Club member's book surveys history of government reparations in U.S.

National Press Club member Dorothy A. Brown had a new book published in January. Getting to Reparations: How Building A Different America Requires A Reckoning With Our Past, in her words, uncovers a part of American history rarely taught: the United States has paid reparations before — to white enslavers for the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, to Tribal Nations for stolen land, to the families of Italians lynched in Louisiana, and to Japanese Americans for their mass incarceration during World War II — but never to Black Americans. The book lays out the evidence — but it also offers a path forward.

Brown holds the Martin D. Ginsburg Chair in Taxation and is a professor at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C.