There was a time when Reparations would have made sense, as well as being just:
And there still might be a way for them to be made, which would be both just and make sense.
The freed slaves should have been given "40 acres and a mule", taken from the slavocracy's holdings ... maybe with compensation by long-term bonds paid for by the national government.
They should also have been given the choice of their own country, carved out of part of the American South, with generous financial assistance in the form of the resources for building a decent educational system.
It would have been very unpopular in the South, to put it mildly, but then we (I'm from the South) were in no position to complain, either militarily or morally (having just tried to do some carving of our own).
By any reasonable definition of a 'nation', Black Americans are a distinct nation. They have not assimilated and most do not really want to assimilate. (And from their point of view, why the hell should they want to assimilate to the culture of slave-owners?)
Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine .. are far closer to each other culturally than whites and Blacks in the US. And they happily kill each other in order to rule themselves.
The people who really understand what's necessary for Black liberation are the Nation of Islam. (They're the only Black group the SPLC -- reluctantly -- includes on its extensive list of 'hate groups'. But that's nonsense: they're probably the most law-abiding people in America.)
The problem the Nation of Islam has is geography: if most Blacks were concentrated into one area, where they were the great majority of the population, they could pursue the traditional struggle for national liberation, as the Algerians did against the French, the Irish against the English, etc.
An American government which was really committed to dealing with the plight of Black people in America would look for some way to solve this. We're a big country and still wealthy. Why not buy out -- with really generous financial compensation -- landowners
in an area along the coast in the Southeast or Gulf of Mexico area -- so the new nation has an outlet to the sea, very important for international trade -- and allow it to become a separate, independent Black nation?
Nothing else has been remotely successful in dealing with this issue. Why not think about a radical solution? ('Radical' means 'root'. The root of the problem is that one nation, one people has been violently kidnapped, taken away from its homeland, and forced to dwell amidst another nation, and then told "You must become like us!" It hasn't worked.)