A ‘path to restorative justice’: Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee leads push to study slavery

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U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, is renewing a 30-year congressional push to establish a commission that would study the impact of slavery and possible reparations for African Americans.

Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, started the effort with House Resolution 40 in 1989 but garnered little support. This year, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act has 162 co-sponsors. At the end of the last Congress, the bill had 173 co-sponsors.

The bill would form a commission to study slavery and the racial and economic discrimination that continued after slavery and to recommend solutions to Congress. It was named H.R. 40 after a promise Congress made to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War — that they would receive “40 acres and a mule.”

In a hearing before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Lee said African Americans “have been known as overcomers.”

“We believe in overcoming the many bad balls that we have been thrown. We’ve caught them, and we’ve kept on going,” she said.

But that isn’t the point of the bill, Lee said.

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