USA TODAY: Reparations bill gets new attention amid BLM. Could other nations provide a blueprint?

[saturn7]

Reparations bill gets new attention amid BLM. Could other nations provide a blueprint?

Tony Burroughs' great-great-great-great grandfather was freed from slavery in 1806 by a white woman from Pennsylvania. In her last will and testament, Margaret Hutton had specified that David Truman was to be taught to read and do math.

He was given $8, about $165 in today's money. Truman was 25.

But 59 years later when a Union Army general named Gordon Granger announced in Texas on June 19, 1865 – now known as Juneteenth – that "all slaves are free," neither Truman nor his descendants benefited from the federal government's short-lived promise of what then passed for reparations: "forty acres and a mule."

The title page of Margaret Hutton's will that specified David Truman should be freed in 1806.


Truman's grandson, Burroughs discovered, would later accumulate enough money to buy a single acre for farming. But he lost it some years later. From enslavement, in all, it would take six generations – until Burroughs' parents' generation, in the late 1960s –before the family had the financial footing to become homeowners.

"The Confederates lost the Civil War. They sure didn't give up the fight," said Burroughs, 71, the founder of the Center for Black Genealogy, a Chicago-based organization that helps people scour records and offers advice about how to trace their lineages.

Burroughs has spent more than 20 years researching his ancestors.

"There's so many ways in which Black Americans have been denied wealth," he said.

cont....

Slavery reparations bill spurs new debate; are other nations a model?

 

[TRY GOD]

Bump

 

[saturn7]

'We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War'
In the USA, the case for reparations for the federal government's role in slavery has been both growing and met with skepticism.

Just weeks after Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes, the California Assembly passed a bill to establish a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans.

But more than a year before, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, sponsored a bill in Congress known as H.R. 40, or the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. And for more than two decades before her, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced it year after year without success.

Now, it's receiving greater attention, Jackson Lee said.

The Congressional Black Caucus met on it last week.

"There is no better time for H.R. 40 to be part of the national dialogue, and part of the national legislative response," she said

The "40" is a reference to the 40 acres of land promised, but never fully delivered, to former slaves by another Union Army general, William Sherman, in 1865.

The full allotment under Sherman's Special Order No. 15 was for 5.3 million acres of land to be distributed to newly freed Black families, according to a new book – "From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century" – by Kirsten Mullen, a folklorist and historian, and William Darity, an economist at Duke University whose research is devoted to inequality in the context of race.

The offer, such as it was, was overturned by President Andrew Johnson, the 17th American president and President Abraham Lincoln's successor, that same year.

In the end, only 40,000 of approximately 4 million of the formerly enslaved were settled on 400,000 acres of land before Johnson reversed the order.

H.R. 40 isn't a reparations plan per se.

It's a bill that, if passed, would study what, if anything, the federal government owes the descendants of slaves, and how to implement that debt.

Renewed public interest in the topic was kick-started by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, whose 2014 cover story "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine argued "it is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery."

Though Congress for the first time formally apologized for slavery in 2008, H.R. 40 has still faced opposition.

"I don't think that reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea. We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, by electing an African American president," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican whose great-great grandfathers owned slaves who worked on Alabama cotton farms, said in 2019 amid a congressional hearing on the topic.

At the hearing, which took place on Juneteenth and saw testimony from Coates as well as Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and the actor Danny Glover, a writer and opinion columnist named Coleman Hughes told the panel that while he considered "our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetuated by the U.S. government," he worried that paying reparations to all descendants of slaves might be "justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living."

 

[humminbird]

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[saturn7]

Hughes, who said he is descended from slaves, added:

"Take me, for example. I was born three decades after Jim Crow ended into a privileged household in the suburbs," he said, referencing the state and local statutes that previously legalized segregation in the USA until the middle of the 20th century.

"I attend an Ivy League school," he went on. "So reparations for slavery would allocate federal resources to me but not to an American with the wrong ancestry – even if that person is living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs to support a family."

In fact, the USA has done reparations before.

Congress established the Indian Claims Commission at the end of World War II. The commission was designed to address Native American grievances related to a century's worth of treaty violations, gross maltreatment and lost territories.

Altogether, 176 different tribes and bands lodged claims that resulted in payouts ranging from $2,500 to $35 million. But historians Michael Lieder and Jake Page noted in their book "Wild Justice: The People of Geronimo Vs. the United States" that the average payout to a person with Native American ancestry was just $1,000.

"Gambling has had a more positive impact on the quality of life on reservations than did the Indian Claims Commission Act primarily because tribal income from it reached $4 billion in 1994 alone, more than two and a half times the total amount of the awards under the Indian Claims Commission Act," they write in the book.

A separate claim, in 1971, gave one billion dollars and saw 40 million acres returned to Native Alaskans, but the commission was effectively closed in 1978.

Supreme Court:Eastern Oklahoma remains Native American territory

Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in remote and sometimes desolate internment camps during World War II amid evidence-less fears that they would act as spies or saboteurs for the Japanese government.

The Minidoka internment camp for Japanese Americans as seen in 1944. Elaine Stiles

With the adoption of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, Reagan acknowledged the injustice of the internment, apologized for it and a $20,000 cash payment was made to each person who was interned and, perhaps crucially in terms of setting a precedent, still alive.

"The act was designed to avoid the whole issue of heirs and estates and descendants. It was decided that only the person who had been incarcerated should be paid – directly," said Norman Mineta, who served as Commerce secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Transportation secretary under President George W. Bush.

Mineta, 88, was instrumental in the act's passage.

He also understood more than most what it meant to Japanese Americans.

Age 10, he was interned with his family – immigrants from Japan – first at the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles, then in Wyoming.

They were sent there shortly after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor "a date which will live in infamy."

All these years later Mineta has an abiding memory of that time: "I remember lots of these big signs that were put up on utility poles and sides of buildings where there were relatively large populations of people, like me, with Japanese ancestry," he said.

The signs instructed all those of "Japanese ancestry, alien and non-alien" to report to certain designated areas, at certain times, for evacuation to the camps.

"I looked at those signs as a very young boy and I said to my brother, who is 9 years older: 'Who's a non-alien?' He said: 'That's you.' I said: 'I'm not a non-alien. I'm a citizen.' He said: 'It means the same thing. It's some kind of psychological warfare.' And that's why, to this day, I still continue to cherish the word 'citizen,' because my own government wasn't willing, at that time, to use the word to describe me," Mineta said.

 

[saturn7]

'They accepted responsibility for their actions. Everything starts with that'

One country that perhaps has more experience administering reparations than any other is Germany, a consequence of its state-directed murder of millions of Jews.

During World War II, Germany also forced millions into slave labor throughout German-occupied Europe. Up to 20 million people toiled manufacturing steel and armaments, as farm hands, in clerical positions, as servants in private homes and other jobs.

Bernd Reiter, a German-born political scientist who teaches at the University of South Florida, said that initially international calls for Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust survivors were met with strong resistance domestically because the country had been all but destroyed by the war and many Germans were poor or destitute.

Additionally, there was recognition that it was Germany's payment of reparations after World War I to compensate Allied powers such as Britain, France and the USA for some of their war costs that contributed to the rise of Hitler's Nazism in the first place.

There was also an unwillingness from some of Israel's Jews to receive German funds.



"Many Israelis saw reparations as blood money – a cheap way out," Reiter said.

Still, by 1956, according to Reiter, Germany was contributing significant sums to Israel's state revenue – money the new state used to build its railways and electricity grid and fund major national infrastructure projects in agriculture, mining and irrigation.

Confronting injustices: Germany slowly relaxes its grip on how it deals with Holocaust

Germany has also, since 1952, paid more than $80 billion in reparations directly to 800,000 Holocaust victims, according to Claims Conference, an organization that represents the world's Jews in negotiating compensation for victims of Nazi crimes.

This works out, on average, at about $100,000 per recipient.

Separately, Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation, a German federal agency, has paid out almost $6 billion to 1.7 million former workers, or their descendants, who were forced into labor by Nazis or their collaborators. These payments have been based on estimates of how much their work enriched Germany.

More recently, in 2013, the German government agreed to pay $1 billion for the home care of elderly Holocaust survivors – financial assistance that, as of July 2019, was estimated to benefit about 80,000 Holocaust survivors, Claims Conference said.

Sami Steigmann, 80, may eventually be one of them.

 

[Big Boda]

its #NoReparationsNoVote for me

#NoTangiblesNoVote

#CutTheCheck stop playing with descendants of american slaves.

 

[saturn7]

Mystic Valley Area Branch, NAACP, Virtual Book Event with William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen discussing "From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century".

 

[saturn7]

He was forced into a Nazi labor camp in Ukraine when he was just 18 months old. While there, he nearly starved to death after Nazi scientists experimented on his young body.

Sami Steigmann at three months old being held by his parents. A little over a year later they would all be in a Nazi camp in Ukraine.

After the Russians liberated his family from the camp in 1944, Steigmann moved to Israel before eventually settling in New York City, where he still lives today.

Over the years Steigmann estimates that he has received about $110,000 in payments of various kinds from the German authorities. He still receives about $400 per month.

But life has not been easy for Steigmann.

The legacy of his time in the camp, though he was very young, has contributed to mental health problems and, off and on, he has experienced homelessness.

"Germany's money has not changed my life," he said. "But the way I look at it is that they accepted responsibility for their actions. Everything starts with that."

How much?
At a Congressional Black Caucus press conference in early July, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said that systemic racism "has been a cancer on the skin and the fabric of this nation that has not been remedied; it has only deepened." She said reparations are "the answer to the original sin."

But the prospect of reparations in the USA, at least in policy terms, has raised a lot of questions. Among them: Who gets reparations? And how much should they get?

According to an estimate by Mullen and Darity, the historian and economist at Duke University, the cost of compensating Americans descended from slaves for the legacy of bondage and subsequent racial oppression could be as much as $13 trillion.

Mullen and Darity have calculated that, out of an approximate 45 million Black Americans, about 40 million would be eligible recipients of these funds if eligibility is based on whether their ancestors were enslaved in the USA.

This works out in the vicinity of $300,000-$350,000 per recipient.

Which raises another question: What's the potential impact? How, in other words, will reparations for a historic crime help the future Tony Burroughs of this world amass wealth and pass it on to subsequent generations of Black Americans?

Studies have shown that the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family. Black Americans are also less likely to own a home than other racial and ethnic groups. The Black poverty rate is double the white rate.

According to an analysis by Mullen and Darity, reparations, if handled judiciously, could lead to the elimination of the Black-white wealth gap within 10 years.

However, that does not mean that reparations would be a panacea for all the myriad ways in which racial discrimination from police brutality to predatory mortgage-lending practices have persisted after Jim Crow laws officially stopped being enforced in 1965.

"I don't believe the elimination of racial wealth differences will solve every dimension of racial injustice," Darity said. "Other policies would be needed," he added.

 

[El_Mero_Mero]

Do you feel people will rush to the Ancestry-type websites to see if they can get enough proof to prove that they also "qualify" for reparations?

 

[Ezekiel 25:17]

its #NoReparationsNoVote for me

#NoTangiblesNoVote

#CutTheCheck stop playing with descendants of american slaves.

B..b..but you gone let racist Trump win

 

[Robo Squirrel]

Reparations bill gets new attention amid BLM. Could other nations provide a blueprint?

Tony Burroughs' great-great-great-great grandfather was freed from slavery in 1806 by a white woman from Pennsylvania. In her last will and testament, Margaret Hutton had specified that David Truman was to be taught to read and do math.

He was given $8, about $165 in today's money. Truman was 25.

But 59 years later when a Union Army general named Gordon Granger announced in Texas on June 19, 1865 – now known as Juneteenth – that "all slaves are free," neither Truman nor his descendants benefited from the federal government's short-lived promise of what then passed for reparations: "forty acres and a mule."

The title page of Margaret Hutton's will that specified David Truman should be freed in 1806.


Truman's grandson, Burroughs discovered, would later accumulate enough money to buy a single acre for farming. But he lost it some years later. From enslavement, in all, it would take six generations – until Burroughs' parents' generation, in the late 1960s –before the family had the financial footing to become homeowners.

"The Confederates lost the Civil War. They sure didn't give up the fight," said Burroughs, 71, the founder of the Center for Black Genealogy, a Chicago-based organization that helps people scour records and offers advice about how to trace their lineages.

Burroughs has spent more than 20 years researching his ancestors.

"There's so many ways in which Black Americans have been denied wealth," he said.

cont....

Slavery reparations bill spurs new debate; are other nations a model?

 

[Cadillac]

Do you feel people will rush to the Ancestry-type websites to see if they can get enough proof to prove that they also "qualify" for reparations?

That won't help them unless they identifed asaas black and have proof

 

[Lord-Yosh]

Cut the check

 

[saturn7]

Do you feel people will rush to the Ancestry-type websites to see if they can get enough proof to prove that they also "qualify" for reparations?

In a 2003 article written with Dania Frank Francis, and, more recently, in work written with Kirsten Mullen, we have proposed two criteria for eligibility for black reparations. First, an individual must demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S. Second, an individual must demonstrate that for at least 10 years prior to the onset of the reparations program or the formation of the study commission, whichever comes first, they self-identified as black, Negro or African-American. The first criterion will require genealogical documentation — but absolutely no phenotype, ideology or DNA tests. The second criterion will require presentation of a suitable state or federal legal document that the person declared themselves to be black.


Overdue reparations is the key to closing the racial wealth gap