As he has the previous two state legislative sessions, Senator Lew Frederick of Portland will likely sponsor in 2025 a Black reparations bill. It’ll call legislators to respond to the legacy of seventy-five years of state-sanctioned slavery and a century of state-sanctioned racial discrimination and segregation. States like California and New York and cities like Providence, Rhode Island and Asheville, North Carolina are modeling how to explore the coupled history of Black disadvantage and white advantage. 2025 is the year Oregon should follow those models and pass a bill funding a commission to study Black reparations.

My support for reparations was recently boosted by a comparison of personal genealogical evidence and typical Black American experience.

My 3rd great-grandfather, John Harris, was born in 1782 in Providence, Rhode Island. Sometime after marrying Esther White the newlyweds embraced their freedom to travel and migrated 700 miles to Michigan to create a new life. In contrast, free, voluntary travel didn’t exist for the enslaved. Furthermore, migration, or any sort of extensive travel for free Blacks and all Blacks after Emancipation, was uncommon until the early 20th century as strange routes and unfamiliar destinations too frequently greeted Black travelers with white hostility and violence.

Another 3rd great-grandfather, Cranston Allen, born in 1819 in New York, farmed in Iowa before taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862. The Act allowed Americans to claim, for a nominal fee, as much as 160 acres in western states, which he did in 1870 in Nevada. The Act benefited 1.6 million intrepid farmers. One organization recently deemed the Act to be the most significant Congressional act in support of the middle class over the nation’s first 140 years. In contrast, very few Black Americans chose the homesteading risk. Likely as few as 1% of Homestead applicants were Black as too few had the financial resources and social capital necessary to develop a thriving farm on 160 acres in five years’ time. And again, there was always the threat of hostile white neighbors.

My 2nd great-grandfather, Lemuel Allen, served two terms as a local district attorney, followed by ten terms as a Nevada State legislator, beginning in 1875. He finished his political career serving as the state’s lieutenant governor from 1903-1907. In contrast, though Black Americans represented 15-19% of the population during this nation’s first 75 years, only four held elected office anywhere. Additionally, between 1901 and 1973, few Black Americans held elected office at the federal level, a period during which Black Americans represented no less than 10% of the population. Representation at the state level wasn’t much better.

Lastly, my father, James Harris, aspired to a career in medicine but his preacher-father lacked the wealth to fund both college and medical school. Luckily, family friends loaned him the tuition money. This largesse from friends and family was extended in a related way when my relatives helped my young family purchase our first home. I plan to do likewise for our children. In contrast, homeownership and higher education, especially a professional degree, require serious resources to achieve. Such resources are much more common to white families, whose average household wealth is seven times that of the average Black household. This racial wealth gap helps explain why Black Americans have a homeownership rate two-thirds that of whites, a college degree attainment rate two-thirds that of whites, and are underrepresented among physicians by nearly two-thirds.

My family resides in the top 15% of households in wealth. We got there via a history of good decisions, rare poor decisions, and luck. But that simple equation ignores the massive influence of America’s racialized social environment in which legal, political, cultural, and economic systemic realities have, for generations, advantaged my white ancestors and disadvantaged Black Americans. The lives of my ancestors attest to this advantage. Reparations that close the racial wealth gap and ensure opportunity equity rather than opportunity hoarding is the solution.

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