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ORIGINAL: DomKen


There are blacks living in the small Alabama town my family comes from with the same name as my paternal grandmother's maiden name which is also the name of the town. I'm not going to try and guestimate how related we might be to each other but I'd lay odds we share some fairly recent ancestors.

My paternal grandmother's close white relatives own functionally the entire town, the farmland around the town is multiply subdivided from the property originally homestead by my ancestors. The blacks who live in town and share my grandmother's name are and have been dirt poor as far back as anyone knows. They certainly were sharecroppers well into the 1960's.

They are likely decended from some of the same people as those who now own the whole town but have not benefitted at all from that relationship. I'm not saying reparations are the way to go but the above argument by Firm is ridiculous.

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ORIGINAL: kdsub

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ORIGINAL: DomKen


There are blacks living in the small Alabama town my family comes from with the same name as my paternal grandmother's maiden name which is also the name of the town. I'm not going to try and guestimate how related we might be to each other but I'd lay odds we share some fairly recent ancestors.

My paternal grandmother's close white relatives own functionally the entire town, the farmland around the town is multiply subdivided from the property originally homestead by my ancestors. The blacks who live in town and share my grandmother's name are and have been dirt poor as far back as anyone knows. They certainly were sharecroppers well into the 1960's.

They are likely decended from some of the same people as those who now own the whole town but have not benefitted at all from that relationship. I'm not saying reparations are the way to go but the above argument by Firm is ridiculous.

Maybe I do not understand so if my comment is not relevant forgive me. Last names mean little in bloodlines of slaves. Sad but so one of my direct relatives had over 2,000 slaves…when they were freed most took on the last names of their owners. There is a town in S. Carolina where the last name of my 5 times removed grandfather is the most common name in the phone book among African Americans.

I don’t know if this was required or the choice of the slaves who may not of even known their true African names… or maybe they did not want to stand out in an area hostile to blacks.

Butch

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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen

Original responsibility and therefore liability must lie with those who took people and enslaved them - that is the leadership of west African tribes, who were engaged for centuries in this activity - an activity in which European customers were not the only source of business - Arabian customers and other African customers were buying too, long before and even after the trans Atlantic trade as regards north America and British colonies had ceased.

E

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And America, so far as I know, was the ONLY nation to have suffered a catastrophic civil war for the sake of abolishing slavery.

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mostly the descendants of the Normans

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ORIGINAL: Arpig

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mostly the descendants of the Normans

Hey, what is it with you guys lately, stop bringing my family into things...

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ORIGINAL: rulemylife

Should blacks get reparations?



Gettysburg, Pa. – "You wonder why we didn't do it 100 years ago," said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, after the Senate voted June 18 to endorse a national apology for slavery. "It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice." And considering the scale and brutality of slavery in American history, Senator Harkin could not be more right.

Abraham Lincoln described slavery as "the one retrograde institution in America," and told a delegation of black leaders in 1862 that "your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people."

But one reason why we have waited so long has to do with what many advocates of the apology regard as the necessary next step – reparations to African-Americans by the federal government. Significantly, that's a step the Senate's apology resolution refused to take.

................. Randall Robinson, whose book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks" (2000), demanded "massive restitutions" to American blacks for slavery, insists that an apology is meaningless without reparations payments to African-Americans. "Much is owed, and it is very quantifiable," Mr. Robinson said after the Senate vote. "It is owed as one would owe for any labor that one has not paid for, and until steps are taken in that direction we haven't accomplished anything."

................And on the surface, the case for reparations to African-Americans has all the legal simplicity of an ordinary tort. A wrong was committed; therefore, compensation is due to those who were wronged. But just below that surface is a nest of disturbing complications that undercut the ease with which Robinson, Mr. Burris, and other reparations activists have put their case.


1. Who was legally responsible for slavery? Not the federal government. Slavery was always a matter of individual state enactments, which is what made Lincoln's initial attempts to free the slaves so difficult.

............2. Who should be paid? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: the slaves. But the victims of slavery are now long dead; it is the heirs of those victims who stand next in line for compensation. Still, the line is a shaky and complicated one, with the chief complication lurking in the genes of African-Americans themselves.

...........3. What about the Civil War? Slavery did not end by evaporation. It took a catastrophic civil war.............

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ORIGINAL: rulemylife
And the government did set a precedent by giving reparation payments to the Japanese-Americans interred During WWII.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

The southern states seceded, in part, due to the slavery issue.

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ORIGINAL: SoulPiercer


The southern states seceded because Lincoln campaigned against the expansion of slavery beyond the southern states. He did not campaign for the abolishment of slavery.

The civil war was fought to return the southern states to the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation didn't even free all slaves. It only freed slaves in the states that had seceded. It wasn't done to end slavery. I was done to prevent the British from getting involved in the war. At the time, the British favored the southern states. If the British had sided with the south, it would appear that Britain (which had already abolished slavery) went to war in support of slavery.

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ORIGINAL: Loki45

Judging from this post, and the couple after it, it appears that the U.S. can't and shouldn't make 'reparation's' to any group at all. Because at some point in history, every 'group' in the U.S. was the victim of some injustice by another group.

I'm beginning to wonder if that's become some unspoken rite of passage for being an American. It goes all the way back to the first settlers to arrive here. Were they not fleeing persecution in England?

It seems to me that what you have is a cycle of abuse. The first ones fleed persecution, so they came here. The next group suffered for the first group's persecution and then the group that arrived after that suffered for the persecution that the second group suffered. And so on and so on.

It's kinda like a family of brothers. The first one gets 'picked on' because the parents don't yet know how to raise him 'right' and then he picks on his little brother who has it a little easier than he did. Then that brother picks on the youngest because 'hey, it was done to me.'

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ORIGINAL: DarkSteven

Okay, I'm not a lawyer.  But here are some of my thoughts.

1. Slavery in the US lasted maybe fifty years and ended about 150 years ago.  Surely the Statute of Limitations expired a long time back.

2. When Affirmative Action was enacted, the premise was that minorities had been denied equal opportunities and that AA would even the playing field.  At that time, no discussion of reparations for unpaid slave wages was held.

3. The proper time to discuss this would have been in 1865, when President Andrew Johnson rescinded the "40 acres and a mule" giveaway.  Absent any evidence to the contrary, it could be assumed that the land was a form of reparations. 

4. As the article says, who pays?  The descendants of the slaveowners have no financial or legal obligations - that does not pass into the estate.  The government cannot be held legally liable for its actions as a general thing.

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In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership".  About $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to surviving internees and their heirs.