Today, Explained - 40 acres and a bill

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Slavery reparations were once an untouchable idea in American politics, but now presidential candidates openly support it. And for the first time ever, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has Congress considering it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maybe you've heard that the Democratic Party has shifted to the left. An interesting upshot of that is now you get to hear the establishment talk about things that were formerly relegated to discussion in your college poli-sci class. Exhibit A, reparations. Our country will never truly heal until we address the original sin of slavery. You know, I think we have to do everything that we can to end institutional racism. The government itself has systematically discriminated against black people. And he said foundational to reparations is the word repair. Foundational to repair is the truth.

Presidential candidates are seriously talking about how to make up for slavery in the United States. And Congress just held a hearing on it for the first time ever. Black people in America are the descendants of Africans kidnapped and transported to the United States with the explicit complicity of the U.S. government and every arm of the United States lawmaking and law enforcement infrastructure. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is the sponsor of a bill called H.R. 40. I spoke with her last week. I think this is a moment in history that reflects the need for an assessment of America's original sin. And that is the 250 years that Africans were held as slaves in bondage in the United States.

And I really believe that the introduction of H.R. 40 creates a constructive opportunity for America to engage in the reflection and the discussion of race and racism. Tell me about the bill. What will H.R. 40 do? What it does, or what it will do, is establish a commission appointed by the President of the United States, the Leader of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House, along with six other scholars and advocates who've been involved in the reparation study and movement over the years to deal with the de jure and de facto impact of racism and horrible period of slavery. To be clear here, HR 40 is just setting up a committee, a commission that will think about this in a real way, that will try and get something done.

But so far, no one's talking about, you know, people are going to get payments, people are going to get bonds, people are going to get property. None of that stuff's happening yet. Nothing in the legislation indicates a check. What it does say is that we're going to have a constructive analysis of a dastardly period in America that has never been addressed, but more importantly, a detailed analysis of slavery. Let me be very clear. We will not be knocking on our neighbor's door, who happens to not be an African American, and ask them for a check or a payment. This is a governmental action.

Slavery was enforced by the government, state and federal and local. And so we will be looking to the government for a positive solution. For those who think this was in the past and I had nothing to do with it, the very fact of the prosperity and the greatness of this nation was built on the original crop. Cotton, worthy to be called king, truly a servant of mankind. That's where we got the terminology, cotton was king. It was the singular export to around the world. This fledgling country with a few states in the deep south was made wealthy by the landed south and cotton and the ability to have free labor for 250 years. No workman's comp,

no salary, no access to health care, no property ownership, no ownership of the crop that you had actually produced. But it was sold around the world. And frankly, it built the banks of the North. It built the Ivy League schools, who were some of the first institutions. It was built on the backs of slaves. So slaves were a part of the economic engine that this country stood on. We are now coming to say, let's reconcile with that history. Let's find a way to address the inequities that still exist today, to the extent that African Americans are incarcerated, impacted by mass incarceration, unequal schools, and look to what would be substantial responses. This idea of compensating people for government injustice isn't foreign to the federal government, right?

The country's gone down this road before? Well, two recent examples are the response that was given to the Japanese American community who were interned in the 1940s, tragically and unfortunately and devastatingly so, were given compensation under the Reagan administration. The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 survivors, surviving Japanese Americans, of the 120,000 who were relocated or detained. Yet no payment can make up for those lost years.

The issue of the Rosewood community in Florida where they were attacked was an African-American community. Early in January 1923, some 1,000 whites came to town, and when they left about a week later, Rosewood had been burned to the ground. No one knows for sure how many people were killed there. The figures might be as high as 40. A lawsuit ensued, and they were able to get relief.

Is there a challenge here because so much time has passed since slavery in this country that it's kind of hard to figure out who exactly should get the reparations? In actuality, the time is rather short historically. If you think of China and its thousands of years, slavery was a little over 150 years ago. I just mean in terms in comparison to like, say, the Japanese internment camps, you could easily find the descendants of those who were interned or you could find the people themselves. This is, we're talking about everyone's dead, right? Well, let me just say that that is going to be the task of the commission. I don't pretend to try and design what will be the appropriate approach,

but that's what we expect the commission to do and to be able to assess how do you deal with de jure and de facto, which is now, and certainly the last century is current. And as I said, we're looking broadly, we're looking economically, psychologically, sociologically, politically, and scientifically to address these questions. And that means we can look at systemic changes that would impact the African-American population. You know, I think Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, they all refuse to back reparations. Why do you think there's so much support for this blossoming right now from mainstream Democratic politicians? I'd like to think it's the way we presented it to the American

public. There is no anger or anguish in our presentation. It's common sense. I think it can be seen clearly now. And I think in the backdrop of what I said was the uptick of the groups of white supremacy, white racism. I think people can see that we've obviously never finished a discussion on race. People do not understand the value of the richness of diversity of this nation. Charlottesville certainly was another stain, and that was of recent vintage, where we lost an innocent life to people who were there out of hatred. And I don't know if we want this nation to be defined as a place that relishes hatred and promotes hatred. And I even think the presidential candidates that were hesitant are now prepared to say they would sign the bill if H.R. 40 was passed.

I know Congress apologized for slavery in 2009. By the Senate, the House of Representatives concurring that the sense of the Congress is the following. One, apology for the enslavement and segregation of African Americans. The Congress, A, acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws. B, apologizes. But eight years later, there was this mayor's poll that found that 68% of American adults were against the idea of payments to the descendants of enslaved people. Do you think if Americans were asked about a different form of reparations, it would play better? Like an apology on a bigger stage, like a presidential address?

And if so, would that be enough? Well, I frankly think we are just beginning this journey on passing H.R. 40. It was an amazing response on last Wednesday when we held our hearing and we had such outstanding testimony from Mr. Coates, who wrote the centennial piece in Atlantic. In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement and reject fair-weather patriotism. To say that a nation is both its credits and its debits. That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings.

That if D-Day matters, so does Black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. We heard from Danny Glover who talked about his ancestors. I sit here as the great grandson of a former slave, Mary Brown, who was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863. I had the fortune of meeting her as a small child. We heard from Dr. Malveaux, who clearly talked about the economic depredation that the African-American population has experienced, the inequity in wealth. When a black woman, man, is arrested absent wealth, they lay up in the jail for I don't know how many days because they don't have the home to mortgage to get the bail.

And cash bail is discriminatory. When zip code determines what kind of school that you go to, when zip code determines what kind of school that you go to, when zip code determines what kind of food you can eat. These are the vestiges of enslavement that a lot of people don't want to deal with. So I just think we're beginning the journey. I'm not going to be daunted by a 68% polling number of people that really don't understand the horrific brutality of slavery and that history of 1619 to 1865. So this gives another opportunity to tell our story. I'm constantly hearing from people who have visited for the first time the African American

Culture and History Museum. They're absolutely overwhelmed. It's experiences that they've never had before. So I expect that 68% to turn around and be 68% in favor of passing H.R. 40 and addressing this period in our history. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee is a Democrat from Houston and the sponsor of H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. Congress is talking about reparations. Presidential candidates are talking about reparations. But it was after the Civil War that we actually saw the government try to give something to the formerly enslaved. Well, in 1865, there is this policy known today as 40 acres and a mule. Confiscated Confederate land was to be set aside for freed slaves.

For each family, there was to be set aside no more than 40 acres. And then there was also the promise that the government would give you a mule on loan. But, of course, things didn't go as planned. When Andrew Johnson took over as president after Lincoln was assassinated, he rolled back that policy. And so the land went back into the hands of the former slave owners, rebels of the United States. And this is how the sharecropping system came about because Black people had to enter into contracts with their former slave owners. And of course, those contracts were never meant to benefit the former slaves. Forty acres and a mule is the idea for reparations we've all heard about. But a historian named Erica Coleman says the country has mostly forgotten Callie House,

who started one of the earliest reparations movements. Carly House came from a family who was enslaved in Tennessee, and she was born in 1861. The family is freed, of course, through Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 63, so she's basically an infant when she was freed. With her family being enslaved for a number of years, she grew up hearing these stories of slavery. And because of the effort to maintain white supremacy and keep Black people enslaved, though they were legally free, she did experience some semblance of slavery.

As she's getting older and, you know, her parents are getting older and they're seeing are seeing that financially strapped because in this process of emancipation, there were no set asides for former enslaved to start their lives as free people. And so what she does is become very active in the movement for pensions for ex-slaves. This whole idea of pensions was based on veteran pensions. Union soldiers, as well as Confederates, were receiving pensions as a part of their service in the Civil War. And so this was the thinking of Carly House. And she is a force to be reckoned with. She travels the country and she's encouraging Black people, stand up for your rights, lobby the federal government for this ex-slave pension. Of course, the federal government is not happy about this.

She becomes the target of mail fraud. Mail fraud? Yes. At this time, the post office department has, I mean, unlimited power. It was early on decided that one of their departments would be the anti-fraud department to make sure that people weren't using the mail service for financial gain, what we call today Ponzi schemes. And so the federal government begins to, you know, put her and a lot of the people associated with the organization under surveillance when she's being targeted by the government. They literally try to ruin her reputation. And in some ways, they were successful at doing that. But the interesting thing is that this system of targeting citizens, progressive activists, was really nothing new. Is she basically asking for reparations? Is that what this is, this pension? She's using the term compensation, but she is really talking about reparations.

One of the quotes that she's most famous for, she said, if the government had the right to free us, she's talking about the United States, had a right to make some provision for us. And since she did not make it soon after emancipation, she ought to make it now. What about this ex-slave pension cause? Did that ever see the light of day? Frederick Douglass, in 1890, sends a letter to a Democrat by the name of Walter R. Vaughn. And he marvels that the federal government had failed to compensate Black people for roughly 250 years of unpaid labor. And he says to Vaughn, The Egyptian bondsman went out with the spoils of his master, and the Russian serf was provided with farming tools and three acres of land upon which to begin life. But the Negro has neither spoils, implements, nor land. And today he is practically a slave on the very plantation where formerly he was driven to toil under the lash.

And so this is really what gets this ex-slave pension bill started. It's introduced in Congress. It was H.R. 11119. was a concerted effort to hold the United States government responsible for slavery and for them to make restitution. But just like 40 acres and a mule, nothing ever happens with this pension bill? Nothing ever happens with this pension bill? Nothing ever happens with the pension bill. We know reparations are controversial now, but you make it sound like they've basically always been pretty controversial. Is that the case? Yes. I mean, this is not just a controversial issue among whites. It's also a controversial issue among Blacks. Remember, Frederick Douglass supported

reparations. Booker T. Washington did not. He did not support Black people agitating for their political rights. What he wanted Black people to do was to, on their own, develop their own economic base without the help of whites, because he felt that Black people had something to prove. And that once we proved that we could be economically sufficient, then this would win over whites and racism would disappear. And so I would say that there remains the Frederick Douglass and the Booker T. Washington camps today with this issue. And we saw that at the hearing when you had Ta-Nehisi Coates supported

and then you had Coleman Hughes not supported. If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing Black people today. We would insult many Black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors. And we would turn the relationship between Black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction. The United States wasn't the only country that participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Have other countries tried to work through this in any significant way? In the Caribbean, early on in the new millennium,

they came up with a 10-point plan for reparations. Fifteen Caribbean nations are demanding compensation from Europe for damages caused during the slave trade. The demands made include financial support in reforming education and raising literacy rates, which are still extremely low in some Caribbean communities. But it's not just monetary. You know, they list monuments and cultural centers. They list mental health services. They were one of the earlier ones who had this very succinct, you know, don't act like y'all don't know what we want.

Here's what we want. It's also been about, you know, almost 200 years that this country has in some way, shape or form been talking about reparations. Do you think something is different about the conversation that's happening right now? Do you think something could actually happen? I think that if we continue to have this conversation at the momentum that we're having it now, because this is really now developing once again into a movement that is reminiscent of the Carly House movement of the late 19th, early 20th century. And the attitude of, you know, a lot of people then and now is, I don't even know why we're talking about this because it ain't going to happen. Not the point. The point is that we need to have this conversation. This is a taboo conversation. And at the time that Obama was running, I mean, this was considered political suicide. And it's interesting because remember Bernie Sanders in the last election, he called it a divisive issue. But I do think that this is getting some traction. And so I would just tell people, stay tuned,

strap your seatbelt on, because this is going to be a turbulent ride. Dr. Erica Coleman is a historian and author based in Newark, Delaware. To be honest, it's pretty boring here, but the fun part is that we have tax-free shopping. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.