The Calculus of Injustice

It starts with a man in chains. Then it runs, grimly purposeful, through 200-plus years of bigotry, humiliation, rejection to end up here, with Joan Brown’s children.

That’s how Brown sees it, anyway: a straight line running from slavery to the present, each woe following hard upon the last.

Her ancestors were shackled. Freed, they were kept illiterate and poor. Couldn’t get loans. Couldn’t get decent medical care. Brown’s mother died of tuberculosis at age 18. Brown herself was sent to pick cotton as a girl. She never made it past the third grade. Of her nine children, only two graduated from high school. One is in prison. And 14 of her grandchildren are in foster care, their parents deemed unfit.

Brutal, hopeless past leads to brutal, hopeless future.

Which brings Brown, 53, to this conclusion: The U.S. government owes her big. In fact, it owes all African Americans for centuries of mistreatment. Owes them reparations.

Brown, who walks door-to-door in this nearly all-black city to drum up support for her cause, is but one voice in a resurgent national movement that insists America owes its African American citizens a debt--and demands at least a down payment.

This is not necessarily a call for taxpayers to cut checks to each African American of slave descent. That’s just one approach. Many activists urge instead a domestic Marshall Plan--a huge investment to rebuild black communities through college scholarships, job training, interest-free loans, even amnesty for some nonviolent criminals.

The specifics, they contend, are less important than the principle: the government confessing its sins and moving to atone for them. Admitting that its policies--not only during slavery but also in the century that followed--ground many blacks down into a permanent underclass.

“So many residuals of slavery are very clearly with us,” said Hilary O. Shelton, who directs the Washington chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “An apology is due but also much more than that.”

The reparations movement has been simmering for 40 years, to little effect. A poll taken in October by Harvard University and the University of Chicago found that 53% of blacks surveyed thought the government should compensate descendants of slaves. A 1997 poll by ABC News found just 10% of whites backed the idea.

Yet several recent developments have energized the movement.

Last year’s settlement compensating Jews who had been forced into slave labor in Nazi Germany spurred some African Americans to ask: Why not us? Recent disclosures about--and apologies from--companies that profited off the slave trade, including Aetna Insurance and the Hartford Courant newspaper, also got people thinking. As did a book by prominent lobbyist Randall Robinson titled “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.”

Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas and Washington all have passed resolutions calling for a national committee to advise Congress on reparations. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) has gained 46 co-sponsors of a bill that would do just that. “The forward thrust is very, very encouraging,” he said of the bill, which is backed by the NAACP.

Meanwhile, a coalition of big-time attorneys, both black and white, plans to file a class-action lawsuit within months seeking reparations for African Americans. The group includes Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.; Richard Scruggs, who led the recent state attorneys general fight against the tobacco industry; and Alexander J. Pires Jr., who recently won $1 billion for black farmers discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Pires called the reparations lawsuit “far and away the most important case ever.”

It’s also bound to be one of the most controversial. Already, the debate runs acrid.

On one side, the proponents of reparations draw that line from slavery to the sorrows of today: the 26% of blacks living in poverty, compared with 8% of whites. The black infant mortality rate, double that of whites. The familiar, depressing landscapes of black communities like Benton Harbor, which boasts a sparkling Lake Michigan waterfront and a spunky downtown revival, but which nonetheless struggles with unemployment, crime and block after block of boarded-up, beaten-up homes.

On the other side, the critics concede, African Americans do face tough odds, but look at all those who have made it. Look at the booming black middle class. Those at the bottom need to stop bellyaching, they say. Need to move on. Move up.

“If you added up all the income black Americans earn and considered us as a separate nation, we’d be the 13th or 14th richest nation on the face of this Earth,” says Walter E. Williams, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “Blacks have benefited from the fact of slavery, because we have far greater freedom and far higher incomes than we could ever find in Africa.”

Robert Woodson Sr.--director of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington, which trains black youths for skilled jobs such as Web site design--points to the African American business districts that thrived in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s despite Jim Crow, despite lynchings, despite overt and legal bigotry. If blacks could do it then, surely they can do it now, he argues. But only if they stop begging and get to work.

“If you see yourself as a chronic victim, and if you look to the people you say are your enemy for your salvation,” Woodson warns, “then you always remain a whining dependent.”

Such are the philosophical objections to reparations. There are practical questions to consider as well.

If reparations are to be paid, who should get them? Just descendants of slaves, or all African Americans? What about black immigrants from elsewhere in the world?

If the compensation is for slavery more than a century ago, why should today’s taxpayers foot the bill? If more recent bigotry is the rationale, why do African Americans have a special claim? What about reparations for gays? Or women? Or white men whose grandparents were humiliated--and impoverished--by signs decreeing, “No Irish need apply?”

And what if blacks won? Would they, in effect, be trading reparations for all government aid?

“Asking for reparations is strategically unwise because it puts a limit on your claim” by casting investment in black communities as a onetime payback of old debts, rather than an open-ended moral obligation to help fellow citizens in need, argues Glenn C. Loury, director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University.

“I don’t see anything wrong with getting money to help solve the problems,” Loury said. “What I’m objecting to is having it [presented] as a quid pro quo.”

But a quid pro quo is exactly what some blacks want.

William Spriggs, research director of the National Urban League, offers this analogy: “It’s like playing poker with someone who’s been dealing from the bottom of the deck and gets all your chips. You finally call him on it, and he says: ‘OK, here’s the deck, you deal. I won’t cheat anymore.’ You say, ‘But what about my chips?’ And he says, ‘Oh, no, you don’t get your chips back. I’m just telling you I’m going to be fair from here on out.’ You’re never going to win that game.”

So why not demand those chips back? You used us. You abused us. You owe us.

The pitch could hardly be more straightforward.

Reparation advocates even claim precedent on their side: After all, President Reagan approved restitution of $20,000 to each Japanese American interned during World War II. And in 1980, the Supreme Court awarded Sioux Indians $191 million as compensation for land stolen from them a century earlier. On a smaller scale, the state of Florida in 1994 paid $150,000 to each survivor of a 1923 assault on the black town of Rosewood.

But those cases hinge on specific, quantifiable losses that reparations could redress.

Japanese Americans, for example, could testify about the homes and businesses they lost when they were locked behind barbed wire. The Sioux could point to the land taken from them and explain what it meant to the tribe.

African American losses are much harder to calculate, although some have tried: By one estimate, the wages slaves should have been paid, plus interest, would amount to $1.4 trillion today. By another, blacks lost $82 billion in equity due to mortgage discrimination in this generation alone. A third calculation pegs the value of 40 acres and a mule--the compensation that freed slaves were promised but never got--at about $40,000 each in current dollars.

How, though, can one put a price tag on the gaps in Joan Brown’s education? On the blow to her self-esteem when, not yet 10, she had to abandon her studies in Alabama and pick cotton to survive? How can one quantify the consequences that followed, not inevitably but predictably: her inability to get a job, her poverty, seven of her nine kids dropping out of school?

Brown is not sure how to run the figures. Still, she insists it’s vital to try. An elected commissioner in this southwest Michigan town of 12,000, she looks at the mess that is her ward--the busted windows, the junky lots, the homes tipsy with disrepair--and concludes her constituents need their country to own up to how far it’s pushed them down.

“Reparations would change the attitude of a lot of people,” she said. “We’d have more faith and trust in America.”

Adjoa Aiyetoro, a law professor at American University, adds simply: “It’s a matter of dignity.”

Dignity, that is, not only for African Americans but for all citizens, of every race.

Most reparation activists passionately believe that airing their cause will help heal racial tensions. They are convinced that white America will repent and embrace them if only they learn the facts: that 25 million blacks died during slavery. That slaves built the U.S. Capitol. That generations of free blacks couldn’t vote or serve on juries, couldn’t work in certain jobs or buy homes in certain neighborhoods, couldn’t get an education or climb into the middle class because of laws written to hold them back. That some legalized bigotry continued as the 21st century was about to dawn; it was not until last month, for instance, that Alabama voters repealed a clause in their constitution barring blacks from marrying whites.

Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio), a white lawmaker sympathetic to at least studying reparations, says it will take years, if not decades, of racial reconciliation before the issue can even be addressed in Congress.

But black activists contend Hall has it backward: Discuss reparations first, they say, and only then will reconciliation be possible.

“The reason that racism festers and divides to this day is that it has never really been addressed head-on,” said J.L. Chestnut, an Alabama attorney and longtime advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. “This country has been in denial.”