Reparations bill gets new attention... could other nations hold blueprint?
TONY BURROUGHS’ great-great-greatgreat grandfather was freed from slavery in 1806 by a white woman from Pennsylvania. In her last will and testament, Margaret Hutton had specified that David Truman was to be taught to read and do maths.
The 25-year-old was given $8 (£6), about $165 (£130) in today’s money.
But 59 years later, when a Union Army general named Gordon Granger announced in Texas on June 19, 1865 – now known as Juneteenth – that “all slaves are free,” neither Mr Truman nor his descendants benefited from the federal government’s short-lived promise of what then passed for reparations: “forty acres and a mule.”
The title page of Margaret Hutton’s will specified David Truman should be freed in 1806.
Mr Truman’s grandson, Mr Burroughs discovered, would later accumulate enough money to buy a single acre for farming. But he lost it some years later. From enslavement, in all, it would take six generations – until Mr Burroughs’ parents’ generation, in the late 1960s –before the family had the financial footing to become homeowners.
“The Confederates lost the Civil War. They sure didn’t give up the fight,” said Mr Burroughs, 71, the founder of the Centre For Black Genealogy, a Chicagobased organisation that helps people scour records and offers advice about how to trace their lineages.
“There’s so many ways in which Black Americans have been denied wealth,” he said.
Protests unleashed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans have re-centred racial inequality in the public consciousness, and renewed debate around what to do about it — including reparations.
From Germany to South Africa, and from Colombia to Kuwait, various authorities have sought to draft and implement policies, not always monetary payments, whose chief purpose is to translate the most hellish forms of suffering into redress.
Though the UK Government has not made reparations for the trans-atlantic slave trade, in 2013 it paid $31million (£24m) to 5,228 claimants in Kenya for unspeakable atrocities committed against Mau Mau independence fighters from 1952-1963.
Forced off their fertile lands by white European settlers, Mau Mau rebels started fighting back. While the Mau Mau themselves were responsible for many deaths, when captured, women were sometimes raped with glass bottles; men castrated with pliers.
Kenyans celebrated the announcement of a legal decision in their case at Britain’s High Court concerning Mau Mau veterans.
Iraq has paid out almost $50 billion (£31 billion) to Kuwait for the destruction of its oil fields during its invasion and occupation of the country during the 1990-91 Gulf War. It has also compensated Kuwaitis for personal property damages, job losses and sexual assaults.
In 2011, Colombia’s so-called Victims Law was established for the more than 11 million people who were caught up in more than half a century of massacres, bombs and armed conflict between Colombia’s guerrillas, paramilitaries and military forces.
“It allows people to get back on their feet and be reborn,” said Gloria Quintero, 48, speaking about the law, a far-reaching reparations system that includes financial payments, restitution of stolen land, health care, education and other benefits.
Ms Quintero was forced to flee her home twice, and her brother was “disappeared” by paramilitaries. Only 10 per cent of the population of Grenada, the town where she lives in central Colombia, remains. Today, Ms Quintero runs her own family baking business, a relative success story she credits to her government’s decision to pursue reparations.
“When you think about some of the violations, most people have received a pittance,” said Makau Mutua, a Kenyan-american law professor who was part of the justice and reconciliation task force in Kenya that helped secure the Mau Mau payments.
Mr Mutua is also active in pressuring Germany’s government to be held accountable for its genocidal slaughter of Herero and Nama tribespeople in Namibia more than a century ago when the African nation was a German colony.
Germany has accepted “moral responsibility” for the killings. But it has so far kept an official apology for the massacres at arm’s length to avoid compensation claims, according to Wolfgang Kaleck, a German civil rights attorney who is involved in the negotiations. He said a development in the case is expected within months.
“The big question is: What is appropriate compensation in this context?” he said.
In America, the case for reparations for the federal government’s role in slavery has been both growing and met with scepticism.
Just weeks after Mr Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes, the California Assembly passed a bill to establish a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.
But more than a year before, Senator Sheila Jackson Lee sponsored a bill in Congress known as HR 40, or the Commission To Study And Develop Reparation Proposals For Africanamericans Act. And for more than two decades before her, Senator John Conyers introduced it year after year without success.
The “40” is a reference to the 40 acres of land promised, but never fully delivered, to former slaves by another Union Army general, William
Sherman, in 1865.
It’s a bill that, if passed, would study what, if anything, the federal government owes the descendants of slaves, and how to implement that debt. Though Congress for the first time formally apologised for slavery in 2008, HR 40 has still faced opposition.
Mr Burroughs is convinced reparations, and racism more generally, will feature heavily as a topic in the American presidential campaign ahead of November’s vote. He believes President Donald Trump has positioned himself as a defender of racism, and this will partly lead to his electoral undoing.
“Reparations aren’t a lost cause. I think we’ll get there,” said Mr Burroughs.
There’s so many ways in which Black Americans have been denied wealth