ATLRepair AtlantaReparations Study Commission

Study · Framework · 7 min read

What 'Reparations' Means, and Who Gets to Say

The five UN forms of repair, NAARC's ten points, N'COBRA's five injuries, and the Darity and Rue Simmons debate over whether cities can do reparations at all. The definition a commission chooses shapes everything after it.

The fights commissions have later, over cash, eligibility, and scale, often trace back to definitional questions left unsettled at the start. These are the frameworks on the table.

The international framework: five forms of full repair

The UN Basic Principles on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (2005) define full reparation as five obligations,[1] and this list has become the common reference point for American commissions. California organized its recommendations around it,[2] Fulton County's lynching analysis applied it,[3] and the African American Redress Network classifies every U.S. effort by it:[4]

  1. Restitution: restore what was taken: liberty, employment, property, home. (Bruce's Beach returned; land back.)[5]
  2. Compensation: money for economically assessable harm. (Evanston's $25K; Palm Springs' $5.9M; California's per-year formulas.)[6][7][8]
  3. Rehabilitation: medical, psychological, legal, and social care. (The Chicago Torture Justice Center.)[9]
  4. Satisfaction: truth-telling, apology, memorial, sanction. (The Fulton Harm Report; the Chattahoochee Brick memorial; Maryland's lynching commission.)[3][10][11]
  5. Guarantees of non-repetition: reform of the institutions that did the harm. (Zoning, assessment, policing, procurement rewrites.)[1]

One statistic from the Redress Network's national database frames the stakes: of the 463 U.S. redress efforts tracked at last count, roughly 85% fall under "satisfaction" alone, meaning apologies and commemoration. Material restitution and compensation remain rare.[4] Atlanta's definitional choice will place it on one side of that line or the other.

The movement's own plans

  • NAARC's 10-point program (modeled on CARICOM's): formal apology and a Maafa institute; repatriation rights; land transfers through a National Reparations Trust Authority; cooperative-enterprise funds and a Black development bank; Black-controlled health and wellness centers; African-centered education and HBCU investment; housing "villages" and a finance authority; media infrastructure; preservation of sacred sites, including every lynching site, massacre site, and destroyed Black town; and criminal-justice repair including revision of the 13th Amendment's punishment clause.[12] NAARC holds an ex-officio seat on CARSC, so this framework is in the room.[13]
  • N'COBRA's five injury areas (peoplehood/nationhood, education, health, criminal punishment, and wealth/poverty) remain the standard checklist for auditing harms, used to keep a process from narrowing to housing alone.[14] N'COBRA also holds a CARSC seat.[13]
  • The Movement for Black Lives toolkit draws a firm line: in its framing, general spending on racial justice only counts as reparations when it ties specific harm to specific people.[15] Several commissions have adopted that distinction as a standard for what to call a remedy.

The local-reparations debate

The Darity position. William Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen (From Here to Equality)[16] anchor reparations to the national racial wealth gap, on the order of $14 trillion, roughly $350,000 per eligible person, and argue only the federal government has both the culpability and the fiscal capacity to pay it.[8] Localities "simply cannot meet the reparations bill, so they should not call whatever steps they take reparations";[8] Darity and Mullen wrote that Evanston's benefit "is a housing voucher program, not reparations — and calling it that does more harm than good."[23] On this view, municipal work should call itself redress or racial equity initiatives, and be honest about scale.

The Rue Simmons position. Robin Rue Simmons, architect of Evanston's program: "The north star for all of us is a federal bill."[22] On this view, each government repairs its own documented harms: Evanston repaired Evanston's zoning, Chicago repaired Chicago's torture, and Atlanta would repair Atlanta's takings.[6][17] Local programs build the evidentiary record, the administrative muscle, and the political proof that repair is possible; her FirstRepair network now supports 100+ local efforts on exactly this theory.[18] Kamm Howard's guide, "Laying the Foundation for Local Reparations," formalizes it as "national symmetry": local efforts should be designed so they add up to the federal case rather than substituting for it.[24]

Atlanta's resolution already takes a side. 23-R-4351 declares that municipal action "shall not be interpreted as" replacing federal or state reparations.[13] The survey asks which stance Atlanta should take: do the local work quietly alongside the federal case, design it deliberately as a national model, or act locally as if federal action will never come.

The naming question

Tulsa's mayor deliberately avoided the word "reparations" ("politically charged") and branded a $105M trust "Road to Repair."[19][20] Colorado's statute says "reparative capital." Asheville said "community reparations" and meant investments, not checks.[21] Fulton County and Atlanta both say reparations, plainly.[3][13] Names set expectations, and the choice of vocabulary is itself a design decision the survey puts to respondents.

References

  1. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 60/147, "Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law" (Dec. 16, 2005), principles 18–23, documents.un.org. Accessed July 2026.
  2. California Department of Justice, "Reparations Task Force Final Report" (June 2023), incl. ch. 14, "International Reparations Framework," oag.ca.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  3. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, "Harm Report" (2025), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  4. African American Redress Network, "Redress Map" (national database of U.S. redress efforts categorized by the UN forms of reparation; satisfaction-type efforts ≈85% of the total), redressnetwork.org. Accessed July 2026.
  5. Office of L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, "Los Angeles County Completes Landmark Return of Bruce's Beach to the Rightful Heirs of Charles and Willa Bruce" (2022), hahn.lacounty.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  6. Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, "Flinn v. City of Evanston," No. 1:24-cv-04269 (N.D. Ill.) (describing Evanston's Restorative Housing Program $25,000 payments), clearinghouse.net. Accessed July 2026.
  7. KESQ News Channel 3, "Palm Springs finalizes $5.9M settlement for Section 14 survivors and descendants" (Oct. 7, 2025), kesq.com. Accessed July 2026.
  8. William Darity, Thomas Craemer, Daina Ramey Berry & Dania V. Francis, "Black Reparations in the United States, 2024: An Introduction," RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(3): 1–28 (June 2024) (California per-year damage formulas; Darity-Mullen $350,000-per-recipient wealth-gap benchmark; federal capacity to meet a $14.3 trillion bill that "states and localities cannot"), rsfjournal.org. Accessed July 2026.
  9. Chicago Torture Justice Center ("born out of reparations for survivors of police torture"; clinical healing services), chicagotorturejustice.org. Accessed July 2026.
  10. SaportaReport, "Neighbors contribute to design of Chattahoochee Brick Co. memorial, park" (Mar. 12, 2026), saportareport.com. Accessed July 2026.
  11. Maryland State Archives, "Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (final report submitted Dec. 2025), msa.maryland.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  12. National African American Reparations Commission, "Preliminary 10 Point Reparations Plan" (modeled after the CARICOM Reparations Commission), reparationscomm.org. Accessed July 2026.
  13. Atlanta City Council, Resolution 23-R-4351 (adopted Nov. 6, 2023) (establishing the City of Atlanta Reparations Study Commission; ex-officio seats for NAARC and N'COBRA; recommendations "are not a replacement for any reparations enacted at the federal or state levels and shall not be interpreted as such"), atlantacityga.iqm2.com. Accessed July 2026.
  14. N'COBRA, "The Five Injuries of Slavery (Defined)" (July 29, 2015; N'COBRA Legal Strategies Commission, 1996–97, chaired by Adjoa A. Aiyetoro), archived at web.archive.org. Accessed July 2026.
  15. Movement for Black Lives, "Reparations Now Toolkit" (2020), pp. 26–27 (reparations involve "specific forms of repair to specific individuals, groups of people, or nations for specific harms" and cannot be achieved through "investment in underprivileged communities" alone), archived at web.archive.org. Accessed July 2026.
  16. William A. Darity Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020; 2nd ed. 2022).
  17. NPR, "Chicago Creates Reparations Fund For Victims Of Police Torture" (May 6, 2015), npr.org. Accessed July 2026.
  18. FirstRepair, "Our Story" (support provided to more than 100 communities engaged in local reparations initiatives), firstrepair.org. Accessed July 2026.
  19. CNN, "Tulsa's mayor proposes $105 million private trust for massacre reparations" (June 1, 2025) (Nichols "does not use the term reparations, which he calls politically charged, characterizing his sweeping plan instead as a 'road to repair'"), cnn.com. Accessed July 2026.
  20. City of Tulsa, Office of the Mayor, "The Greenwood Trust" (Road to Repair), cityoftulsa.org. Accessed July 2026.
  21. City of Asheville, "Community Reparations Commission" (2020 resolution directing investments to build generational wealth and boost economic mobility in the Black community), ashevillenc.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  22. Chicago Policy Review, "Doing the Work: Robin Rue Simmons on Implementing the Nation's First Government-Funded Reparations Program" (Sept. 2023), chicagopolicyreview.org. Accessed July 2026.
  23. NBC News, "The country's first municipal reparations program is off to a rocky start" (2021, quoting Kirsten Mullen and William Darity's Washington Post op-ed), nbcnews.com. Accessed July 2026.
  24. Kamm Howard, Laying the Foundation for Local Reparations: A Guide for Providing National Symmetry for Local Reparation Efforts, aboutreparations.org. Accessed July 2026.

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