Originally published 2020-07-17.
On 14 July 2020, Asheville City Council in North Carolina voted 7–0 for a resolution that formally apologised for the city's part in slavery and discrimination and committed it to reparations for its Black residents. The resolution did not hand out cash cheques. It set up a process: a community commission that would recommend long-term investments in housing, business ownership, health, education and justice, with the aim of narrowing the wealth gap between Black and white households.
Demonstrators in support of Black Lives Matter and reparations in 2020. Photo: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock.
That distinction matters, because the vote was widely shared online as "Asheville will pay Black residents." What actually happened is both more modest and more interesting, and the story kept developing for more than five years.
What Asheville's council actually voted for
The resolution came in the summer of 2020, weeks after the killing of George Floyd and amid protests across the United States. A month earlier, on 9 June 2020, the same council had unanimously voted to remove two Confederate monuments after local campaigners presented a list of "Black Asheville Demands."
The July resolution went further. It apologised on behalf of the city for its role in slavery, segregation and discriminatory policies, and directed the city manager to create, within a year, a process for developing concrete recommendations. The priorities named in the text included:
- more home ownership and access to affordable housing for Black residents;
- more Black-owned businesses and better career opportunities;
- strategies to build equity and generational wealth;
- closing gaps in health care, education, employment and pay;
- neighbourhood safety and fairness in the criminal justice system.
In other words, "reparations" here meant targeted public investment decided over several years, not a one-off payment to each person. The money would come from the city's ordinary budget and programmes, so any spending still had to pass through normal council votes.
What council members said
Councilman Keith Young, a driving force behind the measure, argued that symbolic steps were not enough. Removing statues, he said, did nothing about problems that were "systemic in nature," as reported at the time.
Councilwoman Sheneika Smith answered critics who asked why taxpayers today should be responsible for wrongs committed generations ago. Her case, as reported by Fox 5, was that slavery built an economic floor for white Americans that was then handed down, while Black families were deliberately kept out of the same wealth-building opportunities. Seen that way, the harm is not only historical; its financial effects are still visible.
Not everyone in Asheville agreed. Some residents welcomed the apology but doubted the city could deliver much with its limited budget; others objected to the principle of race-based spending altogether. Those arguments mirror the national debate.
The wealth gap behind the debate
The numbers that supporters of reparations point to are stark. According to the Federal Reserve's 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white family in the United States had a net worth of $171,000, while the median Black family had $17,600 – roughly a tenth as much. Average (mean) figures showed a similar gap: about $933,700 for white families against $138,200 for Black families.
Economists attribute that gap to several layers of history, not just slavery itself:
- No land after emancipation. In January 1865 General William T. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside land on the Sea Islands and the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for freed families, the origin of the phrase "40 acres and a mule." Around 40,000 people settled there, but President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and returned the land to former owners.
- Segregation and exclusion. Jim Crow laws, discriminatory mortgage lending and "redlining" kept many Black families from buying homes, which became the main source of wealth for most American households in the twentieth century.
- Inheritance. Because wealth is passed down, a head start or a handicap in one generation tends to carry into the next.
Local campaigners argued that this pattern played out in Asheville too, through twentieth-century housing and redevelopment decisions, which is why they saw the city itself, not just the nation, as having something to answer for.
How important was slavery to American wealth?
A common argument holds that slavery played only a small part in building the wealth of the modern United States, because most growth came from northern industry. Historians largely reject that view. The cotton grown by enslaved people was the country's leading export before the Civil War and fed the textile mills, banks, insurers and shipping firms of the North as well as Britain.
Yale historian David Blight, as quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic's "The Case for Reparations" (2014), has estimated that in 1860 enslaved people, counted as property, were worth more than all of America's manufacturing and railroads combined. That does not settle what should be done today, but it does mean slavery cannot be treated as a footnote to American economic history.
It is also true that the South lagged the North in industrial development by 1860, and that much of today's wealth was created after the Civil War. Both points can stand together: slavery was central to the early economy, and later discrimination continued to shape who benefited from the growth that followed.
The main arguments for and against
Reparations remain one of the most divisive questions in American politics. A 2020 Washington Post poll found that about 63% of Americans opposed paying reparations to descendants of enslaved people, with sharp differences by race: most Black Americans supported the idea, while about three-quarters of white Americans did not.
Arguments in favour
- The harms did not end in 1865; segregation, lending discrimination and urban renewal affected people still alive today.
- Governments, not just individuals, enforced many of those policies, so public institutions carry responsibility.
- Investment in housing, health and business can benefit whole neighbourhoods and the local economy.
Arguments against
- Many Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after slavery ended, and some faced persecution themselves.
- Deciding who qualifies, and how much, is legally and practically difficult, especially for recent immigrants and people of mixed ancestry.
- Some critics prefer policies aimed at low-income people of every background, in the spirit of the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King Jr. was organising when he was killed in 1968.
- Race-based programmes can face legal challenges under US anti-discrimination law.
Asheville's approach – investment in areas of measurable inequality rather than individual payments – was partly an attempt to steer between these objections.
What happened next: the Community Reparations Commission
Turning the resolution into action took longer than its one-year deadline suggested. Buncombe County joined the effort, and the two governments appointed members of a joint Community Reparations Commission in March 2022: Asheville City Council on 8 March and the county commissioners on 15 March. Its job was to recommend short-, medium- and long-term actions to repair damage caused by systemic racism, after an initial phase of information-sharing and truth-telling.
The commission met regularly from April 2022 until August 2025. Its work was interrupted in the autumn of 2024, when Tropical Storm Helene devastated western North Carolina and a meeting had to be cancelled. In total it delivered 39 recommendations to the city.
On 14 October 2025, the council passed Resolution 25-229 dissolving the commission, describing its work as complete. According to the City of Asheville, staff were then reviewing which of the 39 recommendations the city has the legal authority to carry out, with next steps to be set out in the budget for fiscal year 2027.
Asheville in the wider reparations picture
Asheville was one of the first US cities to pass such a resolution, but not the only one. Evanston, Illinois, committed its first $10 million of tax revenue from recreational cannabis sales to reparations programmes aimed at housing and wealth gaps. California created a state reparations task force in 2020 to study proposals. In Congress, the bill known as H.R. 40, which would set up a federal commission to study reparations, has been reintroduced repeatedly but has never passed.
For anyone following the topic, Asheville is a useful case study because it shows how slow and procedural local reparations really are: an apology and a framework in 2020, a commission in 2022, recommendations by 2025, and decisions about money and legal authority after that. Whatever one thinks of the principle, the result looks less like a cheque and more like a long-term planning process.
Sources: City of Asheville: Community Reparations Commission; Wikipedia: Reparations for slavery in the United States; Federal Reserve: Recent Trends in Wealth-Holding by Race and Ethnicity (2017); Wikipedia: The Case for Reparations. Photo: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock.
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