U.S. History of Slavery Justifies Reparations for Blacks, Coalition Contends : Justice: Germany paid Jews and U.S. is paying Japanese-Americans. Why not compensate blacks for years of kidnaping and servitude, group asks.

Slavery, the institution, died in 1865. But is slavery unfinished business?

Some blacks think so. They note that Germany has paid billions to the Jewish survivors of the gas chambers; the United States has promised $1.2 billion to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II.

But blacks, they say, have not been compensated for 300 bloody years of kidnapings and forced servitude. Until they are, the books can’t be closed.

“It maintains a layer of low-grade resentment and hostility,” said Efia Nwangaza, a Greenville, S.C., lawyer and former board member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, or N’COBRA. “Black people . . . feel a sense of violation as a result of the African holocaust.”

Some argue that the black community’s most pressing problems aren’t linked to slavery; others say reparations would be pointless. Still others say reparations are a nice idea but doubt they’ll ever be paid.

But organizers of last year’s national Day of Absence to mark Juneteenth--the holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, the day Texas slaves learned they had been freed--included a call for reparations in their platform. And about 100 black lawyers, activists, business leaders and social workers met in Charleston, S.C., last summer for a conference on reparations.

And Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has sponsored a bill to set up a commission to study the concept. Similar bills have been introduced in the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania legislatures, and several city councils have passed resolutions in support of Conyers’ bill.

“People will say, ‘My grandfather wasn’t part of that,’ ” said Kalonji Olusegun, co-chairman of N’COBRA, an umbrella organization for more than 20 groups that was formed in 1987. “But this country was part of that. This country has to answer for that.”

The commission established by Conyers’ bill would study the form reparations should take, Nwangaza said.

“The first thought, certainly among whites, is cash money,” she said. “Cash money is the least important of it.”

Specific ideas include genealogical studies, land and resources to establish a separate nation or--for blacks able to trace their roots to a specific ethnic group--resources to build a life in Africa, Nwangaza said.

Carl Bell, a black psychologist and executive director of the Community Mental Health Council in Chicago, said blacks deserve compensation for being cut off from their roots, if for nothing else.

“Heritage is very important as a source of inner strength,” he said. “That’s one of the buffers, pride in your heritage. If you don’t know what it is, you’re missing something.”

Herman (Skip) Mason Jr., a black genealogist who runs a consulting firm and teaches history at Morehouse College in Atlanta, has dedicated his life to tracing his own roots and those of other blacks.

Slavery makes his job more difficult than it should be. Not surprisingly, he likes the idea of money for genealogical study.

“It would be nice if we could get money to do research to help us piece together our individual families,” he said. “One of the problems with the black family now is that we have a lack of cohesiveness.”

Robert Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington, doubts that slavery can be blamed for that lack of cohesiveness or for other problems in the black community.

“Why is it that some blacks in this society have achieved while others have not?” he asked. “Why is it that until 1959, 78% of all black families were whole?”

Talk about reparations, he said, is a “cop-out.”

“It’s a nice, easy cliche that exempts people from personal responsibility,” he said. Blacks can’t “assume that somehow, because white people created this, which they did, that we have to look to them for a solution. That’s almost an insult to our forbearers.”

Others believe it doesn’t make sense for blacks, who pay taxes, to seek reparations from the government.

“What’s the point?” asked Christy Brown, a law student at Duke University.

Charles King of San Diego, who operates a 900 number that gives updated information about the reparations movement and allows callers to give their opinions, has heard many other objections.

People argue, among other things, that blacks aren’t entitled to reparations because they are descendants and weren’t enslaved themselves, that reparations would strain the economy, and that black people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, King said.