Politicians, Scholars Voice Support For Slavery Reparation

Jet, May 15, 2000

The Chicago City Council's Human Relations and Finance committees unanimously adopted a resolution to seek government hearings on the issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves in America.

The full Chicago City Council is scheduled to address the resolution on May 17.

The city's Finance and Human Relations committees recently held a joint hearing in City Hall chambers on the resolution proposed by Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman that calls for state and federal hearings on the reparation issue.

Tillman already has garnered the signatures of half of the City Council's 50 members and the endorsement of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Participants at the hearing included Lerone Bennett, Jr., executive editor of EBONY Magazine and noted historian, Illinois Congressmen Bobby Rush and Danny Davis, and Wade Nobles, a San Francisco state psychologist who said slavery damaged both Blacks and Whites.

Tillman, who has received cross-cultural support from her colleagues, said slavery reparation would be similar to the money the U.S. government gave Japanese-Americans for their internment in camps during World War II. She said all Blacks should be considered eligible for reparations because "they are all direct descendants" of slaves.

"America is in denial," Tillman said. "We are still feeling the effects of slavery. The White community was able to pass wealth to their descendants, and we were passed down poverty."

In a passionate, eloquent address, Bennett asked for reparations for "the greatest crime in human history"--"The 500-year ordeal of Africans and African-Americans, which consisted of three major events: The 400 years of the African slave trade, which coincided with the 205 years of American slavery, followed by 100 years of forced labor and sharecropping."

Bennett testified, "So there it is then, up front: more than 500 years, more than half the millennium. Has any other group anywhere suffered so long and so grievously and received so little in apologies and recompense? Has any other group anywhere bled more, cried more, and died more?"

Bennett, author of the Black history classic Before the Mayflower: A History Of Black America and the new critically acclaimed book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, pointed out that the resolution "calls for an end to the time of weeping and cursing and the beginning of healing and reconciliation." He said that "if it does that, the price of reparation, however astronomical, will be a bargain."

Bennett emphasized, "We must make amends by, first, apologizing for the slave trade and slavery and the forced labor of sharecropping."

The next step, Bennett said, should be "establishing a schedule of payments. There's been a lot of discussion about how difficult this would be, but it is not hard to give away several hundred billion dollars; and it's not hard to create a panel representing all major Black interests to define priorities which, I hope, would include economic development plans for Black communities and GI-bill-type disbursements for scholarships and home purchases."

Recalling the pain and hardship Blacks endured throughout 500 years of history, Bennett said, "The only remaining question is, how did the slaves and the sons and daughters of the slaves survive the vilest punishment inflicted on a people in the Western world?"

"By all odds," Bennett noted, "they should have been destroyed in the holds of slave ships. By all accounts, they should have been annihilated in the shacks of segregation. But they were so tough, these people, that nothing ... neither slavery nor sharecropping nor rats, nor roaches ... could destroy. They came up from slavery, up from segregation, up from horror. And in the end, by some miracle no historian can explain, they not only survived, but they prevailed, giving this country a new music and a new spirit and the take-off capital that made the skyscrapers around us possible."

Bennett concluded his passionate testimony by declaring, "It is that miracle, it is that gift, it is that debt, that we bring before this body today, with the hope that you will join us in ensuring that they did not labor and die and dream in vain."

If adopted, Chicago would join Detroit, Cleveland and Dallas in approving a measure aimed at federal hearings on reparations.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) drafted a bill supporting reparation in 1989. The proposed Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African American Acts calls for congressional hearings to weigh whether the government should provide restitution to the descendants of slaves.

Conyers said, "We are not talking about an unsophisticated raid on the U.S. Treasury, nor am I trying to win a debate. I'm trying to heal. And I don't think we can get to a healing on this issue, Black or White, unless we take an informed look back at the oldest, most sensitive problem on the American scene."