Is Barack For Reparations?

It's a strange coincidence. Earlier today, I posted about this report of Barack's speech to minority journalists, including the following part of his speech:

I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

How odd, then, to see in today's New York Times a long piece on Barack's days as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago, including:

Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

In other words, it sounds like Barack was seeking to assess the feasibility of legal remedies to redress -- not existing racism -- but racism that no longer exists.

Does he support reparations -- and if not, then what kind of "deeds" was he talking about in his speech yesterday?