Reparations for slavery in the United States


Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery and/or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily by individuals and institutions.
This idea has been recurring in the politics of the United States, from the 1865 Special Field Orders No. 15 to the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The idea of reparations remains highly controversial.
The first known case of reparations for slavery in the United States was in 1783 to Belinda Royall in the form of a pension, and since then it has been and continues to be proposed and/or given in a variety of forms.
Forms of reparations which have been proposed or given in the United State by city, county, state, and national governments or private institutions include: individual monetary payments, settlements, scholarships, waiving of fees, and systemic initiatives to offset injustices, land-based compensation related to independence, apologies and acknowledgements of the injustices, tokenary measures, and the removal of monuments and streets named to slave owners and defenders of slavery.
Since further injustices and discrimination have continued since slavery was explicitly legal in the US, reparations for non-slavery related injustices have also been called for along-side slavery related reparations by black communities and civil rights organizations. Some suggest that the U.S. prison system starting with the convict lease system and continuing through the present-day government-owned corporation Federal Prison Industries, is a modern form of legal slavery that still primarily and disproportionately affects black populations and other minorities via the war on drugs and what has been criticized as a school-to-prison pipeline.
In 2020 as the call for reparations in the US has been bolstered by protests around police brutality and other cases of systemic racism in the US. Recently in the US, the call for reparations for racism in the US has been made along side calls for reparations for slavery.

U.S. historical context

The arguments surrounding reparations are based on the formal discussion about many different reparations, and actual land reparations received by African Americans which were later taken away. In 1865, after the Confederate States of America were defeated in the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15 to both "assure the harmony of action in the area of operations" and to solve problems caused by the masses of freed slaves, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land in the sea islands and around Charleston, South Carolina for the exclusive use of black people who had been enslaved. The army also had a number of unneeded mules which were given to settlers. Around 40,000 freed slaves were settled on 400,000 acres in Georgia and South Carolina. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after Lincoln was assassinated, the land was returned to its previous owners, and the blacks were forced to leave. In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it was not passed.
Reconstruction came to an end in 1877 without the issue of reparations having been addressed. Thereafter, a deliberate movement of segregation and oppression arose in southern states. Jim Crow laws passed in some southeastern states to reinforce the existing inequality that slavery had produced. In addition white extremist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan engaged in a massive campaign of terrorism throughout the Southeast in order to keep African Americans in their prescribed social place. For decades this assumed inequality and injustice was ruled on in court decisions and debated in public discourse.
In one anomalous case, a former slave named Henrietta Wood successfully sued for compensation after having been kidnapped from the free state of Ohio and sold into slavery in Mississippi. After the American Civil War, she was freed and returned to Cincinnati, where she won her case in federal court in 1878, receiving $2,500 in damages. Though the verdict was a national news story, it did not prompt any trend toward additional similar cases.
The topic became a major issue in 2020 due to the highlighting of ongoing systemic racism by the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis and the ensuing George Floyd protests which spurred the removal of confederate monuments in many states. In some instances, reparations for slavery have been placed along side call for systemic change to resolve racial injustice and/or reparations for systemic racism, including the call to defund the police.

Proposals for reparations

United States government

Some proposals have called for direct payments from the U.S. government. Various estimates have been given if such payments were to be made. Harper's Magazine estimated that the total of reparations due was about "$97 trillion, based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, regardless the United States wasn't a recognized independent country until after the Revolutionary War in 1787, compounded at 6% interest through 1993". Should all or part of this amount be paid to the descendants of slaves in the United States, the current U.S. government would only pay a fraction of that cost, since it has been in existence only since 1789.
The Rev. M.J. Divine, better known as Father Divine, was one of the earliest leaders to argue clearly for "retroactive compensation" and the message was spread via International Peace Mission publications. On July 28, 1951, Father Divine issued a "peace stamp" bearing the text: "Peace! All nations and peoples who have suppressed and oppressed the under-privileged, they will be obliged to pay the African slaves and their descendants for all uncompensated servitude and for all unjust compensation, whereby they have been unjustly deprived of compensation on the account of previous condition of servitude and the present condition of servitude. This is to be accomplished in the defense of all other under-privileged subjects and must be paid retroactive up-to-date".
At the first National Reparations Convention in Chicago in 2001, a proposal by Howshua Amariel, a Chicago social activist, would require the federal government to make reparations to proven descendants of slaves. In addition, Amariel stated "For those blacks who wish to remain in America, they should receive reparations in the form of free education, free medical, free legal and free financial aid for 50 years with no taxes levied," and "For those desiring to leave America, every black person would receive a million dollars or more, backed by gold, in reparation." At the convention Amariel's proposal received approval from the 100 or so participants, nevertheless the question of who would receive such payments, who should pay them and in what amount, has remained highly controversial, since the United States Census does not track descent from slaves or slave owners and relies on self-reported racial categories.
On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.
There have been 9 states that have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans. Those states are:
In April 2010, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in a New York Times editorial advised reparations activists to consider the African role in the slave trade in regard to who should shoulder the cost of reparations.

Private institutions

Private institutions and corporations were also involved in slavery. On March 8, 2000, Reuters News Service reported that Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a law school graduate, initiated a one-woman campaign making a historic demand for restitution and apologies from modern companies that played a direct role in enslaving Africans. Aetna Inc. was her first target because of their practice of writing life insurance policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slave owners as the beneficiaries. In response to Farmer-Paellmann's demand, Aetna Inc. issued a public apology, and the "corporate restitution movement" was born.
By 2002, nine lawsuits were filed around the country coordinated by Farmer-Paellmann and the Restitution Study Group—a New York non-profit. The litigation included 20 plaintiffs, demanding restitution from 20 companies from the banking, insurance, textile, railroad, and tobacco industries. The cases were consolidated under 28 U.S.C. 1407 to multidistrict litigation in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The district court dismissed the lawsuits with prejudice, and the claimants appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
On December 13, 2006, that court, in an opinion written by Judge Richard Posner, modified the district court's judgment to be a dismissal without prejudice, affirmed the majority of the district court's judgment, and reversed the portion of the district court's judgment dismissing the plaintiffs' consumer protection claims, remanding the case for further proceedings consistent with its opinion. Thus, the plaintiffs may bring the lawsuit again, but must clear considerable procedural and substantive hurdles first:
If one or more of the defendants violated a state law by transporting slaves in 1850, and the plaintiffs can establish standing to sue, prove the violation despite its antiquity, establish that the law was intended to provide a remedy to lawfully enslaved persons or their descendants, identify their ancestors, quantify damages incurred, and persuade the court to toll the statute of limitations, there would be no further obstacle to the grant of relief.

In October 2000, California passed the Slavery Era Disclosure Law requiring insurance companies doing business there to report on their role in slavery. The disclosure legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Hayden, is the prototype for similar laws passed in 12 states around the United States.
The NAACP has called for more of such legislation at local and corporate levels. It quotes Dennis C. Hayes, CEO of the NAACP, as saying, "Absolutely, we will be pursuing reparations from companies that have historical ties to slavery and engaging all parties to come to the table." Brown University, whose namesake family was involved in the slave trade, has also established a committee to explore the issue of reparations. In February 2007, Brown University announced a set of responses to its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. While in 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for the "sins" of racism, including slavery.
In December 2005, a boycott was called by a coalition of reparations groups under the sponsorship of the Restitution Study Group. The boycott targets the student loan products of banks deemed complicit in slavery—particularly those identified in the Farmer-Paellmann litigation. As part of the boycott, students are asked to choose from other banks to finance their student loans.
Pro-reparations groups such as The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America advocate for compensation to be in the form of community rehabilitation and not payments to individual descendants.

Arguments for reparations

Accumulated wealth

In 2008 the American Humanist Association published an article which argued that if emancipated slaves had been allowed to possess and retain the profits of their labor, their descendants might now control a much larger share of American social and monetary wealth. Not only did the freedmen not receive a share of these profits, but they were stripped of the small amounts of compensation paid to some of them during Reconstruction.
The wealth of the United States was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of African American slave labor. According to this view, reparations would be valuable primarily as a way of correcting modern economic imbalances.

Health care

In 2019, VICE magazine published an article that argued racial health disparities, from slavery through Jim Crow until today, have cost Black Americans a significant amount of money in health care expenses and lost wages, and should be paid back.

Precedents

Advocates have used other examples of reparations to argue that victims of institutional slavery should be similarly compensated.
In several cases the federal government has formally apologized to or compensated minority groups for past actions:
U.S. state governments have made reparations in some specific circumstances:
Other countries have also opted to pay reparations for past grievances, such as:

Legal argument against reparations

The legal statute of limitations for filing lawsuits has long since passed, which prevents courts from granting relief via a lawsuit. This has been used effectively in several suits, including "In re African American Slave Descendants", which dismissed a high-profile suit against a number of businesses with ties to slavery.

Additional arguments and opinions

The Libertarian Party has suggested that reparations would make racism worse.
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, while acknowledging that slavery was an "original sin" of the United States, opposes providing reparations because "none of us currently living are responsible." Legal philosophers have forcefully argued that this fact is irrelevant.
One publication against reparations is David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery. Other works that discuss problems with reparations include John Torpey's Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics, Alfred Brophy's Reparations Pro and Con, and Nahshon Perez's Freedom from Past Injustices.

Examples

Federal government

On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.

States

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