April 6, 2020 The Nation. 17I
n 1870 a black woman named henrietta wood sued the
white deputy sheriff who, nearly two decades earlier,
kidnapped her from the free state of Ohio, illegally trans-
ported her to slaveholding Kentucky, and sold her into a
life of enslavement that endured until the end of the Civil
War. Lawyers for the defendant argued that Wood’s claim to
reparations for decades of unpaid labor was barred by a statute
of limitations. Nearly 150 years later, as Congress prepared to
hear testimony on the idea of reparations, Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell offered much the same argument. “I don’t
think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago forbts
the federal government doled out the 2020
enslaved but to their white enslavers.
KALI HOLLOWAY