Belinda Sutton Petitions Massachusetts for Reparations — First Known Claim of Its Kind

Belinda Sutton, an elderly African woman enslaved for over fifty years in Massachusetts on the estate of Loyalist Isaac Royall Jr., petitioned the state legislature for a pension from Royall's confiscated property. She described in vivid terms being kidnapped from West Africa as a child, the Middle Passage, and decades of uncompensated labor. The legislature granted her an annual pension of 15 pounds 12 shillings — the first recorded instance of an American governmental body awarding something resembling reparations to an enslaved or formerly enslaved person.