SYDNEY WILLIAMS: THOUGHT OF THE DAY….”REPARATIONS”
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“The most important thing to keep in mind about reparations is that it is never going to happen.No Congress is going to pass, and no President is going to sign, a bill that takes money from the great majority of American voters to pay a debt they don’t feel they owe.” Thomas Sowell “Risks of Slave Reparations Campaign” aUGUST 4, 2001
Periodically, the issue of reparations resurfaces, brought on not by those who might stand to gain, but by politicians who see political advantage in issues that never come to fruition, like immigration or climate, neither of which they would like to resolve, as long as they serve a higher purpose – their re-election.
Slavery was the blemish on our founding. Most of the Founding Fathers understood that. Nevertheless, the decision made was to proceed with unification of thirteen separate states under a Constitution and Bill of Rights to which all attendees agreed. Was it perfect? No, because it allowed the practice of slavery to continue. But liberty was the essence of our founding. It was understood by the Founders that at some point a Civil War would have to be fought, but they wanted to delay that inevitability until the Union had solidified into a unified and respected country. They knew it would have to be able to withstand the rending of its heart, which a civil war would cause. As the first half of the 19thCentury advanced, it became obvious that the cancer that was slavery did not fit a country whose values were based on individual freedom. The abolitionist movement grew stronger and advocates of slavery more isolated. It was felt that if the curse of slavery persisted it would mean dissolution of the union. But if it were abolished the union would be preserved, even though the cost would be high and the time for healing long.
In 1775, slavery was to be found in most of the northern states. As late as 1820, there were still an estimated 20,000 slaves in New York. But by 1860, slavery had been abolished in the north. Virginia had fewer slaves in that year than they did in 1820. It was not that they had been freed but were sold to cotton plantations in the deep south. And, while northerners railed against slavery, some were conflicted. For example, cotton brokers in New York became wealthy selling the slave-produced commodity to buyers in England.
The Civil War was fought and, while it was initially couched in terms of preserving the union, both sides understood the real cause – slavery. On January 1, 1863, with more than two years to run in the War, Lincoln issued the Proclamation Emancipation, declaring “…that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are and henceforward shall be free.” Over four years and 620,000 deaths, slavery in the United States ended. The Union held, and the slow process of reconstruction began – not just of broken families, farms, homes, mills, factories and towns, but of men’s souls. With the adoption of the 13thAmendment in December 1865, slavery in the U.S. and its territories was constitutionally abolished. With the passage of the 14thAmendment in 1868, all persons born in or naturalized in the United States were declared to be citizens. But the path forward was not easy: Lynchings were common, especially in rural parts of the south. The Ku Klux Klan peaked, in terms of membership, in the 1920s, sixty years after the Civil War. Segregation was a fact of live. It was more than eighty years after the Civil War before President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981in 1948, integrating the armed forces. Racially segregated public schools were common, under the misguided concept of “separate but equal,” until 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Miscegenation was a crime in some states until the Court in Loving v. Virginia ruled it unconstitutional in 1967. And it took a hundred and one years from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Progress advances, but at rates too slow for us who must be content with life spans of eighty years. But, as Richelle Goodrich wrote in Slaying Dragons, “Progressing at a snail’s pace is still progress, and slow progress is better than no progress.”
So, while the history of slavery is ugly, we have moved forward. We should never stand still. We should advance in unison, and we should acknowledge progress when it is made. We should never be satisfied, but we should never be hateful. There are those who gain by fomenting dissension – race hustlers and ideologues. Apart from the power that comes with political success, there are others who gain, as Mr. Sowell wrote in the essay quoted above, “self-righteous satisfaction from denouncing other people.” We are a different people today than we were fifty and a hundred years ago. Almost eighty million have immigrated to the United States between 1865 and 2017. With their progeny, they account for about two thirds of the American population. Despite those who see us a “salad bowl” rather than a “melting pot,” our backgrounds are increasingly mixed. Most Americans do not solely descend from one nationality, but rather from multiples. The number of interracial marriages rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015. A 2017 Pew Research survey said that 39% of those surveyed felt that interracial marriages were good for society, up from 10% in 2010. So, while if one only listened to politicians, one might conclude we are more segregated than we were a few years ago, while the opposite is true. At a hearing on reparations in mid-June, Senator Cory Booker said: “As a nation, we have yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this nation’s founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequalities.” This is an odd statement from a man who is a product of a mixed heritage, grew up in middle class environs, captained the Stanford football team, won a Rhodes Scholarship and graduated from Yale Law School. Kamala Harris’ call for reparations was even more conflicted: as her father, a professor of economics at Stanford, noted, she is a descendant of slave owners in Jamaica.
In the demand for reparations, a comparison can be drawn with the radicals of the French Revolution. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke took aim at the seizure of property belonging to the Catholic Church. The revolutionaries who seized the property were not, as Liam Warner wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “avenging the vices of the current clerical generation;” they were “seeking retribution for centuries of crimes.” Mr. Warner concluded his op-ed: “Our efforts would be better spent directing the future than auditing the past.”
One of my eight great-great grandfathers, George Augustine Washington, as proprietor of a tobacco farm in Tennessee, was a slave owner. Because he sired a son, Granville Washington, around 1830, I have African American cousins, one of whom, John Baker, Jr., authored a well-received history of his family, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation[1]He wrote toward the book’s conclusion: “African American descendants from Wessyngton now live all over America. They became physicians, lawyers, poets, teachers, civil rights activists, ministers, painters, artists, authors, bankers, brokers, professional athletes, movie stars, airplane pilots, business owners, accountants, genealogists, writers, singers, entertainers, policemen, and government and public officials.” They are part of the fabric of America. This is the spirit of America we should celebrate – the strides made by descendants of those once enslaved – not the separation of people into compartments that serve the interests of a few politicians. There is more to be done, but as Thomas Sowell wrote, a call for reparations is an empty promise.
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