A 1915 lawsuit sought repayment of taxes levied on enslaved people’s cotton

Evidence

After years of organizing failed to pay off with Congress, in 1915, House took an extraordinary step for a Black, formerly enslaved woman living in the Jim Crow South: she retained Cornelius Jones, one of a tiny number of Black lawyers practicing in Washington, D.C., and sued the federal government for reparations. In the suit, Jones argued that the U.S. Treasury owed Black Americans $68,073,388.99 for the taxes it had collected between 1862 and 1868 on the cotton enslaved people had grown. The federal government had identified the cotton and could trace it, and the suit argued that this tax money should be paid in the form of pensions for those who against their will had grown, picked, and processed it. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1346

Categorization

• QUESTION: The precise $68,073,388.99 figure — were the cotton taxes between 1862-1868 actually traced and documented? Worth chasing the court records.
• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in legal history or reparations — the precedent argument that the Treasury profited directly from enslaved labor.