Reparations: A movement made in Detroit

The fight for reparations is as old as America itself, but the modern movement owes much to Detroiters.

“Reparations Ray” Jenkins, an impeccably dressed real estate agent who came to Detroit from Memphis, spent his life doggedly campaigning for federal payments to descendants of slaves. He helped convince former Congressman John Conyers Jr., a lion of the civil rights movement, to introduce legislation calling for a federal reparations commission. While efforts in Congress stalled, Rev. Dr. JoAnn Watson’s voice of conscience made the case in city hall and on the airwaves.

More of this series:

• Detroit has a big opportunity for reparations. Can it deliver?
• How cities are taking on reparations after decades of federal gridlock

Jenkins, Conyers and Watson have since died, leaving their unfinished work to heirs of the reparations movement. Though many thought it a lost cause, the possibility of reparations is stronger than ever. Last year, Detroit joined a wave of cities establishing local reparations commissions to take responsibility for harms inflicted against Black residents.

“A lot of advocates and those who attend the meetings carry on the legacy of those before us,” said Council President Mary Sheffield, who helped establish the task force. “We are building on that work (of) pioneers and legends in the reparations movement.”

Detroit’s contribution to the movement is important history to consider, said Trevor Smith, a New Yorker who builds partnerships around reparations initiatives as co-founder and executive director of Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty Collective. Smith said the work requires growing cultural awareness around the story of people who have been fighting for reparations since the country’s founding.

“There’s a lineage of this movement,” Smith said. “The call for reparations has long been part of the Black radical tradition and the broader movement for Black lives. This idea that too much time has passed (since slavery), folks like Reparations Ray play an important role. There were folks calling for it, you were ignoring them. That is not the fault of the Black community.”

Enslaved African Americans lived in Detroit since its founding, brought by French and British settlers. The 1778 Census recorded 138 enslaved people, which increased to 300 by the time slavery was outlawed in the Michigan Territory.

The city’s first mayor John R. Williams and many prominent residents of early Detroit were slave owners. Their family names are memorialized in street names and other dedications, including Beaubien, Brush, Cadillac, Campau, Cass, Dequindre, Hamtramck, Livernois, Macomb, McDougall and others. Watson argued for stripping their names from public spaces among other reparations policies.

Many Black residents have family roots in southern states, but slave labor also built Detroit. Jenkins, who moved to Detroit from Memphis, was a descendant of enslaved people. As a child, Jenkins earned a quarter each day for bringing water to Black sharecroppers.

Jenkins founded Slave Labor Annuity Pay (SLAP) in 1963, often described in news reports as a one-man organization. His argument was straightforward. Jenkins said reparations are an inheritance owed to the descendants of Black slaves who built America for free.

Janis Hazel, a member of Detroit’s reparations task force, met Jenkins in the 1980s. She remembers stories Jenkins told about his grandfather, a former slave and sharecropper who died at the age of 103 without anything to pass on to his family.

“Reparations was very personal to (Jenkins), his grandfather had been working for 99 years and had nothing to leave his grandchildren,” Hazel said. “He never had a foundation to start with. The problem is never having time to catch up. You’re just always working.”

Jenkins pounded the pavement, handed out leaflets, shouted speeches, debated on television, wrote letters to prominent Black figures and once slipped past the Secret Service to deliver his message to President Bill Clinton.

A few years after Jenkins founded SLAP, another proposal for reparations was unveiled in Detroit in dramatic fashion. The 1969 National Black Economic Development Conference was the stage for James Forman to present the “Black Manifesto.”

“For centuries we have been forced to live as colonized people inside the United States, victimized by the most vicious, racist system in the world,” reads an opening portion of the manifesto. “We have helped to build the most industrial country in the world.”

Jenkins sought $1 million for each Black American and a $40 billion scholarship fund. Delegates at the conference demanded $500 million in reparations from white churches and synagogues for their role in perpetuating slavery. The call triggered some donations but was largely rejected by religious organizations.

Demands for reparations became harder to ignore after Congress authorized payments to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. The federal government issued a formal apology in 1988 and distributed $1.6 billion in restitution to roughly 82,000 Japanese Americans. It established a precedent for Black and Indigenous Americans to seek compensation.

Jenkins found an ally in Conyers, the country’s longest-serving African American congressman. In 1989, Conyers introduced a bill seeking to convene a commission of the brightest minds to investigate the impact of slavery. Only Congress, he argued, could correct the injustice.

Hazel was working for Conyers at the time and recently found a press release she wrote announcing the bill’s introduction back in 1989.

Thirty-five years ago, Conyers said the time was ripe to discuss reparations. He compared the reparations movement to a seed left inside a closet that grew into a tree and burst through the door.

Jenkins sometimes waged a lonely campaign – news reports say he even endured public ridicule – but lived to see a wave of national admiration for his efforts. He was honored with a secondary street sign in the former Paradise Valley business district downtown.

He inspired activists like Watson, a long-time Detroit City Council member who served on the Detroit reparations task force until her death last year. Jenkins was a frequent caller on Watson’s radio show “Wake up Detroit,” and she was reportedly first to dub him “Reparations Ray.”

Watson also worked alongside Conyers, who hired her as a public policy director. She served as chair of the local chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA).

Watson shepherded an ordinance through the City Council requiring companies seeking to do business with a city to disclose whether they engaged in or profited from slavery. It passed in 2004 and was updated in 2019 with disclosure requirements for contractors that profit from prison labor.

Sheffield said Watson was an easy choice when she was assembling the task force’s executive committee. Watson died last summer just as the group was getting started.

“JoAnn Watson was unapologetically pro-reparations, pro-African American, pro-justice and equality,” Sheffield said. “She made you feel comfortable talking about our history, what is owed to us. All we can do is honor her in the work we do.”

Watson’s leadership with N’COBRA kept Detroit connected to national conversations about reparations. Jenkins helped organize the Detroit chapter’s first reparations awareness day event, which continues each year at the Shrine of the Black Madonna church on Detroit’s west side.

This year’s program was organized by N’COBRA Co-Chair Anita Belle, a former task force member and Reparations Labor Union founder. She opened by honoring leaders of the social justice movement under the iconic painting “Black Madonna with Child,” which was unveiled on Easter Sunday in 1967.

The 18-foot-tall painting was created by Detroit native Glanton Dowdell, who learned to paint in prison and later helped form a local Black Panther Party chapter. Dowdell was reportedly arrested during the 1967 uprising, when Gov. George Romney instituted a curfew, and beaten by an officer who recognized him – a possible sign of the painting’s narrative power.

Detroit had a major influence on the post-WWII Black nationalist movement, which sought to empower Black people facing oppressive systems like police brutality. Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr. organized for Black ownership of business and government institutions from the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Cleag notably demanded white businesses and political leaders to support Black-owned co-ops through a “transfer of power.”

The reparations task force also has living legends like Detroit educator, poet and activist Gloria House. She has been involved in numerous social justice movements dating back to her work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. House organized voter registration drives in Alabama, protested Detroit water shutoffs and backed anti-war and anti-police brutality causes.

Detroit’s contributions to the reparations movement were memorialized in a documentary commissioned by the city’s task force and produced by Watson’s godson Khary Frazier.

He said resurfacing the history reinforced an understanding that reparations work relies on dedicated people driven by a higher purpose.

“A lot of questions come forward when we’re talking about empowering the grassroots community for Black people in America,” Frazier said. “What should be done and is it ever enough? It’s going to take commitment.”

And while reparations may be a popular cause today, it’s only because of these past leaders that it’s even come this far.

Task Force Co-Chair Cidney Calloway is in her early 30s, the youngest member of the group. She said it’s been inspiring to learn more about Jenkins, Conyers, Watson. “Now is the time” to follow through on their efforts, Calloway said.

“Millennials are excited about moving forward with this idea and making sure that they understand that this is an actual possibility,” Calloway said. “I’m sure when my elders were coming out, they’re like ‘we’re gonna try,’ they’ve been trying for so long because the climate for it has never been better.

“The reparations history is here. People are looking to those pioneers, but now it’s an opportunity for us to bring it into the new Millenia.”