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Reparations revisited

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Cover Design by James Copper (118909)
Cover Design by James Copper

Ron Daniels is well aware of the ebb and flow of progress that social justice issues can sometimes endure. An activist/scholar who holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Youngstown State University, a masters of arts in political science from the Rockefeller School of Public Affairs in Albany, N.Y., and a doctor of philosophy in Africana Studies from the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, he currently serves as distinguished lecturer at York College, City University of New York.

Daniels is also a keen student of history and, consequently, is not surprised that the social cause that is near and dear to his heart—reparations—has for the last few decades ridden on waves of awareness and popularity.

But what the historian does know about the key to successfully riding waves and keeping an issue a float is that social activists who want to advance their cause have to be prepared to use the events that prompt these ups and downs as tools. That is exactly what he is planning to do April 9-12 when his New York-based Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) hosts the Caricom Reparations Commission’s next meeting in New York.

The Caricom Commission is chaired by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor designate of the University of the West Indies. In 2013, 14 of the 15 nations that comprise the Caricom Secretariat—Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago—unanimously agreed to create a reparations committee to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by European countries to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community for native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a radicalized system of chattel slavery. They also filed suit against 11 nations in the United Nation’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague in the Netherlands.

According to the Al Jazzera America news service, they hired British law firm Leigh Day, which waged a successful fight for compensation for hundreds of Kenyans who were tortured by the British colonial government as they fought for the liberation of their country during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Caricom countries will focus on Britain for its role in slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean, France for slavery in Haiti and the Netherlands for Suriname, a Caricom member and former Dutch colony on the northeastern edge of South America.

And rather than seeking reparations for slavery itself, the nations want compensation for the lasting effects it caused.

Caricom is comparing their demand to Germany recompensing Jewish people for the Holocaust and New Zealand compensating Maoris, according to an article in the British Daily Mail.

Analysts have pointed out some of the drawbacks of the Caricom action including the fact that some countries negotiated conditions under which they would join the U.N. The Netherlands cannot be tried for any actions preceding 1921 and the United Kingdom for any actions before 1974. Both countries and the U.N. agreed to these restrictions before each country agreed to ICJ participation. As a result, many critics and experts do not think the ICJ will take the case even though it focuses on modern problems in the Caribbean.

In the event that the ICJ does take the case, an analysis in the University of Pittsburgh newsletter Panorama says that Leigh Day must then prove that Caribbean underdevelopment is a direct result of the slave trade.

In the write up, Robert Westley, a professor at Tulane and an expert on reparations believes this argument has merit: “If you look just at measures of well-being in racial comparison, not just the racial wealth gap, but if you look at employment, if you look at access to things like medical care, or if you look at rates of imprisonment, if you look at poverty rates—almost every measure of well-being in society—there is a racial disparity. And those disparities are clearly an outcome of historical forces. They didn’t just happen that way.” Westley also argues the amount of time between the end of slavery and current times have increased the inequality and disparity between slavers and victims.

According to a the Panorama article, the ICJ requires that before taking a case, both parties must attempt to reach a settlement outside of court. Westley believes this process will give one side leverage when it comes to seeking monetary compensation. In the case of the Caricom, he believes they will have significant leverage against an already monetarily squeezed Europe.

The ICJ can also be pressured by the U.N. General Assembly to make an “advisory” opinion. While these advisories do not hold legal weight, they are extremely influential when it comes to politics. Advisories can also be used to reach a temporary agreement and would allow for discussion of the bigger issues at a later time.

Sir Beckles says Caricom is “focusing” on Britain because it was the largest slave owner in the 1830s.

“The British made the most money out of slavery and the slave trade—they got the lion’s share. And, importantly, they knew how to convert slave profits into industrial profits,” he said in the Daily Mail.

Some Caricom countries already get financial aid from Britain and other Commonwealth countries.

“These are not just activists,” explained Daniels about the profundity of Caricom’s actions. “These are heads of state; presidents, and prime ministers who came together and said we should do this. That’s a whole difference. This is a powerful new development.”

In addition to agreeing to seek reparations from such nations as Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the Caricom heads of state have been speaking before European governments on the movement and addressed the United Nations (which has previously declared the global slave trade a crime against humanity.)

The Caricom Commission identified six broad aspects of the “Caribbean condition that are the direct result of the “crimes” that should be the focus of reporatory diplomacy and action: public health; education; cultural institutions; cultural deprivation; psychological trauma; and scientific and technological backwardness.

The commission also devised a 10-point action plan that begins with a full formal apology. This particular item acknowledges that some nations have issued “statements of regrets” in place of an apology but the Caricom plan rejects these because “such statements do not acknowledge that crimes have been committed and they feel these statements represent a refusal to take responsibility for such crimes.

The action plan also seeks a repatriation program for those descendants who wish to return to Africa; an indigenous peoples development program; establishment of cultural institutions; addressing the public health crisis; eradication of illiteracy; programs that build bridges between Africa and her dispersed descendants; psychological rehabilitation that facilitates the coming together of the fragmented community and using technology transfer and science sharing to educate generations of Caribbean youth. Finally, Caribbean governments that emerged from slavery and colonialism have inherited the massive crisis of community poverty and institutional unpreparedness for development. These governments still daily engage in the business of cleaning up the colonial mess in order to prepare for development.

Caricom believes that the pressure of development has driven governments to carry the burden of public employment and social policies designed to confront colonial legacies. This process has resulted in states accumulating unsustainable levels of public debt that now constitute their fiscal entrapment.

Caricom says this debt cycle properly belongs to the imperial governments who have made no sustained attempt to deal with debilitating colonial legacies. Support for the payment of domestic debt and cancellation of international debt are necessary reparatory actions.

In conjunction with the Caricom Commission meeting in New York, Daniels says a National African American Reparations Commission was established to push the movement in America. It includes people such as professor Charles Ogletree and Rev. Jeremiah Wright and representatives from the Caribbean and U.S.A. commissions will meet with reparations movement representatives from Central and South America, Canada and Europe.

Each commission will develop its own action plan similar to the Caricom 10-point plan.

Daniels says the American plan is likely to build on the work by people and things that have caused previous waves on the reparations landscape including the 2001 book by Randall Robinson called “The Debt, What America Owes to Blacks;” “The New Jim Crow,” written by Michelle Alexander and published in 2010; and there is the work of legal researcher Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, whose revelation in 2000 that Aetna was among the many firms with corporate ties to slavery rocked the world.

“This is going to be a huge event with people coming from Sweden, Switzerland, Central and South America and from all across America,” said Daniel’s who credits the actions of Caricom with the uptick in interest in the reparation movement in the U.S. as well as the uproar surrounding the killing of young Black men and women; as well as the continuing wealth gap and underdevelopment of urban communities and the urban adjacent communities like Ferguson.

Daniels says Ferguson is representative of a growing number of communities that urban Blacks are being forced out of by economics like gentrification.

He also points to the writing and research of a young scholar named Ta-Nehesi Coates whose article “The Case for Reparations” in the news magazine Atlantic, for generating awareness of the subject among a younger and online generation.

As part of the Caricom meeting, Daniels says participants will have an opportunity to pay homage to the one constant that the scholar says has been part of the U.S. reparation movement—Rep. John Conyers Jr.

Since 1989, the Michigan congressman has each year introduced legislation, H.R. 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, and has vowed to continue doing so until it is passed into law.

Conyers says, “I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the 40 acres and a mule that the United States initially promised freed slaves. This unfulfilled promise and the serious devastation that slavery had on African American lives has never been officially recognized by the United States Government.”

The Conyers legislation, which on Jan. 6 was introduced in the House Judiciary Committee and then referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on Jan. 25, must go through a hearing which has only happened once (in December 2007) when Conyers was the chair of the subcommittee.

The proposed law acknowledges the “fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery” and establishes a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves; it studies the impact of those forces on today’s living African Americans; and the commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.

Even as he prepares for the upcoming summit, Daniels is well aware of the naysayers who accuse activists like him of continuously harping on the past and refusing to move forward. He also knows there are others who believe that because slaves did not own property they are not due reparations while others resist the idea of reparations because it was something “their ancestors did, not me.’

He counters those arguments: “Reparations are not predicated on whether one owned property. They are based on acts of physical, cultural, spiritual and similar destruction of a person. Then there are people who enriched themselves and their property largely because of the free labor provided to plantation owners that have flowed down generations for decades and centuries.”

He also points out that “White supremacy, and institutional racism” continue to exist today and hold back people of African descent.

Daniels remembers examples from his own childhood in Youngstown Ohio, where the vestiges of slavery still clung in 1956.

He noted that Hungarians came to Youngstown, from Europe that year and hundreds of them were able to secure jobs in the then-booming factories. In fact, while native Blacks were limited to jobs in the first three tiers of the lower-paying employment rungs, the newly arrived Hungarians found employment in all six levels of steel mills. Consequently, Daniels said they were able to take that economic difference and pass it on to their family for a generational benefit.

“Where we are now is always a function of the past; it’s the relationship,” Daniels said. And that is why it is so vital that the reparation discussion happen, says the scholar. It helps inform African Americans about their own history as well as assists others (such as Whites, Hispanics and Asians) with understanding the connection between the past, today and the future.

Reparations
Highlights

  • After the end of the Civil War, about 400,000 acres of land along the Florida, Georgia and South Carolina coasts was taken from former slave owners and set aside for freed slaves, who would each be granted a 40-acre plot of land to farm and make a living. It was the first attempt in the U.S. at reparations, but was reversed by President Andrew Johnson after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
  • The House issued an apology for slavery in July 2008, and the Senate followed suit in 2009, but neither mentioned reparations.
  • The Tulsa Reparations Coalition, sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice Inc., was formed on April 7, 2001 to obtain restitution for the damages suffered by Tulsa’s Black community in the 1921 race riots that decimated the Greenwood, Okla., section of Tulsa as recommended by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission.

In June 2001, the Oklahoma state legislature passed the “1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act.” While falling short of the commission’s recommendations, it provided for the following:

More than 300 college scholarships for descendants of Greenwood residents; Creation of a memorial to those who died in the riot, which was dedicated on October 27, 2010; and economic development in Greenwood.

  • According to the National Archives and Records Administration, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paved the way to compensate slave owners for their “loyalty to the Union” and for the loss of income incurred by freeing slaves.

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia. Passage of this law came eight and a half months before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called “the national shame” of slavery in the nation’s capital. It provided for immediate emancipation, compensation to former owners who were loyal to the Union of up to $300 for each freed slave, voluntary colonization of former slaves to locations outside the United States, and payments of up to $100 for each person choosing emigration.

Over the next nine months, after April 1862, the Board of Commissioners appointed to administer the act approved 930 petitions, completely or in part, from former owners for the freedom of 2,989 former slaves.

  • On Feb. 18, 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to provide compensation and resources to African American farmers. A 1999 legal settlement was supposed to provide compensation for decades of systematic discrimination by the United states Department of Agriculture. However, the federal bureaucracy placed enormous roadblocks to the farmers receiving settlement funds only. Consequently, 15,000 African American farmers were able to navigate the complicated paperwork to collect compensation reported to have averaged a mere $50,000 per family.

In 2008 the U.S. Congress acknowledged the problems and granted additional time for another 70,000 people to apply for compensation. Unfortunately Congress cut $1.5 billion in funding that President Barack Obama had included in his budget and specifically designated for Black farmers.

  • Britain compensated slave owners 20 million pounds in 1834 equal to 200 billion pounds today.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) published a database of roughly 4,000 British slave owners who were compensated by the British government in 1833 for the emancipation of their slaves. The academics behind the UCL database have been widely quoted as estimating that some one-fifth of 19th century British fortunes were founded directly on slavery. That doesn’t include all those who profited indirectly from the fact that other people owned slaves. Given the scale of the Atlantic slave trade, the true figure is almost certainly higher.

*Shortly after gaining independence from France in 1804 (in 1825) France, with warships at the ready, demanded Haiti compensate the country for its loss of men and slave colony. In exchange for French recognition of Haiti as a sovereign republic, France demanded payment of 150 million francs (modern equivalent of $21 billion). In 1838, France agreed to reduce the debt to 90 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years to compensate former plantation owners who had lost their property.

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