Katherine Franke, "Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition" (Haymarket Books, 2020)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 10, 2020 · 47m

Katherine Franke’s ambitious new book challenges Americans to face our collective responsibility for ongoing racial inequality. Rather than fall back on what Franke calls a “palliative history” that emphasizes granting freedom and rights after the Civil War, Franke insists that Americans acknowledge the failure to provide any meaningful reparation to formerly enslaved people in the 1860s. That failure has ongoing structural effects today. The book replots this history through archival research on two post-war communities in which property ownership produced increased autonomy for freed…