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TheCaseforReparations_Coates_TheAtlantic_5-141.pdf
The Case for Reparations
By Ta-Nehisi Coates MAY 21, 2014
Carlos Javier Ortiz
The Case for Reparations Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of
separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
A nd if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee,
and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go
free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt
not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and
out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God
hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou
wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee:
therefore I command thee this thing today.
— DEUTERONOMY 15: 12–15
Chapters
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
V. The Quiet Plunder
FEATURES: MENU
C
Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years.
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right
rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to
quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is
commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives
damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage,
has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular
right to seek reparation.
— JOHN LOCKE, “SECOND TREATISE”
By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many
times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.
— ANONYMOUS, 1861
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
LYDE ROSS was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near
Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents
owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs,
and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in
a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a
Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave
to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black
families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the
law.
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi
was, in all facets of society, a
kleptocracy. The majority of the
people in the state were
perpetually robbed of the vote—a
hijacking engineered through the
trickery of the poll tax and the
muscle of the lynch mob. Between
1882 and 1968, more black people
were lynched in Mississippi than in
any other state. “You and I know
what’s the best way to keep the
nigger from voting,” blustered
Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi
senator and a proud Klansman.
“You do it the night before the
election.”
The state’s regime partnered
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
IX. Toward A New Country
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Google+
When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
robbery of the franchise with
robbery of the purse. Many of
Mississippi’s black farmers lived in
debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their
landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and
necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was
determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—
and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the
next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at
the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under
vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from
Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In
her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of
Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being
made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin
said. “You had to sneak away.”
When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his
father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not
have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could
not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no
way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities
seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and
mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family
was reduced to sharecropping.
This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-
part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to
the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and
24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was
taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of
the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,”
the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball
spring training facility in Florida.”
Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more
challenging school. There was very little support for educating black
people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears,
“Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported.
Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children
throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local
Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to
work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did
not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.
Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his
only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have
this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father
$17.
“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they
took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to
him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of
my losses.”
The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages
treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split
the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would
often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim.
If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15
cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit
for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But
Sharecropper boys in 1936 (Carly Mydans/Library of Congress)
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK Elegant Racism “If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination.” Read more
that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The
mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent
back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.
It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an
American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the
heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He
thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because
they’ll come and kill us all.”
Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered
him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his
chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could
go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without
being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.
Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world
from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny
had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi
lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie
River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans
that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The
black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and
work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive
warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as
a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had
children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the
vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a
white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his
gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete.
Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the
sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.
In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling
community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a
predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African
Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was
anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s
Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the
neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial
living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country,
North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall
grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in
wait.
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out.
This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was
not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the
bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on
contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of
homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the
benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not
the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for
only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the
seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a
normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he
missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down
payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at
inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their
down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring
in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with
payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News
of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the
property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four
times.”
Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but
was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth
was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s
through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of
the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and
extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive
covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress
created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private
mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the
down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a
possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that
rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps,
green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one
From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.
appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These
neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance.
Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually
considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither
the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered.
Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-
backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was
already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate
means of obtaining a mortgage.
Explore Redlining in Chicago
“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have
required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams,
the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing
Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that
could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and
Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA- backed mortgages. (Map development by Frankie Dintino)
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Leaflet | Map scans courtesy of LaDale Winling of urbanoasis.org.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK The American Case Against a Black Middle Class “When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots.” Read more
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth
accumulation in American history, African Americans who
desired and were able to afford home ownership found
themselves consigned to central-city communities where their
investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of
the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,]
their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in
comparison to those homes and communities that FHA
appraisers deemed desirable.
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American
dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government.
Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them
for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot
lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the
historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the
chase and the kill.”
The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more
than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was
estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by
exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During
this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers
who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well
established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a
contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.”
Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.
Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the
emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his
community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked
him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.
“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that
ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His
glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi
where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So
how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was.
“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I
just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated
wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you
know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up
in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my
kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people.
And no law.”
But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract
Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and
West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of
predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay
$25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was
Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a
mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air
—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract
sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They
scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’
compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city
inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers,
when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers
who were in on the scheme.
The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually
number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the
speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’
doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade.
They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments
in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers,
accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to
reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.”
Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
A
In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers
for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid
for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a
“fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover,
the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted
willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.”
Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the
government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a
better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against
their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They
wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they
wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said
offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no
longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking
reparations.
II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
CCORDING TO THE MOST-RECENT STATISTICS, North Lawndale is now on
the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930
its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of
“interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent
black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a
WATCH VIDEO The story of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League
whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the
national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live
below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent
of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the
city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800
jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their
prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits
directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago.
Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and
whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of
Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black
neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined
incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he
found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration
rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the
white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering
differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A
difference of kind, not degree.”
Interactive Census Map Race Vacancy Unemployment
Show Population Density
100% White 100% Non-white 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
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Leaflet | © OpenStreetMap contributors
In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—
characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single
parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not
simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this
pattern Chicago is not alone.”
The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago.
The humiliation of WHITES ONLY signs are gone. Rates of black poverty
have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the
gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk
significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault
lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households
is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist
at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and
found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had
been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study
showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into
affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods,
blacks tended to fall out of them.
This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are
significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center
estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as
black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or
negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black
family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity
strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.
And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of
wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of
neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not
generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research
shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of
neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and
whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is
not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white
children.”
Explore race, unemployment, and vacancy rates over seven decades in Chicago. (Map design and development by Frankie Dintino) Leaflet | © OpenStreetMap contributors
A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored man of means who was giving his
The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their
way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching
their children and grandchildren tumble back.
Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the
Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the
1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most
segregated ethnic group in the country.
With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes
the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see
poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular
bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been
paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has
been devastating.
One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that
these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that
can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In
2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among
young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making
too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up
dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless
babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see
your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black
politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black
people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making
its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is
disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim
inheritance.
The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took
direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history
of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate
and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by
predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial.
Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations
proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury,
the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that
he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v.
Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
children a college education.”
The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades
have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s.
Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack
Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters
—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered
in the negative.
The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average
American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of
upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won
by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha
Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that
comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare
with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of
privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be
evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality.
An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color.
VIEW SLIDESHOW The Abandoned Buildings of Chicago's North Lawndale (11 photos)
I III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
N 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the
commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been
born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold
into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of
enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall,
a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free
after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts
legislature:
The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of
time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years,
while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of
one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been
accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by
her servitude.
WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a
body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the
reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she
prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of
Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm
daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter
comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.
Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be
paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful
attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America
had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they
might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at
least not outrageous.
Click the image above to view the full document.
“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions
committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John
Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were
fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”
As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this
country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected.
Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make
“membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In
1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted
them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for
their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote
Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the
kingdom of men.’ ”
Click the image above to view the full document.
Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder
through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a
plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that
all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than
40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their
freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner
of one.”
In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled
planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:
Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by
you.”
Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?”
In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast
that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed
that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK What We Should Be Asking About Reparations
House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and
the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987
under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in
1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has
pursued reparations claims in court.
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the
response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have
been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have
been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language
instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the
ex‑slaves.”
Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left
to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second
slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks,
and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were
overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated
against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police
brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black
bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in
the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long
centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are
haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having
pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not
disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all
around us.
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably
follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But
if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking
point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the
past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit
area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for
a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as
recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy
solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study
Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this
bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions.
But we are not interested.
“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped
found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered
left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John
“Any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.” Read more
Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We
can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to
anyone.”
That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it
to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the
impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we
conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not
inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community
that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to
make of the world’s oldest democracy?
One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing
the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral
immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The
last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly
claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A
nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington
crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has
meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into
World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s
genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George
Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of
the runagate Oney Judge.
In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent”
white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the
community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched
outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has
passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the
lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief
that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing
begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white
dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be
made to disappear if only we don’t look.
There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our
ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy
Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
A
Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress)
Dwight said in 1810.
We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and
are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt,
particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous
Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will
rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and
stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
MERICA BEGINS IN BLACK PLUNDER AND WHITE DEMOCRACY, two features
that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who
came together to found the independent United States, dedicated
to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands
with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of
them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel
responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their
attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two
were not unconnected.”
When enslaved Africans, plundered
of their bodies, plundered of their
families, and plundered of their
labor, were brought to the colony
of Virginia in 1619, they did not
initially endure the naked racism
that would engulf their progeny.
Some of them were freed. Some of
them intermarried. Still others
escaped with the white indentured
servants who had suffered as they
had. Some even rebelled together,
allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.
One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces
would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the
two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that
its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard
usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their
contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.
This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was
boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the
colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more
efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still
legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections,
African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the
protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable
working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal
resistance.
For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a
class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In
1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry
arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a
slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia
assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—
but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked,
without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony
mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that
hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local
church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that
time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks
and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at
the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in
America.
“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and
black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the
Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich,
belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”
In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi,
almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all
Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the
largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain
counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-
fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the
economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected.
In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from
slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of
the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the
looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it
powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of
world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian
Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”
In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated at a slave auction. (Library of Congress)
The wealth accorded America by
slavery was not just in what the
slaves pulled from the land but in
the slaves themselves. “In 1860,
slaves as an asset were worth more
than all of America’s
manufacturing, all of the railroads,
all of the productive capacity of the
United States put together,” the
Yale historian David W. Blight has
noted. “Slaves were the single
largest, by far, financial asset of
property in the entire American
economy.” The sale of these slaves
—“in whose bodies that money
congealed,” writes Walter Johnson,
a Harvard historian—generated
even more ancillary wealth. Loans
were taken out for purchase, to be
repaid with interest. Insurance
policies were drafted against the
untimely death of a slave and the
loss of potential profits. Slave sales
were taxed and notarized. The
vending of the black body and the
sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves,
estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum
America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi
Valley than anywhere else in the country.
Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that
Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear
wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly
dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this
made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”
Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some
parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her
lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first
marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia,
were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy
his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along
T
which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to
pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who
was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-
loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one,
what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand
towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would
come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the
gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and
beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may
God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that
moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized
hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed
me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I
followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine,
as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was
obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked
freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder.
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-
profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the
family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated
that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic
foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that
seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable
working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving
white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic
values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from
England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love
of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who
in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether
composed of their own Negro slaves.”
V. The Quiet Plunder
HE CONSEQUENCES of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black
families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership
today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those
who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners
today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room,
slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers,
exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today
might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had
journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices
for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the
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enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the
country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of
death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor
of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well
be violent.
“This country was formed for the
white, not for the black man,” John
Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing
Abraham Lincoln. “And looking
upon African slavery from the same
standpoint held by those noble
framers of our Constitution, I for
one have ever considered it one of
the greatest blessings (both for
themselves and us) that God ever
bestowed upon a favored nation.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War,
Radical Republicans attempted to
reconstruct the country upon
something resembling universal
equality—but they were beaten
back by a campaign of
“Redemption,” led by White
Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen
bent on upholding a society
“formed for the white, not for the
black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history
Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked
for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for
disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for
disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes
the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877.
The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence
was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out
toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned
to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to
rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of
World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for
daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after
the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce
jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms
against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to
Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into
the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in
1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually
no one was punished.
The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that
extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New
Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government
should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the
afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to
express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the
accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note
that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it,
rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.
“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-
science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s
democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all
over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social
Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern
way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment
A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy.
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insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by
blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935,
65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent
in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new
American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of
Negroes to fall through.”
The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring
the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though
ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans
access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white
officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same
banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The
historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so
many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is
more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”
In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling
patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns
his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who
pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various
Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”
But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated
throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to
move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a
burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was
“probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the
value of my house.”
The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from
the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door,
housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values
would decline.
In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large
down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of
the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing
Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring
no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without
federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization
would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the
University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned
their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home
ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate
industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the
National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a
Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood
… any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be
detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such
potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—
and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college
education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of
redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it
insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed
forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of
dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
T
“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the
discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T.
Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of
suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and
individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy.
Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.”
Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act.
By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have
continued.
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens,
who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th
century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid
a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been
the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But
practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of
slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst
the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
ODAY CHICAGO is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a
fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white
supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a
city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—
has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the
Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks,
lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled
against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its
agenda by more-discreet means.
Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing
Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped
bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed
home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these
restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in
the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.
One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto,
where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and
steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the
unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions
endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and
ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people
privileges enjoyed by white Americans.
In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while
permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other
weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given
Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public
housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new
federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other
cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public
housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s,
the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian
Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt
but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-
housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built
in all-black neighborhoods.
Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of
Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black
encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing
segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those
blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood
Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the
neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic
engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private
banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the
American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily
discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the
seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob
of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to
eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house
with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.
In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of
Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks
off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting
attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being
“sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them)
were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20
minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building
that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through
the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury
declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP
attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and
rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two
years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering,
about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.
When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the
neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of
natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of
social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of
America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white
families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of
principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of
American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner
claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property
value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately
observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining
destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a major city. (Associated Press)
S PECULATORS IN NORTH LAWNDALE, and at the edge of the black
ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They
resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap
before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black
woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire
someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.”
Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that
the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would
decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand,
speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed
northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape
the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought
cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a
second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife
took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children
out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his
children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross
wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.
“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you
can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right
kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this
neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My
kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t
keep them in there.”
Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s,
when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as
a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked
for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon.
Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both
had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross
in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract
sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the
scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by
Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers
League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a
reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the
Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.
Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started
moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are
coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: DON’T SELL TO BLACKS.”
Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to
Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it
today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they
don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody
black in Cicero.’ ”
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They
were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow,
considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white
people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And
that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans
at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do
it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it
is.’
“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they
wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If
Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League.
everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people
in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North
and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets
and all these things these other people have.”
Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the
difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would
see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would
say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ”
I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.
“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that
payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”
“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,”
Weatherspoon interjected.
Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said
Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a
dancer and my other wanted to take music.”
Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The
White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering.
O
suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to
the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers
League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses
outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis
and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny
minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our
exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel
Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many
thousands gone.
Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media)
“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I
would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
N A RECENT SPRING AFTERNOON in North Lawndale, I visited Billy
Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in
the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers
League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a
staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the
streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14,
1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried
to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved
in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”
Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is
impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a
week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is
still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here.
I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over
there were the Vice Lords.”
Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still
working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice
neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is
not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no
protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When
they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the
neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you
going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but
in your mind it’s yours.”
We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men
were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men:
IN LOVIN MEMORY QUENTIN AKA “Q,” JULY 18, 1974 ❤ MARCH 2, 2012. The
name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival
group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a
crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an
exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these
young men as boys.
“That’s their corner,” he said.
We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No
respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to
that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there?
He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there
… I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this
WATCH VIDEO Visit North Lawndale today with Billy Brooks
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building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their
mentality. That’s their block.”
Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He
went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which
ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed
out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud
if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened
his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did
here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,”
he said, “because I wanted him with me.”
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the
great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father.
Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to
middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder.
Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a
lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target
the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to
save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship
—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on
Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie
Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always
will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice
as fast.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a
relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of
this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that
punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon
Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard
Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK White Racism vs. White Resentment “The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the greatest argument made for reparations—like ever.” Read more
University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his
advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy
that recognizes the difference.
After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders,
including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address
the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president
that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of
American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the
“particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance
programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.”
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader
inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes
for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have
always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped
upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling
in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal
discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in
its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase
“diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of
black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over
several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to
face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage,
dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of
affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor
declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results.
But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395
years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little
to redress this.
Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation
for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view
the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting
Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next.
Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle
for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by
changing the subject.
The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to
Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude
blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The
Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush
Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s
expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many
poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The
Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to
those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.
“All that it would take to sink a
new WPA program would be some
skillfully packaged footage of black
men leaning on shovels smoking
cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas
S. Massey writes. “Papering over
the issue of race makes for bad
social theory, bad research, and
bad public policy.” To ignore the
fact that one of the oldest republics
in the world was erected on a
foundation of white supremacy, to
pretend that the problems of a dual
society are the same as the
problems of unregulated
capitalism, is to cover the sin of
national plunder with the sin of
national lying. The lie ignores the
fact that reducing American
poverty and ending white
supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the
“achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which
black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white
college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy
roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal
records.
Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black
America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the
pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The
effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community
that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three
jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale
neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how
watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child
watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions
tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their
home—taken from them.
The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks
W
says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is
working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an
education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling
you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you
ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything,
nigger.’ ”
IX. Toward A New Country
HEN CLYDE ROSS WAS A CHILD, his older brother Winter had a
seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to
Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi
Delta region.
“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he
was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t
control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was
dangerous.”
Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a
progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In
fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans
in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor
James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into
the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds.
“Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book
Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and
brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal
farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.”
When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them
that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the
authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw
Winter’s body.
And this was just one of their losses.
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make
reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In
the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black
Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by
multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the
difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion
in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations
program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the
Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of
job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but
T
includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in
a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s
shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans,
and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this
chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the
cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the
same.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40
proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African
Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a
discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is
frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of
reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage,
history, and standing in the world.
HE EARLY AMERICAN ECONOMY was built on slave labor. The Capitol
and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk
traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black
pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and
intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on
the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of
black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the
black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined
the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These
laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal
government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap,
which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we
picture COLORED ONLY signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his
historic civil-rights speech.
When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there
are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—
radiating painful roots into the community and into the family,
and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial
differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of
ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something
about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our
links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not
flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of
reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and
intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as
laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something
unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—
that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or
a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America
that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the
full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the
price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may
well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not
living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of
hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided.
The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say
—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution.
What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts.
What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of
white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more
than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m
talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July
while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of
yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would
mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our
self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From
Germany”
W
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK The Auschwitz All Around Us “It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.” Read more
E ARE NOT the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making
amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that
should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans
believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West
Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29
percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were
divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that
only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and
should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves
were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third
Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls.
Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond
Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for
his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic
national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German
officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which
the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly
punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of
reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an
agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous
reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7,
1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the
prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem
Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd,
inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and
property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and
guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state.
“If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.”
Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center), signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was carried out in silence. (Associated Press)
He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent
Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept
reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching
the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture,
Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”
Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the
Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the
roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the
Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and
smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the
Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos,
Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two
hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people
were arrested. Knesset business was halted.
Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the
actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,”
he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go,
they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be
killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.”
Survivors of the Holocaust feared
laundering the reputation of
Germany with money, and
mortgaging the memory of their
dead. Beyond that, there was a
taste for revenge. “My soul would
be at rest if I knew there would be 6
million German dead to match the
6 million Jews,” said Meir
Dworzecki, who’d survived the
concentration camps of Estonia.
Ben-Gurion countered this
sentiment, not by repudiating
vengeance but with cold
calculation: “If I could take German
property without sitting down with
them for even a minute but go in
with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that
—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell
them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.”
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli
militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was
aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of
Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West
Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or
more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims
followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for
halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration
camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the
end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli
merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The
Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a
third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its
capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of
Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to
investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the
impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological
and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis.
But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps
provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy
of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a
precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of
moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to
the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time
in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed,
plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries
of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return
part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective
reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We
cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of
health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by
what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is
not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the
early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the
survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The
past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women
and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I
had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We
want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
I
In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report
affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for
years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar
suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves)
and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have
thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which
reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few
towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves,
at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates
the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that
represents them.
John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know
what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully
capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the
number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and
dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions
matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be
produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is
improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the
sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the
future. More important than any single check cut to any African American,
the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of
the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
N 2010, JACOB S. RUGH, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and
the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent
foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe:
segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like
creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be
steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the
American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by
American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in
the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier,
these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from
mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking
for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,”
Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus
foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’
minority neighborhoods.”
Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of
America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth
Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading
originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled
black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building
“generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front
for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit
against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into
predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or
coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The
New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black
customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto
loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan
officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets
unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church
leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out
subprime loans.”
In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of
discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells
Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the
damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose
“Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches.”
ALL POSTS
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
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owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008
were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black
neighborhoods.
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