Issue Overview: Should thedescendants of slaves getreparations?

Protesters in 2011 holding a brief meeting on Wall Street in New York to demand reparations for abuses against African-

American slaves. Photo by: John Minchillo/AP. Photo by: John Minchillo/AP.

Slavery in the U.S. ended in 1865, but the effects live on to this day. That is why activists and

the descendants of slaves demand reparations.

The debate over reparations for slavery in the United States dates all the way back to the Civil

War. At the time, General William Tecumseh Sherman recommended that all freed slaves

should receive 40 acres of land and a mule. However, President Andrew Johnson and

Congress rejected the plan.

The U.S. government has yet to repay the descendants of slaves for what happened to their

ancestors. Still, the call for governments to take action has recently grown louder, and in

September 2016 a group at the United Nations wrote a report that concluded African-

Americans deserve reparations for enduring centuries of “racial terrorism”: "Contemporary

police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of

lynching."

By ThoughtCo.com, adapted by Newsela staff on 10.16.17

Word Count 992

Level 1140L

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What Are Reparations?

When some people hear the term "reparations," they think it means that descendants of slaves

will receive a large cash payout. But that isn't the only way reparations work. The U.N. panel

said that reparations can be "a formal apology, health initiatives, educational opportunities ...

psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and financial support, and debt cancellation."

This is not a new concept. For example, Germany has provided restitution to Holocaust

victims, even though there's no way to compensate for the lives of the six million Jews that

were slaughtered. The U.S. has also given reparations, specifically to the Japanese-

Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. The U.S. government later

apologized and gave $20,000 to the people who had been interned.

Those who oppose reparations for slave descendants argue that African-Americans and

Japanese-Americans have an important difference. Japanese survivors of internment were

still alive to receive reparations, but black former slaves are not alive anymore.

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Proponents And Opponents Of Reparations

The African-American community includes both opponents and proponents of reparations. Ta-

Nehisi Coates, a journalist for The Atlantic magazine, has become one of the leading

advocates for reparations for African-Americans, especially after he wrote an article entitled

"The Case for Reparations." Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason

University who is also black, opposes reparations.

Williams argues that African-Americans benefitted from slavery, and that their incomes are

usually higher than those of people in Africa. Yet, this ignores the fact that African-Americans

have higher rates of poverty and unemployment than other groups. It also ignores the fact that

black people have less wealth on average than white people.

Williams also ignores psychological scars left by slavery and racism. Researchers have linked

those scars to higher rates of high blood pressure and infant mortality for African-Americans.

Reparations supporters argue that the government can compensate African-Americans by

investing in their schooling, training and economic empowerment. But Williams says that the

federal government has already invested trillions of dollars to fight poverty.

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Coates argues that reparations are needed because, after the Civil War, African-Americans

endured a second slavery. This was due to practices like debt peonage, a system where

somebody is forced to work to pay off a debt. It was also due to Jim Crow laws, which

enforced racial segregation in the southern states.

Coates also pointed out how many people who owned land often refused to give the black

farmers, known as sharecroppers, the money owed to them. Banks and the federal

government, on the other hand, applied racist practices that made it hard for African-

Americans to get mortgages to own houses.

Coates notes how enslaved black people and slavers themselves thought that reparations

were necessary. He describes how in 1783, freedwoman Belinda Royall successfully sued for

reparations. In the 20th century, many other Americans backed reparations. Since 1989,

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lawmaker John Conyers has repeatedly introduced a bill known as the Commission to Study

and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. The bill has never gained

enough support to become a law.

How Institutions Have Addressed Slavery Ties

Many companies have been sued for their ties to slavery, such as Aetna, Lehman Brothers,

J.P. Morgan Chase, FleetBoston Financial and Brown & Williamson Tobacco. Walter Williams

said that these corporations aren't to blame, but some corporations have admitted their

wrongdoing.

Companies such as Aetna, a health insurance company, have acknowledged that they

profited from slavery by insuring the lives of slaves. Still, Aetna said it would not offer

reparations.

Tom Baker is a former director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut

School of Law. He told the New York Times in 2002 that he disagreed that insurance

companies should be sued for their slavery ties. He said it's unfair to target a few companies,

"when the slave economy was something that the whole society bears some responsibility for."

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Even some of the nation's oldest universities have had ties to slavery, such as Princeton,

Brown, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania and the College

of William and Mary. In 1838, Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to eliminate its debt.

Today, it is offering admissions preference to the descendants of the people it sold.

Yet slave descendant Sandra Thomas says she doesn't think Georgetown's reparations plan

goes far enough. "What about me?" she asked. "I don't want to go to school. I'm an old lady."

This raises an important point, which is that no amount of reparations can make up for the

injustices suffered because of slavery.

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