Slavery payments a divisive question

When it comes to the question of reparations for slavery,
Alabama is a house divided.

A new Mobile Register-University of South Alabama survey
shows that while 67 percent of black Alabamians favor
the federal government making cash payments to slave
descendants, only 5 percent of white Alabamians
agree.

Among the supporters is J.L. Chestnut, a black Selma
lawyer who is part of a national legal team preparing
to file reparations litigation.

Chestnut, a veteran of civil rights battles, said such an
effort is justified because black people continue to
be at an economic and educational disadvantage, owing
to slavery and generations of Jim Crow discrimination
that diminished in the South only in the 1960s.

"As I look about me now, I see evidence of slavery
everywhere. Whites may not see it, but I see it,"
said Chestnut.

But Spyros Alvonellos, a 38-year-old white man who came
to this country from Greece as a boy, doesn't buy the
idea of reparations.

"I don't see how a person like me should be responsible
for what people did 200 years ago," said Alvonellos,
who lives near Montgomery. "If you're going to look
at past things, look at what happened to the American
Indians ... This is a very racially divisive issue."

That's an accurate statement, said Keith Nicholls, the
University of South Alabama political science
professor who oversaw the survey.

"In five years of polling in Alabama, I have never seen
an issue that was so racially polarizing," Nicholls
said.

He added that the mere mention of reparations and an
official U.S. government apology for slavery --
another issue addressed in the poll -- caused many
white respondents to get so angry that they had
trouble completing the interview.

At the outset of the Civil War, Alabama had more than
430,000 slaves, representing 45 percent of the
state's population. Mobile had most of the state's
2,600 free blacks but was also the destination of the
last slave ship to arrive in the United States, just
before the Civil War.

The reparations issue dates to near the end of the war
when Union Gen. William T. Sherman signed an order
giving certain freed men 40 acres each of abandoned
or confiscated land along the South Carolina, Georgia
and Florida coasts.

"Forty acres and a mule" became the hope of former slaves
across the South, though Sherman never mentioned
mules, and his order was soon overturned by President
Andrew Johnson.

"It was a rumor, and the rumor goes everywhere, but there
was no general promise that everybody was going to
get land," said Michael Fitzgerald, a history
professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota and author
of a forthcoming book about Mobile during
Reconstruction.

Nearly a century and a half later -- after
Reconstruction, after the long period of segregation
known as Jim Crow and after the Civil Rights movement
-- the reparations controversy is thriving in the
courts, on radio and TV talk programs and on the
college lecture circuit.

A federal lawsuit filed recently in Brooklyn seeks
reparations from three companies -- including Aetna,
the insurance firm -- because they allegedly profited
from slavery before the Civil War.

Meanwhile, Chestnut's team -- which includes Johnnie
Cochran -- has been meeting regularly to plot
reparations litigation strategy.

Chestnut said he believes his group will file a lawsuit
by the end of the year, seeking not cash payments to
individuals but what some call "community-based
reparations."

"We would want to see, for example, adequate funding of
historic black colleges all over the country," he
said. "We would want to see real sustained urban
renewal in Atlanta, in Harlem, in parts of Mobile and
all over the country. We would want to see certain
banks, which have redlined (discriminated against)
blacks for centuries, provide capital for the
development of ongoing businesses inside the minority
community."

But it's easy to find white Alabamians who distrust the
wisdom and practicality of reparations for slave
descendants, even if the money would go to
institutions and communities.

"If we start this kind of thing, where will it end?" said
Eunie Smith of Birmingham, who is president of the
conservative Eagle Forum of Alabama, but who
emphasized that she was giving her personal views,
not the organization's, on this subject. "I'm afraid
it'd be a lot money for the lawyers and very little
for anybody who had felt the repercussions (of
discrimination.)"

Last week's poll showed strong black support for and
strong white opposition to any official U.S.
government apology for slavery. The races split too
on whether corporations that profited from slavery
should be required to pay reparations to slave
descendants.

The one point of agreement was on the question of whether
reparations would improve race relations. Both groups
-- whites by the stronger margin -- agreed that the
effect would be negative.

"It's going to be a hot and divisive debate," Chestnut
said. "But it is a debate that America desperately
needs to have, because this country is in denial
(about racial discrimination.) You can't heal
yourself by denying you're sick."

Not all white Alabamians oppose reparations. Al Brophy, a
law professor at the University of Alabama, has
counseled black residents of Tulsa, Okla., in their
effort to gain compensation for a 1921 race riot, in
which an armed white mob burned more than 30 blocks
of the city's black business district.

Brophy said he thinks reparations for slave descendants
will be an even tougher sell, since slavery is even
farther removed in time, and there's no single
offense to focus on, as with the Tulsa riot. But he
said the reparations-seekers are right to seek
compensation.

"You have generations of either completely uncompensated
labor (slaves) or grossly under-compensated labor,"
he said. "You have educational opportunities that
were either rare or non-existent ... This is not
reparations for slavery only. This is reparations for
slavery and the years of Jim Crow."

But there's skepticism about reparations among black
Alabamians, too. Some, like D'Linell Finley of
Montgomery, a political scientist and a Baptist
preacher, worry with Eunie Smith that lawyers will
end up with the money.

Others, such as R.D. Davis, a real estate investor and
writer in Huntsville, just don't like the idea.

"It's too late in the game, and it would be like a
handout," said Davis, whose conservative columns
appear in a local black paper. "I'm totally for my
race, but I don't think we ought to depend on our
government."

The telephone survey of 418 adult residents of Alabama
was conducted Tuesday through Thursday by USA Polling
Group, which put the margin of error at plus or minus
5 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence
level. This means there is a 95 percent probability
that the results are within 5 percentage points of
the results that would have been obtained from a
survey of all adult residents of Alabama.

Question 2: "Some people feel that the federal government
should make payments, sometimes called reparations,
to the descendants of slaves to compensate them for
the injustices of slavery. Would you support or
oppose such payments?

Support: All 21%, White 5%, Black 67%

Oppose: All 71%, White 88%, Black 28%

Question 3: If the federal government did pay
reparations for slavery, do you think the overall
impact on race relations in the United States would
be positive or negative?

Positive: All 14%, White 7%, Black 29%

Negative: All 67%, White 74%, Black 53%

Hmmm, why can't we all just get along??? Indeed!

"As I look about me now, I see evidence of slavery everywhere. Whites may not see it, but I see it," said Chestnut.

Oh, I see it too. The slavery to the culture of victimhood, which Chestnut exploits for his financial benefit.

When it comes to the question of reparations for slavery, Alabama is a house divided.

Support: All 21%, White 5%, Black 67%

Oppose: All 71%, White 88%, Black 28%

Doesn't sound like divided. sounds like an overwhelming majority is opposed.

What do you suppose the numbers would be like if someone asked:

Should the U.S. Government give every person with an even social security number $10,000?

How many people with an even SSN would vote yes?
How many with an odd SSN would vote yes?

If the government did pay reparations for having an even SSN, what do you think this would do to relations between evens and odds?

Get the chip off your chips and grow up freeloaders... My grandparent's generation didn't even own slaves, much less me. Besides, black slaves fared a whole lot better than feudal serfs in Europe during the time. So says renowned historian Forrest McDonald at Auburn U.

If a majority of blacks think the effect on race relations would be negative, how can two thirds of them support a proposal that would worsen them? Something about the survey doesn't compute --- and reparations is political baggage that will end up distracting this country from the real important things that need to be done.

You my friend have grasped the salient point of this article. Regardless of the effect on race relations, the majority of the blacks surveyed still want the money.

This has nothing to do with fairness or repairing past misdeeds, but everything to do with exacting revenge via confiscation of funds and redistributing wealth.

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