'We apologise for slavery' - JamaicaObserver.com

Saturday, November 07, 2009 10:46 PM

Columns

'We apologise for slavery'

HEART TO HEART

With Betty Ann Blaine

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Dear Reader,
It took 144 years since the abolition of slavery in 1865 for the United States to issue a formal apology. I'm not sure if the saying "Better late than never" is apropos, considering the length of time it took for that government to say that it was sorry. Nevertheless, the announcement is significant, and signals a victory for descendants of slaves all over the world in general, and the unflagging work of the global reparation movement in particular.

In what was described as a "fiercely" worded resolution, the United States Senate last Thursday apologised for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery" of African Americans. One report stated that "the unanimous voice vote came five months after Barack Obama became the first black US president, and ahead of the June 19 "Juneteenth" celebration of the emancipation of African Americans at the end of the US Civil War in 1865.

House of Representatives approval, which could come as early as next week, would make it the first time the entire US Congress has formally apologised on behalf of the American people for one of the grimmest wrongs in US history. The bill, which does not require Obama's signature, states that the US Congress "acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and 'Jim Crow' laws that enshrined racial segregation at the state and local level in the United States well into the 1960s". And the Congress "apologises to African Americans on behalf of the people of the United States for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws."

While people no doubt are celebrating this historic development all across the world, it is important to point out that the resolution came with an important caveat stating that "nothing in this resolution (a) authorises or supports any claim against the United States". In other words, apology yes, compensation, no! And so, for the reparations constituency the struggle continues.
It is important to note that the issue of compensation is not a new phenomenon. Calls for compensation in some form to slaves and their descendants preceded the founding of the United States, dating back to at least the 1760s and continued to be sounded in relatively unbroken form for some two-and-a-half centuries up to the present. This long history of reparations, arguments and practices included a range of individuals and groups prior to the Civil War. Hundreds of 18th-century Quakers, who freed their slaves and personally compensated them for their unpaid time in bondage; a few newly freed slaves in the North after the American Revolution, who sued in court for a portion of their former masters' wealth; dozens of penitent masters in the upper South, who set their slaves at liberty (especially in their wills) as acts of "retribution" and gave them plots of land; a small cadre of 19th century black and white abolitionists who argued that it was important not only to emancipate the slaves but to "compensate them for the crime", and hundreds of thousands of slaves on Southern farms and plantations before the Civil War, who sounded calls for both freedom and reparations in their folk songs and tales, claiming that they were due "Egypt's spoil" for their "unrequited toil".

Those various threads converged after the Civil War as African Americans and their white allies pressed unsuccessfully to redistribute "40 acres and a mule" to each family of recently freed slaves. After agreeing to the compensation, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order after the assassination of Lincoln, and the land given to ex-slaves were returned to their previous owners. In 1867, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a bill for the redistribution of land to African Americans, but it was not passed.

Since then the issue has been revisited time and again by leading civil rights activists. In 1963, for example, Martin Luther King Jr called Sherman's (the American general who issued the "40 acres and a mule" order after the Civil War) promise "a cheque which has come back marked 'insufficient funds'". King called instead for "a cheque that will give African Americans upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice". Advocacy groups like the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) and our own Jamaica Reparations Movement have fought gallantly to keep the issue on the front burner.

Those opposed to reparations cite the enormity of the task of calculating compensation. Various estimates have been given if such payments were to be made. A leading American magazine in reviewing a book on reparations published an estimate that the total amount in reparations due is over US$100 trillion, based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labour between 1619 and 1865, with a compounded interest of six per cent. The article stated that "should all or part of this amount be paid to the descendants of slaves in the United States, the current US government would pay only a fraction of that cost - over US$40 trillion, since it has been in existence only since 1789".

But NCOBRA leaders and others point to the precedent already set with other racial groups. They are adamant that the US Congress not only apologised to Japanese Americans for internment in World War II concentration camps, but paid US$1.25 billion to camp survivors and their descendants. In 1988 the US government paid eight Sioux Indian tribes US$122 million dollars for tribal lands illegally seized in 1877, and Jewish Holocaust survivors continue to receive US tax benefits from reparations paid by the German and Austrian governments.

So the question remains, if others have been paid, why not blacks?

With love,
bab2609@yahoo.com

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