Debts past due: a rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the United States

This dissertation maps the rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the United States through three watershed periods along its trajectory: Civil War-era land redistribution debates, 1960s and 1970s Black nationalist reparations advocacy, and contemporary (2010) reparations discourse. In each period, advocates reimagined what reparations were and why they were necessary to secure Black freedom within and without the United States. I argue that we should not understand these periods in isolation, but rather as an interconnected string of rhetoric across time, a Black reparations tradition. I analyze various widely circulated and important texts from each period to demonstrate how strategies appear, recur, and take on new meanings across this long history. This project has three specific goals as a result. First, it analyzes the rhetorical strategies and arguments deployed by Black reparations advocates in different periods. Second, it examines how this discourse has evolved over time and responded to new contexts and constraints. Third, it investigates how reparationists’ strategic choices and lines of argument disrupted, refuted, or otherwise contested the prevailing racial logics of each period. By doing so, this project seeks to understand better how rhetors in different contexts looked to the past to invent new visions of reparative justice.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Golding, Wallace Singleton

Contributors dc:contributor

• Murphy, John M.
• Murphy, John M
• Finnegan, Cara A
• Cisneros, Josue D
• Mortensen, Peter

• Reparations
• Citizenship
• Rhetorical History

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Wallace Golding

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130087

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130087