Author: Tamar Lewin
Publication: The New York Times
Date: June 4, 2001
It has been more than a century
since Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that the coastlands confiscated
in the Civil War be divided into 40-acre plots and distributed to thousands
of former slaves.
After Abraham Lincoln's assassination,
Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and took back the land that had been
distributed. Since then, the idea of compensating African-Americans for
the sins of two and a half centuries of slavery has hovered in the background,
far from reality. But now the movement for reparations is gaining steam.
As a political matter, reparations
has been a nonstarter: every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers
Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has introduced legislation calling for a comprehensive
study of reparations, and every year the legislation has stalled.
But as a social and legal movement,
the call for reparations has taken on substantial force this year. Black
professionals and scholars are taking up a cause that used to engage mostly
working-class blacks. And beyond the longstanding efforts to seek government
restitution, there is a new focus on winning reparations from corporate
targets that once profited from slavery.
The new momentum is apparent on
many fronts:
A California law that took effect
this year requires every insurance company licensed in the state to research
its past business, and that of its predecessor companies, and report to
the state whether it ever sold policies insuring slave owners against the
loss of their slave property, and if so to whom.
A team of prominent African-American
lawyers has announced plans to file lawsuits early next year seeking damages
from the federal government and companies that profited from slavery. The
team is part of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, led by Charles
Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Randall N. Robinson, the
founder of TransAfrica, a lobbying group.
In March, the Oklahoma Commission
to Study the Race Riots of 1921 recommended that survivors and their descendants
be paid reparations for the uprising in which thousands of whites stormed
a prosperous black neighborhood, destroying homes and businesses and killing
at least 40 people.
Aetna formally apologized in March
2000 for having written policies for slave owners on the lives of their
slaves. Three months later The Hartford Courant, which had run a front-page
article about Aetna's apology, made a front- page apology of its own, for
having run advertisements for the sale and capture of slaves.
Advocates of reparations are fighting
to make compensation for slavery an official theme of the United Nations
World Conference Against Racism in August, and hoping to win a declaration
that slavery is a crime against humanity for which reparations should be
paid.
Last month, The Philadelphia Inquirer
published two full-page editorials urging the creation of a national reparations
commission.
The idea of reparations raises tangled
questions about who should pay the money and who should receive it - and,
more profoundly, about the relative merits of affirmative action and restitution.
The Reparations Coordinating Committee's
litigation is unlikely to get into such particulars. The first task, lawyers
say, is to establish a legal wrong that must be remedied.
"The history of slavery in America
has never been fully addressed in a public forum," Mr. Ogletree said. "Litigation
will show what slavery meant, how it was profitable and how the issue of
white privilege is still with us. Litigation is a place to start, because
it focuses attention on the issue."
Some blacks still dismiss the reparations
movement as a digression from the issues that matter. "If the government
got the money from the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, that'd be great," said
Walter E. Williams, chairman of the economics department at George Mason
University. "But the government has to take the money from citizens, and
there are no citizens alive today who were responsible for slavery. The
problems that black people face are not going to be solved by white people,
and they're not going to be solved by money. The resources that are going
into the fight for reparations would be far more valuably spent making
sure that black kids have a credible education."
Reparations remain a divisive idea,
opposed by the vast majority of whites but widely supported by African-Americans.
"There is now no major black organization that does not support reparations,"
said Mr. Robinson, whose book "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks" is
a steady seller in black bookstores.
The legal argument, he said, is
compelling: "When government participates in a crime against humanity,
and benefits from it, then that government is under the law obliged to
make the victims whole. That's recognized as a principle of law."
Certainly, reparations payments
have become an increasingly familiar concept. The United States government
has paid reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in World War II, and
to several Indian tribes. Holocaust survivors who were used as forced laborers
have won reparations from European countries. Mexican braceros who worked
in the United States during World War II have filed a class- action lawsuit
for reparations.
Stuart E. Eizenstat, who as a senior
official in the Clinton administration negotiated settlements under which
Holocaust victims would receive $8 billion in reparations from the governments
of Germany, France and Austria and from Swiss banks, said that he viewed
those cases as different from the African-American claims, because Holocaust
reparations are going largely to surviving victims, while slavery reparations
would go to descendants generations removed.
"For slavery qua slavery, I think
the appropriate remedy is affirmative government action in general, rather
than reparations," said Mr. Eizenstat, who is now in private life. "And
if 100 years from now the great-great- grandson of a Holocaust laborer
asked for reparations, I don't think that would be appropriate, unless
there was some specific property that had been confiscated that they wanted
to recover."
Those campaigning for reparations
say that they are prepared to prove that African- Americans today continue
to suffer from the legacy of slavery - and, after slavery, another century
of legal discrimination.
"We are not raising claims that
you should pay us because you did something to us 150 years ago," said
Adjoa Aiyetoro, a legal consultant to the National Coalition of Blacks
for Reparations in America, which is preparing its own lawsuit against
the federal government and working with the coordinating committee. "We
are saying that we are injured today by the vestiges of slavery, which
took away income and property that was rightfully ours."
Part of the new momentum in the
reparations movement comes from efforts to win restitution not just from
the federal government, but also from companies that profited from slavery.
"I started doing research about the possibility of a lawsuit against the
government," said Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a lawyer. "But I turned to
corporations, after finding how difficult it would be to win a claim against
the government, given sovereign immunity, the statute of limitations, and
an opinion by a relatively liberal court rejecting the idea. If you can
show a company made immoral gains by profiting from slavery, you can file
an action for unjust enrichment."
Historians say that slavery was
so central to the economy in the early days of America that almost every
business benefited from it. "The entire economy of this country was based
on slavery, North as well as South," said Eric Foner, a professor of history
at Columbia University. "New York had a stranglehold on the cotton trade,
which made up half the total value of U.S. exports in 1850. Brooks Brothers
supplied a lot of clothing to plantation owners. Merchants, manufacturers,
everyone felt the economic ripples."
Government benefited, too, often
using slaves to build public works. Slaves helped build the United States
Capitol - and their owners received $5 a month for their labor.
Ms. Farmer-Paellmann, who found
the documents about Aetna's slave policies, is pursuing other companies
that profited from slavery. Among her discoveries was a 1906 history of
the New York Life Insurance Company, which explained that "among the first
1,000 policies issued, 339 were upon the lives of negro slaves in Maryland
and Virginia."
Spurred by the California legislation,
New York Life is now reviewing its archives, to find out to what extent
the company may have sold insurance to slave owners.
Although no lawsuits have been filed,
some old-line companies have reportedly begun to worry about their exposure.
Owen Pell, a New York lawyer who represented several companies in Holocaust-related
litigation, has spoken informally with several companies about the possibility
and potential shape of claims relating to African slavery.
Ultimately, insurance companies
may not be the most important defendants. The ripest potential defendants,
some lawyers say, may be municipal governments, which do not have the same
sovereign immunity as the federal government, and tobacco companies or
railroads - even those that declared bankruptcy after the Civil War, since
the old bankruptcy code did not wipe out any debts or liabilities that
were not specifically declared.
Often the connection to slavery
is mentioned in company histories: a history of the Arkwright Manufacturing
Company, now owned by the Dutch company Océ, describes how James
DeWolf, a slave trader, "invested his slaving profits in the textile mills"
Arkwright operated in Rhode Island.
To be sure, it is a long stretch
from a 19th- century slave trader to a 21st-century Dutch company that
makes copying machines, and Océ officials seemed baffled by any
possible connection to the slave trade. "This is the first I've heard of
it," said Karen Fitt, a company spokeswoman.
Still, Ms. Farmer-Paellmann says,
companies built on the profits from slavery may become strong advocates
for reparations from the government, as opposed to the private sector.
"My interest in this is to get these
corporations, once they are aware of their own connections, to be our chief
lobbyists in Washington for other forms of restitution," she said. "Apologies
aren't enough."
If the idea of paying reparations
for slavery makes Americans uneasy, Mr. Ogletree of Harvard said, it is
probably partly because, for most whites, it is a new idea, based on a
history they do not understand. "The uneasiness that some express about
reparations is the same uneasiness that we had about integration, about
women's right to choose," he said. "We've gained some important mainstream
viability, but these things take time."
