Sometimes, to paraphrase a song by Sam Cooke that became an anthem of the civil rights movement, change is a long time coming. So, too, is justice.
On June 19, 154 years ago, news of the abolition of slavery finally reached Texas — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. On this year’s Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating Union General Gordon Granger’s declaration that “All slaves are free,” lawmakers on Capitol Hill will hold a hearing on the issue of reparations — the first in more than a decade.
It has taken too long to get to this point. Too long for reparations to be considered seriously. Too long for politicians and elected leaders to begin to acknowledge what has been made abundantly clear by irrefutable evidence and the lived experiences of black Americans.
The ravages of slavery did not end with Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation or Granger’s announcement or the 13th Amendment. They continued with the brutal laws of the Jim Crow era and systematic racial and economic discrimination against African Americans.
It is past time for us as a nation to redress those wrongs, to address what many have called America’s “original sin,” and to compensate the descendants of the enslaved.
The hearing by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties is a good start. The discussion will focus on HR40, a bill that would create a commission “to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans.”
The measure, first proposed 30 years ago by former Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., who reintroduced it every year, received only one previous hearing in 2007.
The date may be “synonymous with history,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who took over sponsorship of the bill after Conyers resigned in 2017, but Wednesday’s hearing is not just a symbolic gesture. Lee wants to see the legislation move forward — out of committee and up for a vote before the full House.
There is precedent for reparations. In 1988, the U.S. government paid people of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II $20,000 and offered a formal apology. Billions have also been given to indigenous nations through courts and legislation.
There is no doubt that a debt is owed to the millions of enslaved people and their descendants whose labor and suffering built this country. No doubt that decades of government policy and practices such as redlining have denied black Americans jobs, education, housing and health care and contributed to a persistent racial wealth gap. The median net worth of white families is about 10 times that of black families, according to the Federal Reserve.
As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of those scheduled to speak at the hearing, has noted: “Virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African American community.”
Coates, whose landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” in The Atlantic helped revive the call for reparations, has said he did not expect his piece would result in getting reparations passed. “My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing,” he said in a March 2019 interview. “And then, once you got them to stop laughing, you could get them to start fighting.”
Well, people have stopped laughing. Several of the Democratic 2020 candidates have expressed support for reparations, including former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, Sen. Kamala Harris (D.-Calif.), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.). Sen. Cory Booker (D.-N.J.) has also introduced a companion bill to HR40 in the U.S. Senate.
A commission to examine the long-term impact of 200 years of slavery and the mechanism for reparations — who would be eligible, what form compensation should take, how would any recompense be meted out — is “a perfectly acceptable approach,” Lee said.
We agree. Lawmakers need to pass HR40 and establish a commission to study reparations. It could be the first step for a national healing that is long overdue, and frankly, impossible without full, meaningful atonement for America’s original sin.