Just how would reparations, focused specifically on slavery, work?

The idea of giving Black people reparations for slavery dates back to right after the end of the Civil War (think 40 acres and a mule). For decades, it's mostly been an idea debated outside the mainstream of American political thought.

But writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reintroduced it to the mainstream with his 2014 piece in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Since then, the conversations surrounding reparations have intensified.

This may be the most contested part. Academics, lawyers and activists have given it a shot, though, and their results vary.

Most formulations have produced numbers from as low as $17 billion to as high as almost $5 trillion.

Generally, advocates for reparations say that three different groups should pay for them: federal and state governments, which enshrined, supported and protected the institution of slavery; private businesses that financially benefited from it; and rich families that owe a good portion of their wealth to slavery.

"There are huge, wealthy families in the South today that once owned a lot of slaves. You can trace all their wealth to the free labor of Black folks. So, when you identify the defendants, there are a vast number of individuals," attorney Willie E. Gary told Harper's Magazine in November 2000, during the height of the last, big time of reparations talk. Gray was talking about how these families could be sued for reparations since they benefited directly from slavery.

It could. Reparations could come in the form of special social programs or land resources. It could mean a mix of cash and programs targeted to help Black Americans.

"Direct benefits could include cash payments and subsidized home mortgages similar to those that built substantial White middle-class wealth after World War II, but targeted to those excluded or preyed upon by predatory lending," Chuck Collins, an author and a program director at the Institute for Policy Studies, told CNN. "It could include free tuition and financial support at universities and colleges for first generation college students."

There are many. Opponents of reparations argue that all the slaves are dead, no white person living today owned slaves or that all the immigrants that have come to America since the Civil War don't have anything to do with slavery. Also, not all Black people living in America today are descendants of slaves (like former President Barack Obama).

Last year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he opposed the idea, arguing "none of us currently living are responsible" for what he called America's "original sin."

After decades of languishing as something of a fringe idea, the call for reparations really caught steam in the late 1980s through the '90s.

Former Democratic Rep. John Conyers first introduced a bill in 1989 to create a commission to study reparations. Known as HR 40, Conyers repeatedly re-introduced the bill, which has never been passed, until he left office in 2017. Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has taken up the HR 40 baton.

Slavery reparations still face an uphill battle.

The idea isn't popular with the American public. A 2020 poll from The Washington Post and ABC News found that 63% of Americans don't think the U.S. should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. Unsurprisingly there's a racial divide to this. The Post-ABC News poll found that while 82% of Black Americans support reparations, 75% of White Americans don't.