Broken Promises: Black Land and the New Fight For Reparations

A rally for reparations at the African Burial Ground National Monument on July 23, 2021, in New York, New York.Michael M. Santiago/Getty

“I was born for this—and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, assistant professor of Africana studies at Morehouse College—and the institution’s Director of Public History and Historic Preservation—chairs a task force that’s the first of its kind in the country: one dedicated to the study of reparations.

A governmental advisory body in Fulton County, Georgia, the task force looks at the mass expropriation of Black land, in part through decades of records painstakingly worked through by Sims-Alvarado and a small team of researchers. They’ve amassed a paper trail of forced expulsions, mob violence, and the abuse of legal tools like eminent domain, all feeding into a wider national wave of efforts to discuss reparations—and assess exactly what’s owed.

Listen to Sims-Alvarado, the late activist Roy Jenkins, and other leaders of the continuing fight for reparations in this week’s episode of Reveal, the third and final segment of 40 Acres and a Lie—an award-winning series by the Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity.