Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in b
