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Episode details

World Service,10 Jun 2020,17 mins

Reparations for African-Americans

Business Daily

Available for over a year

This is an old idea gaining new currency amidst the latest Black Lives Matter protests. Should billions of dollars in damages now be paid to descendents of African-American slaves for the sins of the past. How would this happen? Why? And would modern white America ever agree to it? One man who's long thought so is Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and RLJ technologies and who became the first US African-American billionaire in the 1990s. Ed Butler also speaks to Professor William Darity, an economist of Public Policy at Duke University. He's written a book on the reparations idea, "From Here to Equality". He also hears from Caitlin Rosenthal, an historian at the University of Berkeley who has studied this era, and the enormous economic boon that slavery brought to the emerging industrial superpower, the United States of America. (Photo credit: Getty Images)

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