TRUTH of Reparations

A growing number of states and local municipalities are launching task forces and programs to examine possible reparations?for Black American descendants of?enslavement. A once-fringe movement is increasingly going mainstream and gathering supporters. The belief is that it is a path to begin to heal divides.

New York became the latest to join the movement after?Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill last month to establish a commission for the study of reparations. It joins California in examining what reparations should be considered to close the so-called wealth and education gaps connected to the legacy of enslavement and racial violence. There is a long list of individual communities who have looked at reparations as a way to solve their racial problems.

It began, primarily, after the death of George Floyd and the rise of resulting rioting and violence. In all cases, governments have had to contend with how to pay the cost of adopting ambitious recommendations and how they would be implemented.

The concept of reparations has its roots back to the Civil War when President Lincoln’s Secretary of War?Edwin Stanton?and Union General William Sherman?met with 20 African American ministers. Stanton and Sherman asked 12 questions, including: “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.” Appointed spokesperson,?Baptist?minister, and former enslaved person Garrison Frazier replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare … We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”?

On Jan. 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 that authorized 400,000 acres of coastal land from?Charlston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida?to be divided into forty-acre plots and given to newly freed enslaved people for their exclusive use. The land had been confiscated by the Union from white slaveholders during the?Civil War. Because Sherman later gave orders for the Army to lend?mules?to the freedmen, the phrase “forty acres and a mule” became popular.?

However, shortly after Vice President?Andrew Jackson?became president following?Lincoln’s assassination?on Apr. 14, 1865, he worked to rescind the order and revert the land back to the white landowners. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had confiscated 850,000 acres of former Confederates’ land. By mid-1867, all but 75,000 acres had been returned to the Confederate owners.?

Isn’t this an interesting concept… “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”?If the concept of reparations to those directly impacted did not work because it took from those directly responsible (slaveowners) and given to those who had no control over their situations (and were willing to work and pay for the land), how can we believe reparations to those who may have been ancestors (and are not willing to work for it), coming from individuals who had no direct connections to the situation (taxpayers), could possibly work.

Slavery is, no doubt, a terrible thing and should never be tolerated, but reparations of the sort being proposed and supported will not work to solve the problems of racial divide.

William Darity Jr. of the New York Times makes his case this way…” The wealth gap between Black and white Americans is too enormous to be remedied through incremental programs. What’s needed are federal?reparations. The reason is essentially twofold: The sheer size of the wealth gap requires massive federal intervention to close it, and justice requires that the U.S. government fulfill its unmet obligations to African American slaves and their descendants.” He knows his history; however, he ignores the powerful message of Garrison Frazier.

There are other paths. ?Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in the office’s June 1, 2021, annual report, states: “Measures taken to address the past should seek to transform the future (my emphasis). Structures and systems that were designed and shaped by enslavement, colonialism and successive racially discriminatory policies and systems must be transformed.” The economic processes that caused slavery can no more solve racial inequality than the current “open border” policies solve problems of not having employees to take certain jobs in this country.?

We must find better paths to solve our problems and correct past mistakes!