Fisk University forum speakers affirm
appropriateness of reparations
a report from Gene TeSelle
Check out a UCC call for study
of reparations.
Reparations will be on the table at the 2001
General Assembly.
Nashville, TN -- February 23, 2001--Today the Race
Relations Institute at Fisk University held a forum on the reparations
issue. Speakers included Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who introduced H.R.
40 in 1999 seeking the appointment of a commission to study proposals
for reparations to African-Americans. I had to miss his address. But I
did hear a broadly representative panel in the afternoon.
Conrad Worrill, national chair of the National Black
United Front, pointed out that the reparations question was raised early
in the nineteenth century and has been with us in various forms ever
since. The most recent phase began in 1960, with calls for reparations
from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and most famously James Forman and
IFC0. He pointed out that commissions have recently called for
reparations after the long-hidden atrocities in Rosewood, FL, and Tulsa,
OK. Randall Robinson's book last year summarized many of the issues.
Noted lawyers, including Johnny Cochran, have expressed an interest in
bringing lawsuits. And formal complaints have been filed with the United
Nations, claiming crimes against humanity.
Malcolm Grace, an attorney with Conlon, Frantz, Phelan
and Pires of Washington, DC, told about the successful lawsuit in behalf
of black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and
specifically the Farmers Home Administration for systematic
discrimination. Since the Reagan administration abolished the USDA's
civil rights division and even destroyed records, the trial judge set up
a special "Track A" with an easier standard of proof, along
with the "Track B" which followed traditional rules of
evidence. Thus far 24,000 claimants have participated; 19,000 claims
have been adjudicated; and 10,000 have been approved. Settlements under
Track B have been as high as $5 million.
Grace made two important points about law and public
relations. First, he commented that an initial study got the ball
rolling and made it possible for the judge to waive the statute of
limitations. Second, the suit was settled out of court because the U.S.
government did not want all of the evidence to be made public. The point
is not so much the money involved as the fact that legal hearings are
held and a judgment is eventually made.
Another attorney was Kevin Outterson, a practicing
attorney in Nashville and an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
He emphasized the responsibility of both the federal and state
governments for several centuries. First of all, governments collected
taxes on the import and the sale of slaves; since slaves were property,
taxes were also paid on them, and it is estimated that 10-20% of the
total wealth of the U.S. was in slaves.
We frequently hear the objection that "my
ancestors never owned slaves"; but the state and federal
governments profited from slavery in many ways, and it can be argued
that they have a continuing liability. When property taxes were not
paid, governments seized and sold slaves along with other property; this
may well fall under the legal principle of "wrongful levy" of
taxes (an analogy is the sale of art works seized from Jews; even if
they were bought innocently, museums are having to give them back).
Furthermore, the U.S. banned import of slaves after 1808, but tens of
thousands were illegally imported after that date; the U.S. even signed
the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, acknowledging that the continuation of the
slave trade was, in today's language, a crime against humanity. When he
is on a fellowship in Oxford he plans to research other aspects of
international law, including the fact that slaves were not citizens but
either stateless persons or foreign nationals, and in some treaties the
U.S. may well have renounced its sovereign immunity and waived the
statute of limitations.
It became clear during Outterson's address that
reparations fits right in with a number of recent trends and
enthusiasms. We love to use sophisticated econometric methods to trace
value; a study in 1990, using several different methods, came up with a
figure of $1.4 trillion, more than $50,000 per person when divided by
the current African American population. Also there is a growing trend
to seek reparations or restoration of property in the wake of crimes
perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, by Soviet puppets in eastern Europe,
and by Castro's Cuba; if it can be claimed by the Cuban-American
Foundation, that raucous sponsor of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W.
Bush, it can certainly be claimed by the descendants of slaves. And the
international law of "crimes against humanity," after being
muted during the Cold War years, is gaining prominence and is even being
enforced by international courts.
Leah Wise, executive director of the Southeast
Regional Economic Justice Network in Durham, NC, spoke about the current
situation. "The rape of our people is still going on," she
said; "the status of people on the ground is getting worse right
now." She recalled how black workers had been exploited as scabs
and as low-wage workers; in chain gangs and now in the prison-industrial
complex; in the "fractured work" of contingent employment and
in the assembly-line speedups in poultry plants. She characterized the
South as unregulated, unorganized, regressive in its tax structure, and
repressive in its behavior--in sum as "the Achilles heel of the
nation."
Malcolm Grace had commented that
"reparations" still would not mean complete "repair"
of all the damage that has been done. Leah Wise now added that repair
needs to start from the bottom, among the most vulnerable.
Adjoa Aiyetoro, attorney with the National Coalition
of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA), founded in 1987, recalled
that momentum has built up only gradually. When it began, the movement
was depicted as the work of "radicals" and
"nationalists." But then the American Bar Association gave it
credibility in 1991, and the NAACP signed on, too.
She said that she is often asked for dollar figures,
and her reply is, "More than a dollar." The point, she said,
is that the issue needs study in order to measure the harm and know what
the remedy is. Critics like to point to the Oprah Winfreys and the Bill
Cosbys and the Michael Jordans as proof that you can be successful if
you work hard and give up the victim mentality, but this is clearly a
diversionary tactic. We are still dealing with "the vestiges of
slavery," she said, pointing out that the criminalization of black
people began early (in the nineteenth century the same acts were
punished differently, depending on race) and is still continuing in
differential sentencing and the permanent deprivation of voting rights
in many states.
Councilman Melvin Black of Metropolitan Nashville
recounted how he got the 11 African-American council members to agree to
sign a resolution in support of H.R. 40, and how they called other
council members with the message, "I need your signature."
They got 30 of the 40 council members to introduce the bill, and it
passed, though with the predictable abstentions and absences. Nashville
thus joins Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta in supporting H.R. 40.
Several speakers emphasized that the chief issue is
not the money involved but study, legal hearings, and legal judgments.
They have all heard the objection that "it will never happen,"
or "the money will never be paid," or "within a year the
money will end up in the same hands as before." They are aware of
the debates between those who want personal payments, those who want the
money to go into community development funds for the permanent benefit
of the African American community, and those who advocate credits for
education, housing, or businesses to all who can qualify. These
questions, they seem to be confident, are best worked out in the process
of fact-finding and legal and moral argumentation--a process which has
scarcely begun.
