Reparations for slavery are back on the table. Here's how likely it is lawmakers take action on them and what it could mean.

• There have been renewed calls in support of reparations for Black Americans following recent protests against police brutality and amid the economic crisis of the coronavirus.
• While the idea goes back hundreds of years, most Americans say they're not in favor of reparations.
• But proponents say they're necessary to right centuries of oppression and inequality.
• A recent Congressional bill, HR 40, is currently being debated. The bill would formalize a committee to study reparations.

While the world is scrambling to find new solutions to racial injustice in America, an old one has bubbled to the surface again: reparations for slavery.

Reparations — the notion of offering remuneration to Black Americans whose livelihoods have been impacted by the legacy of slavery — has become a hot topic in the 2020 presidential election and recent protests over police brutality and racial injustice.

The notion of reparative justice for slavery has been around for more than 300 years, but only in the latter half of the 20th century did it begin building political momentum. In 1987, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America was founded, and two years later, former Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced a bill in Congress calling for reparations. Conyers, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, continued to reintroduce the bill each year until he resigned in 2017.

In January 2019, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee took up Conyers' mantle and introduced HR 40, a bill that would establish a committee to study and develop reparations. Among other initiatives, the commission would identify the role both federal and state governments played in supporting the institution of slavery and the discrimination in public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants. Congress has been holding hearings on the bill for more than a year. Last July, Ta-Nehisi Coates — who wrote a landmark article on the topic in The Atlantic in 2014 — and Coleman Hughes, then an undergraduate columnist, debated the measure during a congressional hearing.

The most recent calls for reparations were made following the police killing of George Floyd. In early June, after a week of protests and calls for police reform, BET founder Robert Johnson told CNBC that Black Americans should receive reparations to the tune of around $14 trillion.

Johnson, who became the country's first black billionaire in 2001, told the network that "wealth transfer is what's needed" to right the wrongs of inequality.

In a June 30 story for The New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that to truly embody the belief that Black lives matter, the government must compensate Black Americans.

"Reparations are a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans until half a century ago," she wrote.

Polling shows Americans still oppose reparations

But despite a renewed interest in addressing the cultural and financial cost of slavery and an increased acknowledgment of the historical and social precedences for reparations, more people are against establishing a system of reparations than are in favor. According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in early June, 73% of Americans do not believe that the federal government should financially compensate Black people who are descendants of slaves.

Proponents say they're necessary to right hundreds of years of oppression. The negative financial impact of slavery, say Rashawn Ray and Andre M. Perry, authors of the Brookings Institute policy paper "Why we need reparations for Black Americans," grows exponentially over time, making it more and more difficult for Black Americans to quash systemic and institutional inequalities.

"Today, the average white family has roughly ten times the amount of wealth as the average Black family. White college graduates have over seven times more wealth than Black college graduates," they wrote.

And those inequalities are only exacerbated during times of crisis.

"Whenever we have an economic shock, you see Black people have a harder time recovering because of historical discrimination connected to the wealth gap," Perry told The New York Times. "Now you see how easily we found money to give out when white people were suffering because of COVID and you scratch your head."

"Reparations are a tangible recognition by the United States that a wrong has been done to a specific group of people," Sheena Howard, an activist and communications professor at Rider University, told Insider.

Howard believes reparative justice would require not only financial compensation, but also an acknowledgment that the United States or individual states "have held a debt" owed to Black Americans.

The first calls for reparations date back to the 1700s

The call for reparations began even before the system of slavery ended.

In 1783, a free Black woman named Belinda Royall petitioned the state of Massachusetts to pay her for the 50 years she was a slave to her master Isaac Royall, who had fled the colonies and died in England. Belinda was awarded an annual payment of slightly more than £15 from her former master, an amount of around $2,300 in 2020 dollars.

Then in 1865, following the end of the Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which provided emancipated slaves with 40 acres of land.

But President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before the order could be put into effect. When Vice President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner, became president, he overturned Sherman's directive.

"Like indentured servants, some enslaved workers received freedom dues on their release from bondage: access to land, tools, sometimes cash," Naomi R. Williams, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, told Insider.

But many former slaves were consigned into a predatory sharecropping system in which they worked land that was leased to them for a portion of what was grown on the land, setting in motion a generations-long struggle to catch up with white Americans.

The US has paid reparations in only a handful of examples

The US has applied a system of reparations to prior historical injustices — including the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, the seizing of land from Native Americans during westward migration, and the forced sterilization of poor people of color through the 1970s.

Specific cohorts of Black Americans have, at times, received reparative benefits. In 1973, the US government issued a $10 million settlement to the surviving victims of the Tuskegee Experiment, a gruesome 40-year study in which 600 Black men were denied treatment for syphilis so that doctors could study the physical and psychological impact the disease had on the body over time.

In 1923, the Black community of Rosewood, Florida, was ransacked by a group of white supremacists after a white woman falsely claimed a Black man assaulted her. White vigilantes pillaged the town and burned it to the ground, leaving six confirmed deaths, though people estimate that more than 30 people were killed.

The state of Florida awarded ancestors of the community $2.1 million and educational scholarships for their descendants.

How much would reparations cost and where would the money come from?

Slave labor contributed untold billions to the South during the years of the Confederacy — by one estimate, the value of slave labor in the US by 1860 was around $3 billion.

But proponents of reparations believe that Black Americans should be compensated not only for unpaid wages during the era of slavery, but for the enduring systemic loss of financial opportunity due to the injustices of slavery that have persisted for decades.

Several figures have been thrown out, but most proponents agree that the cost would be in the trillions. HB40 suggests that $14 trillion could be necessary. The point of the bill is to figure out how much it would cost.

Using the value of the original promise of "40 acres and a mule," Duke University economist William A. Darity Jr. estimated that reparations would cost between $10 and $12 trillion.

Darity's figure could erase the $800,000 net worth gap between white and Black households.

Where would this money come from? Funds could be pulled from federal and state governments, private businesses that benefited largely due to slavery, and could include wealthy families that owned slaves.

Some individual institutions — like Georgetown University, which employed and sold slaves in the 1800s — are independently enacting reparations programs. The school now offers several hundred thousands of dollars in scholarships to the descendants of around 280 slaves who were sold by the school's founding Jesuits.

But money, Coates argued in his article "The Case for Reparations," is only part of the solution. Coates believes reconciliation for the evils of slavery — along with Jim Crow, redlining, and other racist policies — must be an ongoing project. Social programs should be built that would pour equity into the Black community in an effort to create actual equality in healthcare, property ownership, education, and more.

"Injustice and unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, healthcare, employment, education, housing, and every institution in the nation, continue to harm Black people in the United States," Williams, the Rutgers professor, told Insider.

Lee's HB40 is currently backed by 128 Democrats, though neither the House nor Senate version of the bills currently have Republican co-sponsors.

When asked at a town hall whether he supported reparations, presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden equivocated and said it "depends upon what it was, and will it include Native Americans as well," which some interpreted as a more progressive stance than former President Barack Obama, who in 2010 said "reparations would be an excuse for some to say 'we've paid our debt' and to avoid the much harder work" of making a more equitable society.

But despite increased political will, there may be no easy road to making reparations a reality.

"The real obstacle, the obstacle that we have never overcome, is garnering the political will — convincing enough Americans that the centuries-long forced economic disadvantage of Black Americans should be remedied, that restitution is owed to people who have never had an equal chance to take advantage of the bounty they played such a significant part in creating." Hannah-Jones wrote in the Times. "When, then, will this nation pass a stimulus package to finally respond to the singularity of black suffering?"