Cory Booker led a parade of prominent African Americans in testifying on the need for reparations for descendants of slaves on Wednesday and argued amends were needed to get rid of a 'stain' on the country.
'We, as a nation, have not yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country's founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality,' Booker, who's running for the 2020 presidential nomination, said.
'The stain of slavery was not just inked in bloodshed but in policies that have disadvantaged African Americans for generations,' he noted.
Cory Booker led a parade of prominent African Americans in testifying on the need for reparations for descendants of slaves
Actor Danny Glover, right, and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, left, testify about reparations issue
Booker, actor Danny Glover, and author Ta-Nehisi Coates were among those testifying at the nearly 3-hour hearing on Capitol Hill on Juneteenth, the day that makes the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves.
'I sit here as the great grandson of a former slave who was freed by the Emancipation proclamation. I had the fortune of meeting him as a small child,' Glover told the lawmakers.
The hearing, launched by Democrats, was the first one to be held on the subject of reparations in more than a decade, putting the spotlight on the debate about whether the government should compensate descendants of slaves.
'It's about time we find the common ground and the common purpose to deal with the ugly past and make sure that generations ahead do not have to continue to mark disparities,' Booker said.
Booker has sponsored legislation in the Senate to study the reparations issue.
The other five senators seeking the Democratic nomination - Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren - have signed on co-sponsors.
In his opening remarks at the hearing, Rep. Steve Cohen, chairman of the subcommittee, noted it took 100 years after the end of slavery to end Jim Crow Laws with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And Coates, the author who reignited the reparations debate with his essay 'The Case for Reparations,' published in The Atlantic magazine in 2014, said reparations was more about making amends.
'The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress but is also a question of citizenship,' he said.
He also said reparations could take the form of financial compensation.
'I don't believe we should rule out cutting checks,' he said.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the House sponsor of legislation to study the reparations issue, said black Americans 'are the only group that can singularly claim to have been slaves under the auspices of the United States government.'
She said the hearing 'is not a symbolic action,' but about legislation that should be signed into law.
'I just
