Growing Call For Reparations of U.S. Slavery

by Katherine Stapp

The apology from Aetna Inc., the nation's largest health and life insurer, and possible restitution in the form of a scholarship fund for black students, represents a small victory in a low-intensity war that has been simmering for years: that of an effort by African Americans to receive reparations for the U.S. legacy of slavery and segregation.

The demand for reparations is not new, but it has been given a recent boost by some of the nation's leading black intellectuals, most prominently Randall Robinson.

Earlier this year, Robinson, the founder and president of a lobbying group called TransAfrica, published a book called "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks" (Dutton, 2000).

In "The Debt," Robinson argues that while the Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps are still being compensated for their stolen labor, no black Americans have received similar consideration for 350 years of brutality and cultural annihilation.

And if the "yawning economic gap between blacks and whites in this country" first imposed by slavery is not closed, he says, "there is no chance that America can solve its racial problems."

The argument for reparations is generally dismissed by whites as a "blame game" in which they are unreasonably being held accountable for acts committed by and against generations long dead.

Certainly, slavery was a terrible sin, they say, but dwelling on this ugly era will only prolong racial healing, not facilitate it.

For example, a bill to merely study the issue of reparations has been introduced in the U.S. Congress every year since 1993 by a black Democrat named John Conyers. Every year, it has stalled in committee.

To these critics, Robinson responds that slavery may be dead, but its ghost lingers.

"Like it or not," he writes, "the races are fixed in their views of each other."

"Memory was an essential ingredient for social progress, and blacks had none," he says. "Only memory would tip them off that their poverty was not fixed in nature as a condition that was meant to be. Not what had always been. Not normal."

The most insidious thing about human bondage, he notes, is that its debilitating effects persist long after the institution itself has been abolished.

Most people in the United States are familiar with the dreary statistics: African Americans are more likely to go to jail, to be there longer, and, if their crime is eligible, to receive the death penalty. They lag behind whites according to every social yardstick: literacy, life expectancy, income and education. They are more likely to be murdered, and less likely to have a father at home.

Who is to blame for these "casualties of inattention and low self-esteem?" Mostly the U.S. government, Robinson says, but also white America as a whole, which continues to benefit from a skewed system while simultaneously denying that it exists.

Perhaps his real point is that even if mass reparations -- which have been estimated by Georgetown Professor Richard America at $5 to $10 trillion -- are a pipe dream, the mere act of demanding them would help to heal the collective psyche of black America.

"As the psychiatrist would exhort the patient troubled in adulthood by some unspeakable, but repressed, violation in early life," he writes, "If you're ever to get past this, it must be gotten out and dealt with...You are owed. You were caused to endure terrible things. The fault is not yours. There is nothing wrong with you. They did this to you."

Perhaps, he says, the simple quest for a final, fundamental reckoning will accomplish what civil rights laws and quotas never could.

While reparations on the scale advocated by "The Debt" will probably never be forthcoming, there are some individual cases in which African Americans have won damages for past wrongs.

In 1994, the Florida legislature awarded $2 million to the survivors (and their descendants) of a 1923 white mob rampage in the town of Rosewood. Finding that local officials had failed to protect residents of the black town -- which was burned to the ground -- Florida became the first state ever to compensate victims of racial violence.

And last month, a state commission in Oklahoma recommended that reparations be paid to the survivors of a notorious 1921 incident in which whites burned down a prosperous Tulsa community known as the "Black Wall Street," killing and injuring hundreds of residents while the police stood by.

The Tulsa race riots are considered by some historians to be the bloodiest in U.S. history.

In both cases, official action was finally taken because African Americans pressed their claims and refused to be ignored.

Similarly, the Aetna apology was apparently the result of a lone crusading lawyer named Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who plans to go after other companies she says profited from the slave trade, such as the eighth-biggest U.S. banking group FleetBoston Financial.

As Robinson writes in "The Debt," "Blacks should come broadly to know that we do not approach this looming national debate as supplicants...This is a struggle that we cannot lose, for in the very making of it we will discover, if nothing else, ourselves."

However the story ends, groups like the Washington, DC-based National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America -- whose 1996 poll indicated 88 percent support for reparations among African Americans -- have no intention of letting it die in committee.