WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on Wednesday questioned whether the U.S. was “truly free from the historically rooted and hideous legacy of slavery” as he pushed for legislation to study whether the country’s African-Americans should receive reparations.

“Right now, today, we have a historic opportunity to break the silence, to speak of the ugly past, and talk constructively on how we will move this nation forward,” Booker, a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential election, told a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Booker, D-N.J., sat alone at the witness table as he led off the hearing on legislation requiring the federal government to study the issue of reparations.

“This idea that it’s just about writing a check from one American to another falls far short of the importance of this conversation,” Booker said. “I say that I am brokenhearted and angry right now, decades of living in a community when you see how deeply unfair this nation is still to so many people.”

Just on Tuesday, Booker told the subcommittee, seven people were shot in Newark, near where he lives. One person was killed.

The hearing was held on June Nineteenth, the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Texas when Union soldiers arrived there on June 19, 1865, some two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The bill was introduced in January in the House. Booker introduced the Senate version in April.

“As a nation, we have yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country’s founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality,” Booker said in his prepared testimony.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., put the kibosh on Booker’s bill a day before the hearing.

I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea," he said on Capitol Hill.

On Sirius XM Wednesday, Booker lashed back at McConnell, saying his statement contained a “tremendous amount of ignorance."

Booker said in the radio interview that the debate was about obtaining “equality of opportunity, a leveling of our economic playing fields, health playing fields, housing playing fields" and "addressing those past consciously racial harms and wounds.”

At the hearing, Booker said in his prepared testimony that long after slavery ended, blacks were excluded from the programs that helped lead whites out of poverty .

“The stain of slavery was not just inked in bloodshed, but in the overt, state-sponsored policies, fueled by white supremacy and racism, that have disadvantaged African-Americans economically for generations,” Booker said.

“Many of our bedrock domestic policies that have ushered millions of Americans into the middle class, stimulating generational wealth and opportunity, like the GI bill, and Social Security, were intentionally designed to exclude blacks.”

The unemployment rate for blacks was twice as high as whites: 6.5 percent to 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a research group focusing on on low- and middle-income workers.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Booker has pushed proposals designed to address poverty, especially among minority communities

Booker also has made the criminal justice system, which has disproportionately affected blacks, a main focus since coming to the Senate.

Actor Danny Glover was among those scheduled to follow Booker at the witness table.

Under the legislation, a panel of experts would look at the impact of slavery and subsequent discriminatory practices, and recommend how the government should apologize for its actions and pay reparations to make up for them.

The reparations issue has taken up part of the debate for the presidential nomination, especially among black voters, who comprise a large share of the Democratic primary electorate. Booker was asked to discuss his views during a CNN town hall meeting in March.

“It’s being reduced to just a box to check on a presidential list when this is so much more of a serious conversation,” Booker said at the time.

“My frustration is we don’t have a way of addressing head-on in this country the persistence of racism, the persistence of white supremacy, and implicit racial bias.”

The Senate bill has 12 co-sponsors, including Democratic presidential candidates Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The House version, sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, R-Texas, has garnered 64 co-sponsors, including Reps. Frank Pallone Jr., D-6th Dist., Donald Payne Jr. D-10th Dist., and Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-12th Dist.

“Slavery is the original sin,” Jackson Lee said Wednesday. “Slavery has never received an apology."

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.

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