Momentum is Still building Toward Reparations for Enslaved Africans

A week and a half ago, Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy,” said Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits.”

“Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery–and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”

On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to designate the Transatlantic Trafficking of enslaved Africans and the system of racialized chattel enslavement as “the gravest crime against humanity.” This resolution was adopted with an overwhelming majority of 123 member states voting in favor of it. Only three countries voted against it: Argentina, Israel, and the United States, while 52 countries abstained.

The resolution was spearheaded by Ghana and strongly supported by the African Union. By championing this resolution, Ghana’s leadership made both deliberate and strategic effort to move global discourse on enslavement beyond symbolic acknowledgment and toward actual institutional accountability and reparatory justice.

Through this resolution, Ghana has elevated the conversation from mere reflection upon past atrocities to the advancement of concrete policy commitments that are aimed at redress, structural reform, and systemic transformation.

The call for reparations extends far beyond mere financial compensation. It also highlights the need for recognition of the immense scale and brutality of enslavement as a crime against humanity. When reconciliation is rooted in truth telling, transformational change can occur to address persistent global inequalities that remain. 

Thus, more pieces are moving into place in order for the United States and other governments to be impelled to enact reparatory justice in the form of what has been more commonly referred to as “reparations.”