With a stroke of the governor’s pen this spring, Washington joined California, Colorado, New York and several cities that have allocated dollars to study the issue of reparations for descendants of slaves. Gov. Bob Ferguson signed off on spending $300,000 over the next two years to hire a researcher to delve into Washington’s history and its connection with the nation’s history of slavery.

The study will also examine state institutions and policies that over the decades may have caused harm to descendants of enslaved people, said state Rep. Chipalo Street, D-Seattle. He helped usher through the legislation along with Sen. Bob Hasegawa, D-Seattle.

Washington state’s forward step, despite its financial budget shortfall, says equity and inclusion still matter to Washingtonians, and that it’s never a wrong time to do the right thing.

The study

Unlike some reparations studies that focus on race, Washington’s study, called the Charles Mitchell and George Washington Bush Study on Reparative Action, will focus on granting repair to state descendants of chattel slavery. (Mitchell was born enslaved in 1847 in Maryland and as a young boy was gifted to a family headed to the Washington Territory. Bush, born in 1790, was a fur trapper and war veteran and considered one of the first Black settlers in the Washington Territory.)

“Wherever you are in the United States, the majority of Black people will have ties to U.S. chattel slavery,” said Davida Ingram, director of Seattle/King County African American Reparations Committee , who also was instrumental in getting the study approved.

But slavery impacted the entire nation, including building wealth and creating laws that kept Black people from opportunities and resources others had access to. That’s why other states and cities such as Asheville, N.C. , Evanston, Ill., and Tulsa, Okla. , are addressing the injustice now instead of ignoring it.

“I think it’s going to be a fascinating process,” said attorney and former state Rep. Jesse Wineberry, who co-founded Washington Equity Now Alliance which, along with the NAACP, helped develop the idea for the study. “This is not based on race. It’s based on lineage and ancestry. Chattel slavery provided labor uncompensated and they (slaves) were not able to pass on wealth to any of their heirs.”

Why reparations?

Many historians, academics, economists and researchers agree the economy many Americans enjoy today was set up on a foundation of hundreds of years of free labor.

America has been a slave-holding country for more years than it has not. The vestiges of 245 years of slavery, which led to 100 years of Black codes and Jim Crow laws, has produced disparities in health, education, wealth and political power for descendants of the 4 million people who were enslaved. The effects of government-sanctioned discrimination don’t disappear with the passing of laws. They linger.

Besides harmful policies and laws, nationally, the lack of generational wealth among Black Americans is one aspect researchers have argued in support of reparations. The production and export of cotton, tobacco and cane sugar created assets and wealth for families, insurance companies, textile mills, factories, banks and universities in the North and South. Black families could not reap the benefits of their labor, and had little if anything to pass to future generations. This contributes to today’s wealth gap. According to the Brookings Institute, in 2022 the median wealth for white households was $285,000; for Asian Americans it was $536,000; for Latino/Hispanic households it was $62,000; and for Black households it was $44,900.

One of the biggest factors for generational wealth is homeownership, which laws and real estate and banking policies have historically worked against Black people. The state Legislature recently revised the Homeownership Covenant Act that is designed to increase homeownership of families that were systemically discriminated against before 1968, the year the federal Fair Housing Act was signed.

Over the years the government has paid reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly imprisoned during World War II, Native Americans, hostages held in foreign countries, the families of first responders in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attack and even to some slave owners who freed their slaves.

The nation at one point did attempt a form of reparations for former slaves. As slavery ended, President Abraham Lincoln’s administration negotiated with Black ministers for freed slave families to receive 40 acres of land previously owned by slave owners. The land, much of which enslaved people had worked for free, was situated along the Atlantic coast between Charleston, S.C., and northwest Florida, and included Georgia’s now prestigious Sea Island, where land today sells for between $5.5 million for 3 acres , up to $40 million for 50 acres .

But President Andrew Johnson reversed the decision and the 400,000 acres promised to former slaves were returned to the white owners.

In his book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century,’’ Duke University economics professor William Darity Jr., who has studied reparations for years, advocates for a reparations program with three components: acknowledgment, redress and closure.

Washington, with it’s Homeownership Covenant and now the reparations study, is on the right path. A debt that goes unpaid, even for centuries, doesn’t mean it is erased. It still must be paid, somehow.