Forty Acres and a Lexus?

Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and his Reparations Coordinating Committee have announced they may sue a number of corporations because of their historical profit from slavery. The defendants may include such august institutions as Yale University, Brown University and our own Harvard. This lawsuit is modeled on the lawsuits brought by the families of Jewish victims of the Holocaust against companies such as Swiss and Austrian banks.

Much of the attention devoted to reparations, however, has failed to properly situate this recent litigation within the current movement for reparations for the descendents of black slaves. The ultimate goal of the litigation is not to exact reparations through suing corporations and institutions for payments. Ogletree’s recent op-ed in the New York Times stated that “litigation is required to promote this discussion because political accountability has not been forthcoming.”

Other methods to stimulate dialogue have not fared well. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has introduced a bill for black reparations, H.R. 40, (the 40 is in reference to the unfulfilled promise to freed slaves for “40 acres and a mule”) at the beginning of each Congressional term since 1989. Each time, the legislation has died. The goal for proponents of black reparations is a national apology for slavery, Jim Crow and institutional discrimination, along with a national form of compensation. Exacting reparations through corporate litigation is not the goal itself, but simply a means to further the debate that has continually been stalled in America’s political arena.

Furthermore, recent attention has failed to present the real and complete case for reparations. First, the litigation and legislation for reparations is predicated upon the group claim to recompense. Neither legally nor legislatively is it viable to provide reparations payments to individual African-Americans. The vision of reparations checks being cut to individual blacks is wrong. Reparations money would be ear-marked for those in the black community who have remained cemented in the underclass. More importantly, reparations would be paid through programs such as education, health care, job training and urban renewal. Individual African-Americans would not receive reparations payments in any form; black reparations is not about “forty acres and a Lexus,” it is about revitalizing, rejuvenating, and rebuilding the black community.

Second, the case for black reparations moves beyond the historical harm of slavery. The case for black reparations becomes even more salient because present-day African-Americans suffer from on-going injustice. To be sure, slavery anchors the claim to repair: it has been estimated that the present-day value of expropriated slave-labor ranges to trillions of dollars, depending the rate of interest. Importantly, the emancipated slaves were neither compensated for this toil, nor treated as equal citizens upon their emancipation. Instead, freed slaves and their descendants were subjected to the Jim Crow period of legalized discrimination and segregation that dedicated a system of inferiority to them in all areas of life from residential segregation to educational separation and political disenfranchisement. The result was the continuation of the socio-economic subordination of African-Americans in American society. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the system of discrimination enforced by law was transformed into institutional forms of de facto discrimination that have continued to depress the status of black Americans. Beyond mere history, it is this continuing and on-going legacy of harm from slavery that is at the core of the case for reparations.

This legacy of harm generates a resounding claim for recompense. When Germany announced its “moral responsibility” for the Holocaust reparations (Wiedergutmachung) in 1954, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, stated that Germany was culpable for the “state-sponsored” crimes of the Nazi regime. Likewise, the U.S. government admitted its complicit nature in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 for the Japanese interment camps in this country during World War II, and found that with governmental culpability comes the need for repair. Black reparations models its claim on the group components of the Jewish and Japanese reparations. Germany paid money to the Jewish Claims Conference, and the Civil Liberties Act contained an “inheritance provision” that paid money to descendants of Japanese internees. Moreover, through the U.S. government’s culpability in institutionally supporting slavery and segregation, there are no individual Americans who can preempt black reparations by claiming “it wasn’t me.”

In the words of Frederick Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” The recent litigation for black reparations is part of the larger movement to examine, reconcile and repair the past of America’s un-remedied injustices. This is not a black problem or a white problem, it is an American problem, and it demands an American solution. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “we seek not just equality as a right and theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” If America continues to avoid compensating African-Americans for the injustices and social injuries that they have endured, and continue to endure, there may be no chance that America will solve its racial problems.

Geoffrey A. Starks ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. He wrote his senior thesis on black reparations.