"Ever since the unfulfilled promise of "Forty Acres and a mule," America has consistently failed to confront the issue of racial injustice. Exploring why America has not compensated Black Americans for the wrongs of slavery, Long Overdue provides a history of the racial reparations movement and shows why it is an idea whose time has come." "Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked in his "I Have a Dream" speech that America had given Black citizens a "bad check" marked "insufficient funds." Yet apart from a few Black nationalists, the call for reparations has been peripheral to Black policy demands. Charles P. Henry examines Americans' unwillingness to confront this economic injustice, and crafts a skillful moral, political, economic, and historical argument for African American reparations, focusing on successful political cases." "In the wake of recent successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed groups - Native Americans, holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s - Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations." "As Hurricane Katrina made apparent, the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. Long Overdue provides an up-to-date survey of the political and legislative efforts that are now breaking the surface to move reparations into the heart of our national discussion about race."--BOOK JACKET. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Henry's fast-paced overview is the latest contribution to the deluge of works that treat reparations for African American slavery as a historical, political, social, and theoretical question. Openly favoring reparations as "the beginning of a true revolution in values," the author interprets debates over compensation for slavery as important windows to underlying contradictions, injustices, and tensions in the US concerning citizenship, race, and racial identity. After examining commissions on race established by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton, Henry (Berkeley) traces the historical, legal, and legislative elements of reparations, including the successful 1994 case of Rosewood, Florida; its unsuccessful 1997 successor for the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the impact of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the 2001 World Conference against Racism, and Hurricane Katrina (2005) for contemporary discussions of racial redress. Henry compares today's unfavorable political environment toward reparations with both the late Reconstruction period and the era of the ex-slave pension movement. He favors a process approximating that espoused by South Africa's Truth Commission, one that includes recognition, responsibility, reconstruction, and collective compensation. Reparation should deal "not with slavery alone but with the entire history of racism in the United States and its exercise abroad." Summing Up: Recommended. For college and university collections. Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Two-year Technical Program Students. Reviewed by J. D. Smith. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Charles P. Henry is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Preface	ix
Introduction: Insufficient Funds	1
1 A Political and Legal History of Reparations and Race Relations	9
2 From Forty Acres to "We Must Have Our Money": Reparations from Antebellum to Civil Rights America	33
3 A Winning Case: Comparing the Rosewood and Greenwood Reparations Claims	69
4 The Contemporary Debate: The Legacy of Slavery and the Antireparations Movement	93
5 Reparations Go Global: Pan Africanism and the World Conference against Racism	123
6 A True Revolution of Values: Changing the Culture and Politics of Reparations	164
Epilogue: We Are American: The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina	179
Notes	191
Bibliography	223
Index	241
About the Author	249

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