In the 50 years since the civil rights pioneer James Forman demanded $500 million in reparations for African-Americans from synagogues and white churches in his 1969 “Black Manifesto,” the United States has largely avoided any serious discussion of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and the structural racism that continues to permeate American society.

This week might have evinced signs of change. A series of public events signaled the arrival of a new cultural moment, one in which Americans are ready to discuss past sins.

The most prominent of these occurred on Wednesday, when a House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on a bill that would commission a study on reparations. The meeting took place on Juneteenth, a day commemorating the announcement of the end of slavery in the United States. The hearing also came five years after the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who testified before the subcommittee, helped rekindle the reparations debate with his essay “The Case for Reparations.”

[Read the full remarks by Ta-Nehisi Coates.]

Mr. Coates and others have traced racial disparities in wealth, health and criminal justice to government policies and decades of indifference. And Americans are listening. Today, 63 percent of adults believe that slavery’s legacy affects the position of black people in society either a great deal or a fair amount, a recent Pew Research Center survey show ed.