Melinda Miller Publishes in the Washington Post

Assistant Professor Melinda Miller, Department of Economics and core faculty member in the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, has published a blog entry about the success of reparations in the Cherokee Nation in the Washington Post. Here is a brief excerpt:

Cherokee Nation Policies After the Civil War Show That Reparations Work. A House committee recently voted to advance H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. The late congressman John Conyers Jr. first introduced this bill in 1989. He chose 40 as an intentional reference to the unfulfilled promise of providing the formerly enslaved with “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War.

Hopes for land distribution in the Southern United States had been temporarily fulfilled by Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s 1865 Special Field Order Number 15, which authorized freed people to establish 40-acre farms on federally controlled land. However, the field order was repealed after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In the absence of widespread land distribution, the formerly enslaved entered freedom with little wealth, contributing to high levels of racial inequality that persist today.

Read more here.