There's a difference between being freed and being free... As soon as the institution of slavery was abolished, White legislators and White society implemented a whole range of measures that weren't slavery but came pretty darn close. People were freed into a society that still hated them, still saw them as not fully human and inferior to White people. We never really had a reckoning with what it would have meant to welcome freed people into society as equals, to give them the material resources required for them to actually be free people in society.

Law scholar Katherine Franke examines the radical potential of reparations for Black Americans - as a social transformation to address the fundamental sin of slavery and the enduring structures of White supremacy in America, and a set of policies to redress the material injustices barring Black people from reaching freedom a century and a half after emancipation.

Katherine is author of Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition from Haymarket Books.