Posted on 03/22/2002 7:30:17 AM PST by What Is Ain't
Reparations are part of the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, said Mary Frances Berry, guest lecturer in the first installment of Beach Institute's 2002 series on reparations.
"In fact, no matter how we look at it, at this hour the civil rights movement was very successful," she said. "I know that in a place that Clarence Thomas came from it's kind of hard to say that. But, the civil rights movement was successful."
After the laughter subsided, Berry spoke to the packed sanctuary Thursday night on how the nation has backslided in civil rights, the historical beginnings of the reparations movement, and where the movement is headed today.
Listening to the distinguished academician, lawyer, and chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is, in many ways, like chatting with an old friend. In her brief lecture at Second African Baptist Church, Berry skillfully wove together history, humor and hard-hitting facts.
"New attention in this kind of climate has been turned to the demand for reparations. The title of this (series) you have is 'Forty Acres and a Mule.' Well, I have to tell you I'd like 40 acres, but I'd like it to be oceanfront property. And you can forget the mule," she said to much laughter and applause.
The unfinished business Berry spoke of has two elements, she said. One is making sure the law really stands for equality and justice. The other part is the economic agenda.
The nation -- when headed by President Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush -- tried to create what it assumed were solutions to economic inequality between blacks and whites. Those strategies -- more education and targeted programs -- have failed, Berry said.
"The effort is under way all across this country to work on (reparations). There are scholars and activists trying to make a case," she said.
Lawyers have argued the theory of unjust enrichment.
"Whites and their descendants were unjustly enriched and blacks and their descendants were unjustly impoverished by the exploitation of black labor," she said.
Some also argue there should be housing and health care, but not cash given, as a form of reparations.
Berry highlighted the work of Robert Block of the Self Determination Committee in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s. He filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles asking for reparations and damages. The government did not answer his petition and it was ultimately lost in court.
Berry cited a New York woman who went to law school to figure out a way to make a case for reparations. She uncovered records showing insurance giant Aetna had written life insurance policies on slaves where the beneficiaries were the slave masters.
"So, anywhere you sort of lift up the cover, you will find these connections, because they are there," Berry said.
But many white Americans, she said, reject the notion of reparations for blacks on several fronts. They will say they personally didn't own slaves and neither did their parents, Berry said. Other common arguments are, "How can you establish who gets paid?" and "What about the Union soldiers who fought in the war, after all they freed these African Americans?"
"Well, the answer to that is most of us can figure out our ancestry if we want to. We can trace people. In my family we can do it. We know who the slaves were and we can go all the way back to the plantation," Berry said.
Union soldiers all got pensions, bounties, old-age benefits, and jobs, she said.
"Then they say, 'What about the immigrants who came after slavery was over?' Well they benefited from the infrastructure that was there before, because America benefited from slave labor," she said.
Some opponents, Berry added, say reparations have already been paid -- pointing to the welfare system.
"Well, welfare benefits go to everyone. And there are more whites on welfare, or were before Bill Clinton ended welfare, than blacks," she said. "Then they say, 'Well you all have racial preferences, and affirmative action has given you all of the best jobs in America.'
"Well we know what the answer to that is, don't you?"
In fact, Berry says evidence opponents have themselves produced says racial preferences may not have reached the vast majority of African Americans.
"This may mean that those who seek reparations have more work to do to prove the case, but that's all right, I don't really think that's the problem," she said.
In fact, Berry is currently working on a book that offers the federal government's own records as proof that the reparations movement began in earnest in 1897.
To answer opponent's assertions that, "We would be for (reparations) if these people were alive," Berry says, "Well they were alive then. And the people then weren't for it."
But, said Berry, the movement didn't die.
"The movement that you see today for reparations is merely an outgrowth of all that work," she said. "When we talk about reparations today -- however the issue is decided -- all we are really doing in a sense is being true to the memory of those who struggled, and who went to jail and worked hard for this cause, and the old ex-slaves who died in poverty and got nothing."
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