Findings and purpose

(a) Findings The Congress finds that— (1) approximately 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865; (2) the institution of slavery was constitutionally and statutorily sanctioned by the Government of the United States from 1789 through 1865; (3) the slavery that flourished in the United States constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans’ life, liberty, African citizenship rights, and cultural heritage, and denied them the fruits of their own labor; (4) a preponderance of scholarly, legal, community evidentiary documentation and popular culture markers constitute the basis for inquiry into the on-going effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the United States; (5) following the abolition of slavery, governments at the Federal, State, and local levels continued to perpetuate, condone, and often profit from practices that continued to brutalize and disadvantage African Americans, including share cropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, unequal education, and disproportionate treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system; and (6) as a result of the historic and continued discrimination, African Americans continue to suffer debilitating economic, educational, and health hardships including having more than 1,000,000 Black people incarcerated or under correctional supervision; an unemployment rate more than twice the current White unemployment rate; and an average of less than 1/16 of the wealth of White families, a disparity which has worsened, not improved, over time. (b) Purpose The purpose of this Act is to establish a commission to— (1) study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans as a result of— (A) the institution of slavery, including both the Trans-Atlantic and the domestic trade which existed from 1565 in colonial Florida, and from 1619 within the other colonies that became the United States, through 1865, and which included the Federal and State governments which constitutionally and statutorily supported the institution of slavery; (B) the de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present, including economic, political, educational, and social discrimination; (C) the lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery and the discrimination described in subparagraphs (A) and (B) on living African Americans and on society in the United States; (D) the manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent in the United States; (E) the role of Northern complicity in the Southern-based institution of slavery; and (F) the direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, and religious and associational entities; (2) recommend appropriate ways to educate the American public of the Commission’s findings; (3) recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Commission’s findings on the matters described in subparagraphs (A) through (F) of paragraph (1); and (4) submit to the Congress the findings of the study under paragraph (1), together with the recommendations under paragraphs (2) and (3).