The Case for Reparations

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2014

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in 1975 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. His father served in Vietnam and was a member of the Black Panthers before becoming a librarian and publisher. His mother was a teacher. Reading and writing were important to Coates early on. When he had done something wrong, his mother would require him to write essays as part of his punishment, and his father’s work as a publisher meant that the house was always full of books. He graduated from the public schools in Baltimore and spent five years studying at Howard University before leaving without a degree to write full time.

As a journalist, Coates worked for the Washington City Paper, the Village Voice, and Time. After publishing an essay in The Atlantic, he became a regular columnist for the magazine and subsequently became an editor and national correspondent. His writing at The Atlantic earned praise and a large readership. “The Case for Reparations” led to Coates’s blog being included in the list of Best Blogs of 2011 by Time magazine. In 2018, after a decade at The Atlantic, Coates left to pursue other writing opportunities. As of 2020, he is a writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.

Coates has written a number of books, starting with a volume of poetry when he was 15. In 2008, he published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of growing up in Baltimore. His book Between the World and Me: Notes on the First 150 Years in America, written as a letter to his son, was published to wide acclaim and won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2017, he published We Were Eight Years in Power: an American Tragedy, a collection of essays regarding the Obama era. Coates’s first novel, called The Water Dancer, came out in 2019. He has also written for the Black Panther comic book series. Among other awards and honors, he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2015.

Clyde Ross

Clyde Ross is the central figure through which Coates tells the story of African Americans in the 20th century. Other figures have smaller roles, but Ross’s experiences constitute the long first section of the essay and appear in other sections. Ninety-one years old at the time of publication, Ross grew up in 1920s Mississippi, a time and place deeply affected by Jim Crow laws and what Coates frankly calls “terrorism.” The latter took the form of African-American families being robbed of the little property they had, of prices being set capriciously for the crops of sharecroppers, and of the specter of lynching (lynchings in the South continued through at least 1946, when the last known occurrence took place in Georgia). Ross’s own family grew poorer when his father was given a bill for back taxes that the authorities claimed he owed. With no way to protest it, the family lost their land, their animals, and their property, and they were reduced to sharecropping.

Given a chance to get out, Ross joined the army during World War II and served in California and Guam. During his time in the former, he noticed a difference in how he was treated in everyday life, so he decided not to return home after the war. He moved to Chicago, got a job with Campbell’s Soup, married, and started a family. When he and his wife wanted to purchase a house, they were denied a mortgage and instead had to settle for buying on contract in a neighborhood called North Lawndale. As Coates documents, federal housing and lending policies stood in the way of Ross receiving a mortgage.

In the late 1960s, he and other black homeowners sought legal redress through an organization called the Contract Buyers League. They sued the sellers of their homes, “accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner ‘to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits’” (Part I). The suit was finally settled in 1976 when a jury decided against them. Today, Ross still lives in the house he bought in North Lawndale.