealth comes from. The Homestead Act of 1862 is the source of a lot of wealth which was not given to African Americans.

The Homestead Act, described as "the most comprehensive form of wealth redistribution that has ever taken place in America," has had a long afterlife. One estimate has it that 25 percent of the current adult population, or 46 million people, are the living legacy of ancestors who owned property because of the virtually whites-only Homestead Act of 1862. As noted by historian Kari Leigh Merritt, "these beneficiaries, of course, were overwhelmingly white." Merritt continues by noting that because black Americans were "largely denied these wealth entitlements, blacks were essentially left landless after years (and generations) of un-paid, coerced, and brutalized labor."

The history of denying FHA loans to blacks has denied generational wealth which continues to handicap their ability to obtain home loans now, many years later.

Our government's history of denying FHA-insured mortgages to black homeowners has led banks to target prospective black homeowners with high-interest subprime mortgages today. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, calls this "predatory inclusion." Because black Americans have been denied access to the housing market on the favorable terms that white Americans received, their inclusion has come at a cost. When they do get access, it is on unfavorable, high-risk terms that have the power to strip them of all the wealth they have built up.

It’s amazing to learn that not that long ago it was against the law for African Americans to stay overnight in more than half the towns in some states. They were known as sundown towns with sundown laws.

The historian and sociologist James Loewen estimates that more than half of all the cities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, among other regions, were sundown towns. …. Just as it did in the West and Midwest, racial discrimination followed black Americans to the North. Sundown towns proliferated there, too. In 1890 every county in the state of Maine, except for two, counted at least a dozen or so black residents. But by 1930, we see a different Maine. Five counties no longer had any black residents at all, while several other counties showed significant decreases in the black population. … There were also sundown suburbs in places like Darien, Connecticut, and Chevy Chase, Maryland, which was "one of our first sundown suburbs."

The blatant efforts to squash DEI initiatives and protect students (think white students) from racial discomfort caused by taught history are ironically providing current event examples of continuing racial repression which prompts the following comment by the author:

… the reelection of President Trump makes me optimistic that reparations can happen sooner rather than later.

[Shan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Crown Publishing for this ARC. Following is my honest review.

I haven't read in depth on reparations until this book. It starts with history of reparations for groups other than enslaved people. The author then makes a great case for why we should pursue reparations for descendants' slaves.

I enjoyed the history, talking points, and ideas. Now I need to mention a few things that bothered me.

At one point the author says, Trump as president can help get us to reparations faster. But then a couple pages later, they say an executive order is unlikely during a Republican presidency and especially during Trump. That's obviously a contradiction and didn't make sense.

Near the end, the author tallies up an amount and at a glance, the low end would be $20 trillion. That is currently half of the US debt. The author does address how we could come up with the money but I don't think many of them are realistically ever going to happen. I don't want to imply that I'm against reparations but my point is the author makes it sound easy to raise the funds.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of this book (Part 2) is a history of post-slavery Jim Crow discrimination that I've read more powerfully elsewhere. Part 3 is well argued but extremely lawyerly, like an open letter. Sections of it though, making the case for next steps, and Part 1, are my favorite sections of the book and are quite worth reading. I think it's more "Having Gotten to Reparations" than "Getting to Reparations," I doubt it will help anyone against Reparations change their mind, but it provides talking points and ammo for people already open to it.

[PamMJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bold and important message that needs to be heard at a time when our political leadership is trying to suppress anything that might make a white person “feel bad.” Part of this country’s difficulty with achieving racial equity and justice has been the fact that there’s never truly been any kind of reckoning for creating and sustaining a slave-based society that benefited whites and gravely disadvantaged blacks for hundreds of years.
Brown, in a very matter-of-fact way, lays out the history, effects and remedies for this. This book is not armchair reading: I see this book as more of a resource book for present and future leaders and activists who want to make reparations happen. The writing is rather dry but well-organized and full of resources and information and legal arguments to support the process, although she does make space as well on ways to articulate and frame the need for reparations to the larger (i.e., white, resistant) public so as to understand the legitimate need for it.
A good companion book to this one is “The Sum of Us,” by Heather McGhee, in which the author, an economist, lays out how harms to black Americans actually cause harms to all Americans.
I received a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway my thanks to the publisher and Goodreads.

[Jeremy Enfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Getting to Reparations is a timely, powerful, and intellectually substantial work. It paints a compelling case that the idea of reparations, far from being radical or fringe, is woven into American legal and social history. Brown offers both moral clarity and workable suggestions, making this book especially valuable for anyone interested in justice, public policy, racial equity, or reparations.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This builds a compelling legal and moral case for Black reparations by examining the extensive precedent of American compensatory payments throughout history. Brown's genius lies in her methodical documentation of how the U.S. government has consistently provided reparations to various groups throughout American history. Well, except for Black Americans.
Her examples are both powerful and damning: slaveowners compensated for losing their "property" during emancipation, Italian immigrants' families receiving compensation for lynching victims, and Indigenous Americans awarded millions through the Indian Claims Commission. These precedents demolish the argument that reparations are unprecedented or impossible.
The author's legal background shines through in her systematic approach to building the case. Her analysis of how previous compensatory programs were designed, funded, and implemented offers a practical roadmap that moves beyond theoretical discussions to actionable policy.
The book's strength lies in its logical progression and overwhelming evidence. Brown methodically builds her case, showing how each historical example strengthens the argument for Black reparations. Her framing of reparations as "a fight for the soul of America" elevates the discussion beyond policy details to fundamental questions about justice and national identity.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid argument for the historical precedence of reparations, however I felt it lacked a clear vision of a future plan. Part 3 was supposed to address this, but the main suggestion is a presidential order to create a committee which will then magically figure out all the details. I found it frustrating to read a book by someone who seems extremely well researched only to have them punt the ball to someone else. I understand this is a sprawling problem to solve, but I’d rather have a detailed plan for a sub-problem (what she would have addressed by a sub-committee) rather than one big “idk but we’ll figure it out”. She is never clear about whether she prefers structural changes (tax/prision reform) over cash payments. This distinction feels important to me because the approach to these two methods is vastly different. Overall a decent contribution to the argument for reparations, but I was frustrated by her unwillingness to commit to a specific approach.

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a book that's definitely long overdue...and the people in government should read this especially!

It's long overdue...this 'reparation' stuff for the Black community...since it's already been proven that it's feasible to do this...since we've already done this many times in the past...

Dorothy A. Brown has done an excellent job researching and writing this story...and it needs to be out there so action can be started...why this hasn't been done is anybodies guess...probably just politics...same ol' same ol'...

Highly Recommended!

[Susie Dumond · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ambitious yet clear-eyed argument for reparations, including a well-constructed plan for how we get there. This is a book that will absolutely change hearts and minds.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful and informative exploration of the topic. A must read for everyone.

[Ron Frampton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book on long reasons for reparation for groups of people that were unjustly treated

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting to Reparations is a timely primer for anyone to learn more about reparations. I really enjoyed Dorothy Brown's frankness and I found the section about the four day focus group, that became the bones of Getting to Reparations, very interesting. I definitely recommend picking up Getting to Reparations and her other book, The Whiteness of Wealth.

[LaQuetta Glaze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting to Reparations is an excellent breakdown of how to reconcile the past actions and move the future towards true justice for all. The author brings quantitative, qualitative, and historical context. The book addresses every criticism of reparations for black people and even provides a clear roadmap to execution. One of the criticisms identified was about direct payments to black families and the commentary was what if someone swindles them out of the funds? There’s a presumption there that is rooted in assumption and racism.

Overall, a good book and reference point for the case of reparations.