Taxes paid for inequality

Reparations are overdue

Regarding “Juneteenth,” ( June 23): Carl J. Schiro, you are correct. Black Americans have not picked cotton today, and you do not own any slaves. Here are reparations from a different context. Washington, D.C., ex-slave masters were paid up to $300 per person, because they lost their “slave property.” Andrew Johnson denied the 40 acres initially approved to give ex-slaves a foothold in America’s economy, then gave the property to the ex-slave masters due to their loss of “property.” In Plessy v. Ferguson, the formerly slaveowning Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of “separate but equal.” Brown v. Board of Education overruled the Plessy decision but the separate social structure lived on. My parents paid taxes for me to attend a separate but unequal high school; to get on the same bus as white students but be commanded to sit in the back. My tax dollars have paid for my inequality in the social structure — better schools for others, statues of men who fought to keep “negroes enslaved,” public colleges that barred me from attending and more. Dad, after serving in World War II, could not buy a home in the same neighborhoods where German prisoners of war could. I would hug the two Confederate soldiers who ultimately gave me life, then, I would slap them because they owned and raped my grandmothers. They helped the awful dark wings of Jim Crow fly over me for 76 years. Sir, your philosophy concerning nonsense is rinsed in the liquid of monopoly — it is hogwash. I want to be repaired.

James H. Ford Jr., Houston