Reparations

Jake Herigstad Herigstad Page 1

Professor Gordon

Final Paper on Reparations

Communications 105

11-11-03

Reparations

Reparations is defined by Websters as the act of making amends for a wrong. This is a topic in which hits close to home for many American citizens. Lewis says "Why are reparations good for Native Americans, Jewish Holocaust survivors and Japanese Americans but not people of African decent?" Is reparation needed in our society today? Is it to late to even try? These are big questions that I will answer in my paper. The topic of Reparations is the single most deviding topic that we face today as a nation.Can addressing this issue take us forward as a society together or will we still ly "seperate but equal?"

This topic is atop many lists today in how we can fix the problems that blacks went through and is it worth it. This has been a problem for many years and continues today.

Official photographic portrait of US President Bar...

English: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President ...

Pie chart of religions of African Americans

During the Reconstruction era of the United States of America this term "reparations" was supposed to be addressed in the way that was correct and morally right. The government never gave blacks the dues that they earned over their years of oppression. The black man suffered for hundreds of years in trying to establish himself as an

American citizen. The thirteenth Amendment was thought to give the black man a break in the white society, but yet while slavery was gone it did not fix what had already been done. It is one thing to get rid of something that affects a race in a whole, yet it is another thing to show that what you did to that race was wrong and that you will do what it takes to repay them for their losses.

In the fourteenth Amendment it...