ACLU: After 160 Years of Waiting, Guaranteed Income Can Deliver on the Promise of Reparations
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This year we celebrate the 160th anniversary of the message of freedom finally reaching the last parts of the former Confederacy. For two years, news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from enslaved people across the South, until Major General Gordon Granger made the long-overdue final enforcement of the decree in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.
While many see Juneteenth as an opportunity to celebrate freedom, the truth is that slavery still exists today, in prisons around the country, due to the loophole in the 13th Amendment that permits enslavement as punishment for a crime.
Small blue and red Juneteenth flag with a star and the date June 19, 1865, waving in the wind at a street vendor's stall in front of shops on 125th Street in Harlem, New York...
Small blue and red Juneteenth flag with a star and the date June 19, 1865, waving in the wind at a street vendor's stall in front of shops on 125th Street in Harlem, New York City.Nowhere else is the transformation of slavery to mass incarceration than in Louisiana. Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, sits on a former plantation. Incarcerated workers continue to work the fields, like enslaved people once did, for only two cents an hour. This food finds its way to consumers: if you've had a Big Mac or shopped at Walmart, you may have purchased produce harvested through Angola's captive labor force.
The broken promise of "40 Acres and a Mule" demonstrates that reparations were never delivered to the formerly enslaved. Over one and a half centuries later, the descendants of freed enslaved people are still waiting. As they wait, they are continually subjugated by a system that traps them in a cycle of poverty, criminalization, and forced labor.
Today, we have the opportunity to fully realize the promise of freedom symbolized by Juneteenth through guaranteed income programs—a bold step toward fair compensation in reparation efforts to those still suffering from the legacy of slavery. These programs aren't charity, but a chance to finally honor a commitment that should have been fulfilled generations ago.
Guaranteed Income and Reparations
Guaranteed income is a simple but powerful concept: unconditional, direct, and continuous cash payments delivered to residents. Disbursed without work requirements or restrictive conditions, guaranteed income operates as an investment in the agency of individuals. It has bipartisan and broad support: Americans of all political parties—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—approve of guaranteed income as a tool to eliminate poverty.
Guaranteed income programs have gained significant traction in the United States, with 165 pilots as of 2025. These programs vary in scope, duration, and funding sources, but generally seek to provide financial stability and reduce poverty for targeted populations. Major pilot programs have been successful in places like Compton, Calif., Chicago, Ill., Gainesville, Fla., and elsewhere.
Today, incorporating guaranteed income into reparations efforts is bolstered by a body of evidence supporting guaranteed income's unique ability to narrow the persistent racial wealth gap. Guaranteed income also leads to greater gender equity and long-term welfare by helping people afford job training, education, or childcare.
The ACLU of Louisiana, in partnership with the Fund for Guaranteed Income and donors Buck and Gracie Close, implemented a guaranteed income pilot program as a form of reparations. This pilot was the first of its kind funded through voluntary reparations, in which oppressors' descendants choose to actively redistribute their wealth and power to the oppressed.
The pilot transferred funds from the Close family—whose wealth was built from slavery—to recipients who suffer from the legacy of slavery through their involvement with the criminal legal system. This pilot was targeted at specific parishes within Louisiana known for their high rates of police misconduct, as the state itself is one of the highest incarcerators in the country.
Program participants were all survivors of police brutality. After participating in the pilot, the participants' ability to pay all of their bills doubled. The ability to meet their medical needs—including prescriptions, refills, and doctors' visits—increased fourfold. By the end of the program, the average number of days without stable housing fell by 85 percent.
Expanding Guaranteed Income Programs
We should take these successes and push a broader conversation about the importance of repairing past harms through direct economic benefits. If we do nothing, incarceration will only increase, especially as we criminalize immigration, and the harms will further perpetuate. Guaranteed income offers an alternative that makes everyone safe by giving them a rightful share of the nation's collectively produced and inherited wealth.
Like the last enslaved souls who waited far too long to hear the news of freedom, we too have been waiting—for justice, for reparations, for the truth of slavery's enduring legacy to be fully acknowledged. We are still waiting for the promise to be kept, for the next generation to finally have a chance to run a race where the hurdles aren't set impossibly high from the start.
It's never too late to address a broken promise. Juneteenth reminds us that freedom and justice go hand in hand. And true justice requires true repair.
Alanah Odoms is the executive director of ACLU of Louisiana.
Nika Soon-Shiong is the executive director of the Fund For Guaranteed Income.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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