How did AASRT get started?

 I guess, it was just, plain time. In the summer of 2014, Ta’Nehisi Coates wrote a landmark cover article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine on American slave Reparations entitled, “The Case For Reparations.” The article searingly captured, on all levels, the very real consequences of the lingering pall of American Slavery and the need for reparative justice. After I read it, I felt like I had put my fingers in an electric socket. I haven’t really slept a full night since. And when I combined that knowledge with the compelling data of the white paper from the Global Policy Solutions think tank published just a few months prior, entitled “Beyond Broke”, showing a 15-fold difference between White American and Black American net worth ($111,740 to $7,113), it was crystal clear that there was a causative link between the American slave experience for Blacks and their present profoundly disadvantageous economic state. In the case of the “Beyond Broke” study, when the average gap between Black and White Americans is aggregated across the entirety of the African-American population of 38.8 million people, one arrives at a net worth gap exceeding $4 trillion dollars. More recent data culled from the Federal Reserve puts this gap above $9 trillion dollars.

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 We started raising $13 trillion over 75 to 100 years in a pickle jar on a prayer altar Shelia had in a spare bedroom in our house. How crazy is that? (Faith crazy.) $40 dollars a clip – for “40 acres and a mule.” We figured we’d start by petitioning the only One we could depend in 400 years to make good on Reparations – the Lord - and we figured He’d take it from there. He has.