Reparations for slavery is a proposal that some type of compensation should be provided to the descendants of slaves from the Atlantic slave trade.
This idea has been recurring in the politics of the United States, from the 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 ("Forty acres and a mule") to the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. This compensation has been proposed in a variety of forms, from individual monetary payments to land-based compensation related to independence. The idea remains highly controversial and no consensus exists as to whether and how it could be implemented. There have been similar calls for reparations from some Caribbean countries and elsewhere in the African diaspora, and some African countries have called for reparations to their states for the loss of their population.
This idea has been recurring in the politics of the United States, from the 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 ("Forty acres and a mule") to the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. This compensation has been proposed in a variety of forms, from individual monetary payments to land-based compensation related to independence. The idea remains highly controversial and no consensus exists as to whether and how it could be implemented. There have been similar calls for reparations from some Caribbean countries and elsewhere in the African diaspora, and some African countries have called for reparations to their states for the loss of their population.
U.S. historical context
The
arguments surrounding reparations are based on the formal discussion
about many different reparations, and actual land reparations received
by African Americans which were later taken away. In 1865, after the Confederate States of America were defeated in the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 to both "assure the harmony of action in the area of operations" and to solve problems caused by the masses of freed slaves, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land
in the sea islands and around Charleston, South Carolina for the
exclusive use of black people who had been enslaved. The army also had a
number of unneeded mules
which were given to settlers. Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled
on 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) in Georgia and South Carolina. However,
President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after Lincoln was assassinated, the land was returned to its previous owners, and the blacks were forced to leave. In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it was not passed.
Reconstruction came to an end in 1877 without the issue of reparations having been addressed. Thereafter, a deliberate movement of segregation and oppression arose in southern states. Jim Crow laws
passed in some southeastern states to reinforce the existing inequality
that slavery had produced. In addition white extremist organizations
such as the Ku Klux Klan
engaged in a massive campaign of terrorism throughout the Southeast in
order to keep African Americans in their prescribed social place. For
decades this assumed inequality and injustice was ruled on in court
decisions and debated in public discourse.
In one anomalous case, a former slave named Henrietta Wood successfully sued for compensation after having been kidnapped from the free state of Ohio and sold into slavery in Mississippi. After the American Civil War, she was freed and returned to Cincinnati, where she won her case in federal court
in 1878, receiving $2,500 in damages. Though the verdict was a national
news story, it did not prompt any trend toward additional similar
cases.
Proposals for reparations
United States government
Some
proposals have called for direct payments from the U.S. government.
Various estimates have been given if such payments were to be made. Harper's Magazine
estimated that the total of reparations due was about "$97 trillion,
based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865,
regardless the United States wasn't a recognized independent country
until after the Revolutionary War in 1787, compounded at 6% interest
through 1993".
Should all or part of this amount be paid to the descendants of slaves
in the United States, the current U.S. government would only pay a
fraction of that cost, since it has been in existence only since 1789.
The Rev. M.J. Divine, better known as Father Divine,
was one of the earliest leaders to argue clearly for "retroactive
compensation" and the message was spread via International Peace Mission
publications. On July 28, 1951, Father Divine issued a "peace stamp"
bearing the text: "Peace! All nations and peoples who have suppressed
and oppressed the under-privileged, they will be obliged to pay the
African slaves and their descendants for all uncompensated servitude and
for all unjust compensation, whereby they have been unjustly deprived
of compensation on the account of previous condition of servitude and
the present condition of servitude. This is to be accomplished in the
defense of all other under-privileged subjects and must be paid
retroactive up-to-date".
At the first National Reparations Convention in Chicago in 2001, a proposal by Howshua Amariel,
a Chicago social activist, would require the federal government to make
reparations to proven descendants of slaves. In addition, Amariel
stated "For those blacks who wish to remain in America, they should
receive reparations in the form of free education, free medical, free
legal and free financial aid for 50 years with no taxes levied," and
"For those desiring to leave America, every black person would receive a
million dollars or more, backed by gold, in reparation." At the
convention Amariel's proposal received approval from the 100 or so
participants,
nevertheless the question of who would receive such payments, who
should pay them and in what amount, has remained highly controversial, since the United States Census does not track descent from slaves or slave owners and relies on self-reported racial categories.
On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.
There have been 7 states that have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans. Those states are:
- Alabama – 04-25-07
- Delaware – 02-11-16
- Florida – 2008
- Maryland – 2007
- New Jersey – 2008
- North Carolina – 2007
- Virginia – 2007
In April 2010, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in a New York Times
editorial advised reparations activists to consider the African role in
the slave trade in regard to who should shoulder the cost of
reparations.
Private institutions
Private institutions and corporations were also involved in slavery. On March 8, 2000, Reuters
News Service reported that Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a law school
graduate, initiated a one-woman campaign making a historic demand for restitution and apologies from modern companies that played a direct role in enslaving Africans. Aetna
Inc. was her first target because of their practice of writing life
insurance policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slave owners
as the beneficiaries. In response to Farmer-Paellmann's demand, Aetna
Inc. issued a public apology, and the "corporate restitution movement"
was born.
By 2002, nine lawsuits were filed around the country coordinated
by Farmer-Paellmann and the Restitution Study Group—a New York
non-profit. The litigation included 20 plaintiffs, demanding restitution
from 20 companies from the banking, insurance, textile, railroad, and
tobacco industries. The cases were consolidated under 28 U.S.C. 1407 to multidistrict litigation in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The district court dismissed the lawsuits with prejudice, and the claimants appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
On December 13, 2006, that court, in an opinion written by Judge Richard Posner, modified the district court's judgment to be a dismissal without
prejudice, affirmed the majority of the district court's judgment, and
reversed the portion of the district court's judgment dismissing the
plaintiffs' consumer protection claims, remanding the case for further proceedings consistent with its opinion. Thus, the plaintiffs may bring the lawsuit again, but must clear considerable procedural and substantive hurdles first:
If one or more of the defendants violated a state law by transporting slaves in 1850, and the plaintiffs can establish standing to sue, prove the violation despite its antiquity, establish that the law was intended to provide a remedy (either directly or by providing the basis for a common law action for conspiracy, conversion, or restitution) to lawfully enslaved persons or their descendants, identify their ancestors, quantify damages incurred, and persuade the court to toll the statute of limitations, there would be no further obstacle to the grant of relief.
In October 2000, California passed the Slavery Era Disclosure Law
requiring insurance companies doing business there to report on their
role in slavery. The disclosure legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Hayden, is the prototype for similar laws passed in 12 states around the United States.
The NAACP has called for more of such legislation at local and corporate levels. It quotes Dennis C. Hayes, CEO
of the NAACP, as saying, "Absolutely, we will be pursuing reparations
from companies that have historical ties to slavery and engaging all
parties to come to the table." Brown University,
whose namesake family was involved in the slave trade, has also
established a committee to explore the issue of reparations. In February
2007, Brown University announced a set of responses to its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. While in 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for the "sins" of racism, including slavery.
In December 2005, a boycott
was called by a coalition of reparations groups under the sponsorship
of the Restitution Study Group. The boycott targets the student loan
products of banks deemed complicit in slavery—particularly those
identified in the Farmer-Paellmann litigation. As part of the boycott,
students are asked to choose from other banks to finance their student
loans.
In 2005, JP Morgan Chase and Wachovia both apologized for their connections to slavery.
Pro-reparations groups such as The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America advocate for compensation to be in the form of community rehabilitation and not payments to individual descendants.
Arguments for reparations
Accumulated wealth
In 2008 the American Humanist Association
published an article which argued that if emancipated slaves had been
allowed to possess and retain the profits of their labor, their
descendants might now control a much larger share of American social and
monetary wealth. Not only did the freedmen not receive a share of these profits, but they were stripped of the small amounts of compensation paid to some of them during Reconstruction.
The wealth of the United States was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of African American slave labor. According to this view, reparations would be valuable primarily as a way of correcting modern economic imbalances.
Healthcare
In
2019, VICE magazine published an article that argued racial health
disparities, from slavery through Jim Crow until today, have cost Black
Americans a significant amount of money in health care expenses and lost
wages, and should be paid back.
Precedents
Advocates
have used other examples of reparations to argue that victims of
institutional slavery should be similarly compensated.
In several cases the federal government has formally apologized to or compensated minority groups for past actions:
- Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government apologized for Japanese American internment during World War II and provided reparations of $20,000 to each survivor, to compensate for loss of property and liberty during that period. No compensation was given to the descendants of affected individuals though.
- The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act transferred land, federal money, and a portion of oil revenues to native Alaskans.
- The Apology Resolution of 1993 apologized for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, but gave no compensation.
U.S. state governments have made reparations in some specific circumstances:
- Virginia established a compensation fund for victims of involuntary sterilization in 2015.
Other countries have also opted to pay reparations for past grievances, such as:
- Reparations for the Holocaust, including the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany and various programs under the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Arguments against reparations
Relocation of injustice
The
principal argument against reparations is that their cost would not be
imposed upon the perpetrators of slavery, nor confined to those who can
be shown to be the specific indirect beneficiaries of slavery, but would
simply be indiscriminately borne by taxpayers per se. Those making this argument often add that the descendants of white abolitionists and soldiers in the Union Army might be taxed to fund reparations despite the sacrifices their ancestors already made to end slavery.
In the case of Public Lands, European colonizers forcibly relocated many Southeastern Native American
tribes. One argument against reparations is that in assigning public
lands to African-Americans for the enslavement of their ancestors, a
greater and further wrong would be committed against the Southeastern
Native Americans who have ancestral claims and treaty rights to that same land.
In addition, several historians, such as João C. Curto, have made
important contributions to the global understanding of the African side
of the Atlantic slave trade.
By arguing that African merchants determined the assemblage of trade
goods accepted in exchange for slaves, many historians argue for African
agency: that Africans were not just enslaved by whites, because some
Africans were willing participants in the slave trade. This implies a
shared responsibility. Whites seldom went inland as this was considered too dangerous: slaves had to be brought to them by Africans.
Comparative utility
It
has been argued that reparations for slavery cannot be justified on the
basis that slave descendants are worse off as a result of slavery,
because it has been suggested that they are better off than they would
have been in Africa if the slave trade had never happened.
In Up From Slavery, former slave Booker T. Washington wrote,
- I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery. I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race. No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction ... Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution. Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ... This I say, not to justify slavery—on the other hand, I condemn it as an institution, as we all know that in America it was established for selfish and financial reasons, and not from a missionary motive—but to call attention to a fact, and to show how Providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose. When persons ask me in these days how, in the midst of what sometimes seem hopelessly discouraging conditions, I can have such faith in the future of my race in this country, I remind them of the wilderness through which and out of which, a good Providence has already led us.
Conservative commentator David Horowitz writes,
- The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous "nation" in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were taken.
Legal argument against reparations
Many legal experts point to the fact that slavery was not illegal in the United States prior to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
(ratified in 1865). Thus, there is no legal foundation for compensating
the descendants of slaves for the crime against their ancestors when,
in strictly legal terms, no crime was committed. Chattel slavery is now
considered to be highly immoral, though it was perfectly legal at the
time.
Some areas of the South had communities of freedman, such as
existed in Savannah, Charleston and New Orleans, while in the North, for
example, former slaves lived as freedman both before and after the
creation of the United States in 1788. For example, in 1667 Dutch
colonists freed some of their slaves and gave them property in what is
now Manhattan.
The descendants of Groote and Christina Manuell—two of those freed
slaves—can trace their family's history as freedman back to the child of
Groote and Christina, Nicolas Manuell, whom they consider their
family's first freeborn African American. In 1712, the British, then in
control of New York, prohibited blacks from inheriting land, effectively
ending property ownership for this family. While this is only one
example out of thousands of enslaved persons, it does mean that not all
slavery reparations can be determined by racial self-identification
alone; reparations would have to include a determination of the free or
slave status of one's African-American ancestors, as well as when and by
whom they were enslaved and denied rights such as property ownership.
Because of slavery, the original African heritage has been blended with
the American experience, the same as it has been for generations of
immigrants from other countries. For this reason, determining a "fair
share" of reparations would be an impossible task.
Another legal argument against reparations for slavery from a
legal standpoint (as opposed to a moral standpoint) is that the statute
of limitations for filing lawsuits has long since passed. Thus, courts
are prohibited from granting relief. This has been used effectively in
several suits, including "In re African American Slave Descendants",
which dismissed a high-profile suit against a number of businesses with
ties to slavery.
Additional arguments and opinions
A
suggested anti-reparations argument is that reparations payments based
on race alone could be perceived by nearly everyone as an injustice,
embittering many, and inevitably setting back race relations. In this
view, apologetic feelings some whites may hold because of slavery and
past civil rights injustices would, to a significant extent, be replaced by anger.
The Libertarian Party, among other groups and individuals, has suggested that reparations would make racism worse.
One publication against reparations is David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery (2002). Other works that discuss problems with reparations include John Torpey's Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2006), Alfred Brophy's Reparations Pro and Con (2006), and Nahshon Perez's Freedom from Past Injustices (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
One member of Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell
of Kentucky, stated on TV that he was against reparations because they
involve taking money from those who never benefitted from slavery to pay
those who were never slaves.
