Reparations

In May 1969, a man interrupted the Sunday service at the Riverside Church in New York City. Reading from a "Black Manifesto," the late African-American civil rights activist James Forman (1928–2005) made several demands. Among them was a call for reparations from whites to African Americans for historical and ongoing repression. In the first phase of the program, white churches and synagogues would be called upon to pay $500 million to be distributed to black community groups and institutions.

The most recent surge of attention to the cause of reparations for African Americans was actually prompted by the actions of a hostile source. In the spring of 2001, David Horowitz, a former 1960s radical activist who underwent a conversion to neoconservatism, placed an advertisement in a number of college newspapers throughout the United States, listing ten arguments why reparations for African Americans for slavery is a bad idea. The advertisement stimulated more attention than the reparations question had received since the early part of the twentieth century. Subsequently, conferences and symposia have been held on the subject at a wide range of college campuses, including a national teleconference in 2003 held jointly by Duke University, Spelman College, and Harvard University.

Horowitz's attack on reparations was directed exclusively at the case for reparations based upon slavery. He had nothing to say, at the time, about a rationale for reparations based upon the harms of the century-long Jim Crow era that followed slavery and Reconstruction. In fact, Boris Bittker, in his book The Case for Black Reparations (1973), argues that the basis for compensation should be anchored exclusively on the costs imposed upon black Americans by the Jim Crow system of American apartheid.

The demand for reparations is hardly a new phenomenon. Even before the Civil War, various groups advocated the redistribution of wealth or property to African Americans, particularly the land that they worked as enslaved laborers. In 1854, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth (1797–1983) warned whites that they "owed the colored race a big debt, and if they paid it all back, they wouldn't have anything left for seed." Although its motives were racist, the nineteenth-century American Colonization Society called for government support of their program to provide free transportation and land in Liberia for any blacks willing to settle there. The champion of the African emigration in the late nineteenth century, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, believed that the government should be financially responsible for the "repatriation" effort.

"Forty Acres and a Mule" became the historic rallying cry for reparations immediately after the Civil War. On January 16, 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, which declared that "not more than forty acres of tillable ground" would be "reserved" for families of four from "[the] islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers from thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida" for "the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the Proclamation of the President."

Both the first Freedmen's Bureau Act and the Homestead Act of the late 1860s also contained land allocation provisions of at least forty acres per black family as well. However, opposition to and obstruction of Radical Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson prevented the massive racial land redistribution from taking place. Such a distribution would have given the ex-slaves a strong economic foundation in the postbellum period. Indeed, by the end of 1865, Johnson had already had blacks removed from the lands they had settled along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts under Sherman's orders, and the property was restored to the white former slave owners.

In 1890, the white Alabaman Walter Vaughan, a lifelong southern Democrat and editor of an Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper, crafted a reparations bill. The bill was introduced in Congress by William Connell, a white Nebraska Republican, who had close connections to Vaughan; the bill would grant government pensions to blacks in partial recompense for the suffering of slavery. African Americans Callie House and Isaiah Dickerson formed the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association to promote the passage of legislation of this type. House's conviction on mail fraud charges in October 1917 (which were similar to the charges brought against Marcus Garvey in 1922) signaled the end of serious efforts to achieve Congressional approval of pensions for ex-slaves.

Demands for compensation came from other areas as well. In 1892, in the British colony of Natal (part of present-day South Africa), a white missionary named Joseph Booth created an "African Christian Union," whose goal was uplifting Africans. Booth foresaw the formation of a Christian nation of Africans. In order to fund its activities, the organization requested that the United States pay one hundred pounds sterling for every African American who volunteered to emigrate.

Proposals for reparations on behalf of African Americans have surfaced continuously throughout the twentieth century from a wide range of voices. In a somewhat obscure 1913 book, Prophetic Liberator of the Coloured Race of the United States of America: Command to His People, Arthur Anderson proposed the creation of a black state in the South. In 1928 the Communist Party of the United States argued that African Americans, especially in the South, were a distinct people and had a national identity. As such, the party argued, blacks were entitled to a homeland and had the right to carve out an independent African-American polity in the "Black belt" states of the South.

Demands for reparations have frequently combined ideological radicalism with black nationalism. In 1934, the Chicago-based National Movement for the Establishment of a 49th State advanced its own agenda for redistribution, calling for a new state to be created in the American South. Through the creation of a new polity, blacks would "have the opportunity to work out their own destiny, unbridled and unhampered by artificial barriers." This state would provide an "opportunity for the nation to reduce its debt to the Negro for past exploitation."

A more recent manifestation of this perspective has been advanced by the members of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) who have sought territory in the U.S. South for a separate black nation, encompassing the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Although little support remains for the RNA, Imari Obadele (Richard Henry), one of the leaders of the organization, continued to advocate reparations as recently as 1993.

In 1955 black activist "Queen Mother" Audley Moore (1898–1997), a former Garveyite and Communist, began her campaign to press for reparations, especially in the pamphlet "Why Reparations? Money for Negroes." Moore believed that there was an effective one-hundred-year statute of limitations for an oppressed group to press legal claims against former captors. At one point in 1962, she even met with President John F. Kennedy to air her views. On the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Moore formed the Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves. The primary demand of $500 million was to be partial compensation for historic wrongs. Her organization did file a suit in at least one court in California.

While Moore's calls for reparations seemed to go unheeded, the subject of reparations was a major component of black nationalist rhetoric during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1950s, the Nation of Islam called for the establishment of a separate black state. In 1962, its leader Elijah Muhammad asserted that "former slave masters are obligated to provide" choice land for the descendants of slaves to create an African-American nation. In addition, under the Nation of Islam's plan, the United States would support and maintain the population of the proposed black state for at least twenty to twenty-five years until it had reached some level of economic and political autonomy.

In a 1966 platform, the Black Panther Party called for economic restitution from the white community. Citing the promises of "forty acres and a mule" and the example of German aid to Jews after the Holocaust, the Panthers desired monetary payments that would be distributed to "our many communities." Other groups also made calls for reparations. One group located in Harlem, the "Provisional Government of the African-American Captive Nation," advocated the creation of a state, supported and aided by the American government, in all areas south of the Mason-Dixon Line where African Americans constituted a majority—a policy similar to that promoted by the RNA.

The most vocal of all those urging reparations during the 1960s was James Forman, best known as the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1961 until 1966. Forman also led the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC), which was the organization that had assembled the "Black Manifesto." While some response came from the white community, it never approached the demands made by the BEDC. Reparations money received by the BEDC reputedly was used to create Black Star Publications, which distributed black militant writings by Forman and others. One organization that received its start from funds generated in responses to the manifesto was the Black Economic Research Center (BERC). Originally started by donations from the National Council of Churches, the BERC began publishing the Review of Black Political Economy, a journal now published under the auspices of the National Economic Association, the professional organization of black economists. In the early issues of the Review, Robert S. Browne, the director of the BERC, advocated substantial reparations to correct disparities in wealth between blacks and whites. Struck by data from a survey that showed that blacks only held two percent of the nation's wealth, Browne felt that reparations would be an appropriate remedy.

The economist David Swinton, formerly a colleague of Browne's at the BERC and now president of Benedict College in South Carolina, argued in 1991 that the "gap between black and white America never changes because of the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on the accumulation of wealth—both financial material, and in terms of human capital." Swinton endorsed reparations of a magnitude that would have a present-day value of anywhere from $1 trillion to $5 trillion to begin to make a transition to a more economically powerful African-American community. Another group in Maryland, the Black Reparations Commission, placed the recommended payment as high as $4 trillion.

During the 1980s, many black activists insisted that at least some discussion of reparations was required. The Detroit City Council passed a resolution in the late 1980s encouraging some compensation for slavery, and a Massachusetts state senator introduced a reparations bill into the state senate in 1989. Arguing in 1992 that the nation owes a singular debt to African Americans above and beyond normal affirmative action programs, the sociologist Paul Starr called for the establishment of a privately funded National Endowment for Black America, which would foster the economic growth of the black community. The neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer actually endorsed a limited reparations program as a substitute for affirmative action.

A body of activists and organizations known as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) began to agitate for reparations in 1989. From the early 1990s, led by Johnita Scott Obadele, Kalonji Olusegun, and Adjoa Aiyetoro, NCOBRA has supported congressional legislation (proposed annually by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan) to explore the question of reparations. However, that legislation has never been reported out of committee to the floor of Congress.

Today, the primary reparations activity involves a growing array of court cases, particularly those brought by the attorney Deadria Farmer-Paellmann against several U.S. corporations—including insurance companies such as Aetna who provided policies for slave owners to protect them from losses of their enslaved human property, and railroad companies such as CSX that used enslaved blacks to lay their railway tracks. The attorney Jerry Leaphart has been developing a case—as has a team of lawyers and scholars led by Charles J. Ogletree of Harvard Law School—to be brought forward against the U.S. government or individual states.

A major difficulty with court cases brought against corporations is their capacity to argue that while their activities might have been immoral during slavery times, they were not illegal. Cases against the government or the state face two problems: (1) the barrier of sovereign immunity, and (2) the nature of implementation of a compensation program if the litigants were to prevail. Arguably, the most effective means of executing reparations would be via legislation, because successful legislation would require significant political support across the population. However, a 2000 survey conducted by the political scientists Michael Dawson and Rovana Popoff shows that ninety percent of white Americans opposed compensation for African Americans for slavery; a majority even opposed a formal apology. Therefore, the task of building national political support for reparations that would translate into legislation is obviously a challenging one.

Logistical issues of concern to advocates of reparations include the following: How should a program of reparations be funded? Should existing assets be transferred from nonblacks to blacks? Should the government undertake additional borrowing to effect such a transfer? Should reparations be distributed to blacks as individuals, to families, to community-based organizations, or to all three? Would eligibility for receipt require genealogical evidence to establish that recipients are descendants of enslaved Africans? How would the distribution ensure that there is a long-term closure of the gap between blacks and whites rather than a renewed transfer of funds back to nonblacks via black consumption expenditure?

There have been historical precedents for both formal apologies and economic reparations by nation-states to various groups. Japanese-Americans subjected to incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II have received an official national apology and payment of $20,000 per victim. Various Native American nations have received settlements in court for prior seizure of their lands and discrimination. Since World War II, the German government has paid about $50 billion to Holocaust survivors and their near relatives. In 1988, Daimler-Benz, the German industrial giant, agreed to pay the equivalent of almost $12 million to victims of Nazi forcedlabor polices and to their families. President Bill Clinton apologized to Hawaiians in 1993 for American involvement in the overthrow of the Hawaiian sovereign at the turn of the twentieth century. And in 2003 the envoy to the United States from Benin apologized to African Americans for Benin's involvement in the slave trade. But neither apology nor compensation has ever been awarded to African Americans for slavery, Jim Crow, or ongoing discrimination.

See also Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; Garvey, Marcus; Jim Crow; Moore, Audley "Queen Mother"; Nation of Islam; Slavery; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Truth, Sojourner; Turner, Henry McNeal

Bibliography

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william a. darity jr. (1996)
Updated by author 2005