Opinion | Congress can pass reparations now to fix this 150-year-old injustice

Jesse Van Tol is president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an organization promoting racial economic justice policy. Should the U.S. government pay reparations for slavery? That question dominates the long-running discussion about righting centuries of wrongs committed against Black Americans. But there is one injustice that Congress can — and should — act on right now. After the Civil War, the federal government took many steps to accelerate the social, political and economic development of formerly enslaved people — including establishing a bank specifically for Black Americans liberated by the Union Army. The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Co., known as the Freedman’s Bank, was chartered in March 1865. Any formerly enslaved person or descendant of one could open an account with a minimum deposit of a nickel, and any account with a dollar or more in it (about $20 in today’s money) would earn interest. The bank was a key economic pillar in the broader project of Reconstruction across the postwar South. And like the rest of the project, it would curdle and crumble within a few years. Many tragedies of the era featured overt violence. White supremacists, sickened by the sight of freed Black people gaining...