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H.R. 40 · 119th Congress

Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act

Rep. Pressley, Ayanna [D-MA-7] (D-MA) · Introduced · 114 cosponsors

CommitteeCivil Rights and Liberties, Minority Issues
Progress
25%
1
Introduced
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2
Committee
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3
Reported
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4
House Vote
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5
Senate Vote
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Passed Congress
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Became Law
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Latest action

Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

· from Congress.gov, as of August 8, 2026

Committees

Judiciary Committee

What this stage means

A smaller group of lawmakers reviews, debates, and edits the bill before it can advance.

Why this matters

Committees do the detailed work — they decide if a bill should move forward and shape its content. Most bills die here.

What can happen next

If approved, the committee reports the bill to the full chamber for debate and a vote.

Study this bill

AP Gov
Unit 3 · Civil Liberties and Civil Rights

The constitutional question

Does Congress's Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power (Section 5) plus its spending power authorize a federal commission to study — and propose — reparations for slavery and its successor regimes, and would any resulting race-conscious remedy survive modern equal-protection scrutiny?

The strongest case for

The bill does not enact reparations; it commissions the study Congress has refused for over a century, while the government has paid reparative claims before — to Japanese Americans interned in WWII (Civil Liberties Act of 1988) and to some Native nations. The economic case is documentable: slavery's expropriated labor, then Jim Crow, redlining, and exclusion from the GI Bill compounded into today's tenfold Black-white wealth gap. If the causal chain is weaker than claimed, a rigorous study would show that too. Refusing even to examine the ledger is not neutrality — it is a decision that the debt is unpayable and therefore unmentionable.

The strongest case against

Reparations for slavery tax people who never enslaved anyone to compensate people who were never enslaved, guided by racial categories the Constitution now forbids government to use except under the strictest scrutiny — which backward-looking, ancestry-based payments would likely fail. Practical design questions (eligibility, mixed ancestry, recent immigrants, amounts) have no principled answers, which is why even sympathetic states have produced reports but not payments. The commission structure lowers the stakes only superficially: its members are drawn from advocates of one conclusion. Directing resources by present-day need — which existing policy can do — helps the same communities without constitutionalizing racial classification.

Foundational documents in play

  • Emancipation Proclamation

    The commission's charge begins where the Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment left off: what freedom without repair meant in practice.

  • Letter from a Birmingham Jail

    King's answer to 'wait' frames the bill's 35-year committee residence: justice delayed as a policy choice.

  • U.S. Constitution

    The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments are the constitutional hooks for any congressional remedy for slavery's legacy.

Required cases in play

  • Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

    Brown established that government-imposed racial harm demands a remedy — the commission asks what remedy remains owed for harms older than segregated schools.

Organizations supporting

Organizations opposing

This has happened before

Rep. John Conyers introduced H.R. 40 in every Congress from 1989 until his retirement in 2017; Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee carried it after him. In thirty-five years it has never received a House floor vote — its one committee markup came in 2021. The number 40 references '40 acres and a mule,' the Reconstruction-era promise revoked in 1865. H.R. 40 is the curriculum's cleanest example of agenda-setting power: a bill with over a hundred cosponsors that leadership simply never schedules.

Practice FRQ

Argument Essay. "Develop an argument about whether the federal government has an obligation to remedy the economic legacy of slavery and legal segregation." Use at least one piece of evidence from the Emancipation Proclamation or Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and one additional foundational document or course concept. Respond to an opposing perspective.

Sources: www.congress.gov · www.congress.gov

Action history

Every recorded action from Congress.gov — 3 total.

  1. House

    Introduced in House

  2. House

    Introduced in House

  3. House

    Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.