The Community Forum for Economic Justice is committed to the fight for racial justice. We recognize that racial injustice has been a constant feature of this nation’s history, from slavery through Jim Crow and the current backlash against the advances of the Civil Rights Movement. Acknowledging and materially repairing these past and current harms is not only a legitimate demand, but a necessary step to racial healing. Members of the Community Forum for Economic Justice were instrumental in forming the South Bend Reparations Working Group and have enthusiastically supported the Reparatory Justice Commission. Our fight to end racial disparities in health, wealth, and access to resources is ongoing and deeply connected to all the issues for which we stand.
South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission
Interim Report June 2025
South Bend Reparations Working Group
A Timeline of How Segregation Happened in South Bend, Indiana
by Derek Webb and the South Bend Reparations Working Group
The Racial Wealth Divide
The Racial Wealth Divide in South Bend, A Report from Prosperity Now, September 2017
Selected Reading and Resource List on Reparations
Anthologies:
Brooks, Roy L., ed., When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Martin, Michael T. and Marilyn Yaquinto, eds., Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and their Legacies. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2007.
Winbush, Raymond A., ed., Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Books:
Bittker, Boris I. The Case for Black Reparations. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Darity, William A. and A Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Franke, Katherine. Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019
Robinson, Randall. The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. New York: Plume Books, 2001.
Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. Reconsidering Reparations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Neiman, Susan. Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Thompson, Janna. Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002.
Articles:
Coates, Ta’Nehisi, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic Magazine, June 2014.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole, “What is Owed,” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2020
The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/
How Southern Farmers were Forced from their Land, and their Heritage
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-southern-black-farmers-were-forced-from-their-land-and-their-heritage