Return to Virginia Business - July 2002

by William H. Alexander

As a nation the United States was enriched by slave labor for its first 90 years. Thereafter for a century, it continued to sponsor systematic discrimination against blacks through such means as under-compensated labor, non-access to public resources and facilities (some supported by black taxes), theft of black property, inferior health care and schools, and restrictive housing policies to list but a few.

Most non-blacks who lived through either of these eras participated in a society of privilege and preference based in large part on the exclusion and domination of blacks. Generations of black people in America have been haunted by racial attitudes and practices that have questioned their humanity.

The argument for reparations to African-Americans is at once historical, moral, legal and economic. It is a reaction to centuries of purposeful subordination by majority American society and present denial of this history. It follows from the principle of unjust enrichment, well-established in legal tradition, that parties who have been enriched at the expense of others are obligated to make restitution to the wronged or injured parties. Given that it was both social and governmental policy to perpetuate discrimination against blacks, the United States has a collective responsibility to address this situation.

The idea of modern reparations emerged in 1918 when the World War I victors demanded that Germany and its allies pay the entire cost of the war. Since then the concept has been extended: Germans and Austrians have compensated Jews for the Holocaust; the United States accepted obligations to the Japanese interned during the Second World War and, in 1999, joined Germany and Eastern European countries in agreeing to compensate forced laborers from the Nazi era. Individual states have offered tens of millions in reparations to Native Americans and indeed have responded favorably to several individual African-American claims.

Those of us who feel that a national conversation on the issue of reparations to African-Americans collectively is long overdue find it puzzling that our federal and state governments have been so willing to offer restitution to these and other groups and so hesitant even to discuss redressing nearly two centuries of wrongs and injuries to blacks that define the history of our country.

Various companies and institutions that allegedly benefited from the earlier exploitation of black labor, such as Aetna, Norfolk Southern, Fleet Boston, West Point Stevens, and J.P. Morgan Chase Manhattan, are now being targeted in the court system. This is consistent with the belief that African-American reparation claims will be received more positively in the courts than in the state legislatures or in Congress, which thus far has been unwilling to entertain any dialogue on reparations. Moreover, some of the identified companies will probably make pre-trial settlements rather than have their records scrutinized and their images tarnished. Also, for the most part, these claims have been made against companies' involvements with slavery. It remains to be seen just how the reparations movement will approach the post-slavery era when records of discrimination policy gradually become more reliable and current.

While some have been calling for individual payments to descendants of slaves or to all identifiable African-Americans, I do not believe that is the best way to proceed. "Forty acres and a mule" did not work in the 1860s, and its modern equivalent would create more problems than solutions. This reparations movement should not be reduced to a formula for personal aggrandizement, nor should it become lost in bureaucracy. Slavery and discrimination have led to marginalization of blacks within mainstream society, and it is this dilemma that must be addressed in all its magnitude. With nearly 25 percent of black families living in poverty, with high levels of illiteracy among our youth, with disproportionate numbers of African-Americans incarcerated in prisons, and with greater African-American vulnerability to health problems at all age levels, I join those who hold that any effort at restitution must target these lingering problems.

The author is a professor of history at Norfolk State University

Return to Virginia Business - July 2002