From churches to campuses, corporate boardrooms to congressional offices, Americans are beginning to pay attention to Aiyetoro and others like her who think this country owes not only an apology, but money, for the damage done by its “peculiar institution.” “It’s moved from margin to mainstream,” says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a relatively recent convert to the cause. At a United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, next week, several delegations plan to push a resolution that would declare the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity. “This is what Malcolm X was talking about in the 1960s, taking our plight before the world,” says Conrad Worrill of Chicago’s National Black United Front.
At Brown and Yale, Ivy Leaguers are beginning to question whether their schools’ endowments were built on the backs of slaves; the answer could spark the biggest wave of protests to hit campuses since the South Africa divestiture demonstrations a generation ago. In California, a new law requires all insurers doing business in the state to disclose whether they sold any slave-owner policies prior to emancipation; this followed a probe triggering an embarrassing public admission by Aetna last year that it had insured slaves like property. And on Capitol Hill, renewed interest in a decade-old bill to study the impact of slavery might finally propel it onto the floor.
For all the talk, however, advocates are divided over whether this momentum is likely to translate into real results. Other supporters of black causes see the debate as a diversion from more pressing problems. And opponents have been emboldened, arguing that the past 40 years of social policy have made ample amends for the wages of slavery. Even some sympathetic to the cause fumble over the logistics of settling 136-year-old scores. Should restitution be paid in dollars, or apologetic words? Who pays? And who gets paid?
As with most civil-rights issues, the answers may ultimately come in the courts. The backbone of any legal challenge is the notion that government and business received “unjust enrichment” from slavery, an idea outlined in Randall Robinson’s book “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” which has become a sort of primer for the reparations movement. Robinson is putting his theory into action: along with lawyer Johnnie Cochran and Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree, he is preparing a reparations suit to be filed next spring. “I think the single most important part of the case is the educational part, because it’s a story that’s never been told,” says Alexander Pires, a member of the Ogletree group who successfully argued a landmark discrimination suit by black farmers against the Agriculture Department that led to a $300 million settlement in 1999. “The second part of it–what is a fair remedy–is a different issue.”
Determining “fair remedy” will require quantifying just how much the government and companies made from slave labor. “Economists have gone back and looked at what percentage of U.S. wealth was represented by slaves in 1850. Estimates vary, but something in the range of 10 to 20 percent of the entire U.S. wealth was human chattel,” says Nashville lawyer Kevin Outterson, a white Northwestern Law School graduate who became interested in the subject after his firm got involved in some of the Holocaust cases. Sifting through state and federal tax records, Outterson speculates, could yield evidence of how much money the government collected from slave taxes. By focusing on issues such as taxation, lawyers may also be able to get around the issue of sovereign immunity, which has derailed past efforts to sue the government over slavery.
The idea of recompense for African-Americans is nearly as old as the republic itself. After the Revolutionary War, which saw slaves recruited to fight alongside white soldiers, the Marquis de Lafayette suggested allocating land in central Pennsylvania where blacks could live freely. Gen. George Washington mused about it, but the idea went nowhere. Nearly a century later, Gen. William Sherman issued his order to give newly freed slaves 40 acres and a mule, but President Andrew Johnson vetoed the measure. Efforts to address the legacy of slavery would continue through various black-nationalist groups on into the 1980s.
Then, in 1987, Congress voted to award $1.2 billion in reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during World War II. Black activists took notice. “The Japanese-American bill let us know that it’s possible,” says Aiyetoro, who was a Washington, D.C., attorney involved in prison-rights issues for the ACLU when she founded N’COBRA that same year. “It gave us a sense that it is not just a rhetorical issue.” At about the same time, a Detroit activist named Ray Jenkins, nicknamed “Reparations Ray” for his passion on the subject, began pestering Rep. John Conyers Jr. about his idea for an official reparations forum. In 1989 the Michigan Democrat introduced legislation calling for the federal government to create a commission to study slavery’s effects. Now N’COBRA had a vehicle that mainstream blacks and some whites could embrace. The NAACP endorsed the call in 1991, followed by the National Bar Association and black fraternities and sororities. More than a decade later, nearly a dozen city councils, including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta, have passed resolutions endorsing the bill.
Emotions surrounding the issue run high. David Horowitz, the conservative provocateur, bought a series of controversial ads in campus newspapers earlier this year (“Ten reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea–and racist too”); it provoked a raucous free-speech-vs.-tolerance brouhaha. “He’s just using this as a vehicle for hate,” said Dipti Barot, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who attended a tense Q&A with Horowitz last week. “I reflect what a majority of the American public thinks in watching this spectacle,” counters Horowitz, who stormed off the stage.
In some ways, Horowitz has been one of the reparations’ advocates best assets, stirring passions wherever he goes. But they know translating the passion into action is still a complicated uphill task. For her part, Aiyetoro shies from discussing what form reparations should take. “I can’t tell you a dollar figure,” she says. Monetary damages aren’t the entire point either. “You cannot look at any aspect of the lives of African-Americans and not see the injury. People say, ‘Look at Oprah Winfrey.’ But we’re not talking about the exceptions, we’re talking about the masses.” The masses may still not be convinced, but they’re starting to listen.
