Reparations brought back into the spotlight
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, the Democratic presidential candidate from New Jersey, appeared Wednesday at the first congressional hearing on reparations in more than a decade. Along with actor Danny Glover, economist Julianne Malveaux, writer TaNehisi Coates and others, Booker testified on H.R. 40, introduced in 1989, by former U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the Democrat from Michigan. After Conyers resigned in 2017, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, picked up the practice of introducing the bill at every new session of Congress.
After decades of being mostly ignored, reparations are being taken seriously among many Democratic candidates in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential campaign. Booker, who introduced the first-ever Senate companion bill to H.R. 40 in April, said during his testimony that the U.S has “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.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer talked to historians, economists and activists about the history of the quest for reparations.
• What are reparations? Reparations are a process of making amends, or repairing and atoning, for damages done because of an injustice, such as the enslavement of people, the internment of Japanese Americans or the murders of Jews during the Holocaust. There are stages of reparation, where the first step may be to acknowledge the wrongdoing. That may be accompanied by a formal apology. Then there may be efforts to provide compensation — maybe by the granting of land, or in the cases of universities such as Georgetown, apologizing for their roles in the slave trade, or offering descendants of slavery admissions preference or creating a fund to assist them.
“It’s high time for a commission on reparations,” said Mary Frances Berry, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Black people were always demanding some kind of recompense for unpaid labor, but they didn’t succeed. Reparations were given to white slave owners during the Civil War when slaves were let go to fight in the Union Army. We have given the slave owners money, but not the former slaves.”
• What exactly is H.R. 40 calling for?
H.R. 40 would authorize $12 million to create a 13-member commission to study reparations and the impact of slavery on African American descendants, and recommend “appropriate remedies” to Congress.”
Conyers first proposed his “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act” as H.R. 3745 in 1989. In 1997, he renamed the bill H.R. 40, as a symbol of the 40 acres and a mule the United States had once promised freed slaves.
The Wednesday hearing is before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. The bill is now called the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.”
• Why are candidates and others talking about reparations now?
In February, Duke University economist William “Sandy” Darity told the Inquirer that “reparations” should be a litmus test for all of the Democrats who announced plans to seek the presidency in 2020. “We should be holding politicians’ feet to the fire on this issue,” Darity said.
Darity has worked closely with a group that calls itself American Descendants of Slavery, or ADOS, that has used Darity’s research to argue that black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved are in dire financial situations because of the racial wealth gap. Many economists, such as those who authored this report from the Center for American Progress, have noted that African Americans own approximately one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans.
Many people argue that Coates sparked a new conversation on the topic when he wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic in 2014, although then-President Obama said he couldn’t see reparations as feasible.
• What were the earliest movements for reparations?
In her book “My Face is Black, is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations,” Berry tells the story of House, a washer woman in Tennessee born into slavery around 1861. After 1898, she helped organize the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association and traveled the South, lecturing and asking people who had been freed from slavery to sign petitions seeking pensions from Congress. “There was no Social Security in those days,” Berry said.
By 1900, the association had 300,000 members who paid dues of 25 cents. Eventually, Berry said, federal authorities charged House with mail fraud. “If you ask the government to do something — pay black folks a pension — and you should have known the government is not going to do that, then that was fraud,” said Berry, who is an attorney. House was jailed in 1917 for nearly a year. After her release, she returned to the same “shot-gun house” she lived in as a washer woman.
• Did any black former slaves ever win a reparations claims?
Ana Lucia Araujo, a history professor at Howard University, said there were individual claims for reparations that date nearly 250 years. Belinda Sutton was among the first black people to demand reparations when she sued in a Massachusetts court in 1783. The term “reparations” didn’t exist, Araujo said, but Sutton and other formerly enslaved people made individual claims for pensions and other compensation. Sutton had been enslaved by the family of Isaac Royall. A loyalist to the British, Royall fled to Nova Scotia in 1775 during the American Revolutionary War, and left a will granting Sutton a pension for three years.