Should Blacks Receive Reparations? Happy Juneteenth from Atlantic Magazine, Civil Rights Articles

Another June, another Juneteenth holiday. Happy Juneteenth!
The Atlantic Magazine had several articles celebrating this new holiday,
mainly an anthology of past articles on Civil Rights, and one article
posed an interesting question:
Should the United States pay reparations to its black citizens who are
the descendants of slaves many generations ago?
We can ask other questions, such as: Haven’t we helped blacks
enough?
Was slavery all that bad? Was Jim Crow and segregation all that bad?
Isn’t that in the past?

Our main source is, of course, the Atlantic magazine,
which was started shortly before the Civil War, and has
always been a leading proponent of civil rights. We will
also summarize some of our many videos on Civil Rights
history.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for
this video. Please feel free to follow along our PowerPoint
script posted to SlideShare. Please, we welcome
interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and
reflect together!

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Atlantic Magazine, Happy Juneteenth
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One article in the Atlantic Juneteenth collection that
I found enlightening was by Bertrand Cooper titled:
“The Failure of Affirmative Action.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/failure-affirmative-action/674439/

The entire article is summarized in the opening paragraph:
“Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of
felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of
time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years,
whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these
folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I, a child of a Black father
and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability, feel the attacks more
acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation
of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for
poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative
action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative
action is just the world as it is: no different than before.”

This is a fairly short article by Atlantic standards, it summarizes his struggles
to earn an advanced education. The first hurdle is those whose parents are
not affluent professionals do not understand what doors are open to them,
and how to apply for these doors to be opened to them. After he had
worked and scraped by to earn his education, he learned about the
programs he could have applied to, if only he knew they existed. Which
means that quite often there are not that many people eager to help you to
get ahead. What about the school guidance counselors? Of course, the
more affluent the school, the more competent the teachers and counselors.
The illustration is a classroom run by the Freedmen’s Bureau, established
after the Civil War, that ran most of the colored schools in the Deep South
during Reconstruction.

Freedmen's School,
James Plantation,
North Carolina,
1866

The Misses Cooke's
school room,
Freedmen's Bureau,
Richmond, Virginia,
1866.

What about the affirmative action programs? The top-tier, and
indeed all schools, often seek a diverse student body, but this
does not mean they need to recruit POOR black students, black
students of any social class will do. So often the children of
affluent black parents benefit the most from affirmative action
programs, both because they are less ignorant and more
prosperous.
These are graduation pictures for WEB Du Bois, he advocated an
advanced liberal arts education for the Talented Negro Tenth so
they could lead the Civil Rights movement.

WEB Du Bois,
Great
Barrington
High School,
Class of 1884

WEB Du Bois,
Harvard
graduation,
1890

The Atlantic magazine also suggested an anthology
of writings to celebrate the new Juneteenth holiday.
What is this new holiday? "On June 19, 1865, two
years after the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation, word reached Texas notifying enslaved
people of their freedom. Juneteenth is a holiday
honoring this delayed freedom."

"Despite a host of regional and statewide
celebrations over the past century and a half,
Juneteenth became recognized as a federal holiday
only in 2021, when President Joe Biden signed a bill
to that effect, likely as a response to George Floyd’s
murder and the ensuing wave of organizing in 2020."

Band performing in Texas for Emancipation Day, 1900

One of these is itself an anthology, a collection of:
“Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It,” by
Clint Smith.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/federal-writers-project/617790/
We invite our listeners to explore these
stories: “From 1936 to 1938, interviewers
from the Depression era Federal Writers’
Project gathered the firsthand accounts of
more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people
in at least seventeen states. While many of
these narratives vividly portray the horror of
slavery: of families separated, of backs
beaten, of bones crushed, embedded within
them are stories of enslaved people dancing
together on Saturday evenings as respite
from their work.“

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/federal-writers-project/617790/
“These are stories of people falling in
love, creating pockets of time to see
each other when the threat of
violence momentarily ceased; of
children skipping rocks in a creek or
playing hide-and-seek amid towering
oak trees, finding moments when
the movement of their bodies was
not governed by anything other than
their own sense of wonder.”

The Case For Considering Reparations

The most compelling story in the collection is “The Case For Considering
Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is one of the Black Lives Matter
banned authors, banned for making sensitive white children ashamed of
their past history, ashamed that slavery was indeed the cause of the Civil
War, ashamed of the brutal history of Jim Crow and KKK violence during
Reconstruction and Redemption that targeted at blacks. Ta-Nehisi-
Coates’ works were deleted from the AP Black History Studies course in a
futile attempt to make it acceptable to Red State schools. If they wanted
to change the emphasis to the AP Lost Cause White History Studies
course, they would have better luck.
The picture is President Ronald Regan signing a bill granting reparations
for Japanese-American families unjustly imprisoned in holding camps on
the West coast during World War II.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/tanehisi-coates-reparations/427041/
This is the Atlantic’s summary:
“Having been enslaved for 250 years,
black people were not left to their
own devices. They were terrorized.
In the Deep South, a second slavery
ruled. In the North, legislatures,
mayors, civic associations, banks,
and citizens all colluded to pin black
people into ghettos, where they
were overcrowded, overcharged,
and undereducated.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/tanehisi-coates-reparations/427041/
“Businesses discriminated against
blacks, awarding them the worst jobs
and the worst wages. Police brutalized
them in the streets. And the notion
that black lives, black bodies, and
black wealth were rightful targets
remained deeply rooted in the
broader society. Now we have half-
stepped away from our long centuries
of despoilment, promising, ‘Never
again.’ But still, we are haunted.”

The first section of Coates’ article is about
Clyde Ross. “Clyde Ross was born in 1923,
the seventh of thirteen children, near
Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the
blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a
forty-acre tract of land, flush with cows,
hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive
to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse
and buggy, in which she invested all the
pride one might place in a Cadillac. The
family owned another horse, with a red coat,
which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family
wanted for little, save that which all black
families in the Deep South then desperately
desired: the protection of the law.” Field, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

Young Clyde’s horse was the first to go, some envious white
neighbors coerced the family to sell it to them, they had no
choice. Then the county declared he owed three thousand
dollars in taxes. Whether he actually did or not is hard to say,
quite likely this was concocted. His parents were illiterate, and
blacks could not hire attorneys, nor did they have a voice at the
courthouse, there was no justice for blacks. The family lost
everything, livestock, land, nearly everything, but at least they
were not forced to leave the county. But they were forced to
become sharecroppers, forced into perpetual peonage, forced
into perpetual poverty, forced into perpetual debt.

The story in the 1619 project that I reflected on was
even more brutal than this story. In this story, Elmore
Bolling in Lowndesboro, Alabama, was murdered for
his success. He chose not to own land, because his
father had once owned land and it was stolen in
much the same manner.

Grant-Valkaria, Florida: Jorgensen's General Store
Elmore had a large family, seven children who helped in the
family business, “a large house, a general store, a delivery
service, a catering company, and a gas station.” “At his peak,
Elmore employed as many as forty people, all black like him.”

Elmore likely had forty thousand in savings, his total assets in today’s
dollars may have been half a million dollars, all money that he earned.
He was prosperous until he started to sell gasoline, provoking the envy
of white storeowner. This black man was becoming too uppity! Several
white men, including a deputy sheriff, visited Elmore at his store, shot
him dead in broad daylight, shot him dead in front of his wife and
children. The entire justice system was rigged against them.
White creditors, fabricating non-existent debts, stole all their money, the
family feared that they too would be murdered if they objected. They
lost their businesses, they forfeited their money, their property was
quickly stolen from them.

The 1619 project has an even worse story where
many of the family members were thrown in jail for
loitering while they were in town shopping. Their
farmland and livestock and crops were seized. They
were forced to leave town in the middle of the night
under threat of death. The father was forced to work
on a chain gang for a year, their children were fined.

Laboring convicts
at the Mississippi
State Penitentiary
at Parchman in
1911. When
Mississippi ended
convict leasing in
1906, all prisoners
were sent to
Parchman.

Clyde Ross Joins Army, Moves to Chicago

Hitler invaded Poland and France, Japan bombed
Pearl Harbor, and Clyde Ross was drafted to serve
in the Army. He was offered a waiver, but he didn’t
want to work as a sharecropper, he preferred to
take his chances in the army.

Clyde was amazed. “He
was stationed in
California. He found that
he could go into stores
without being bothered.
He could walk the
streets without being
harassed. He could go
into a restaurant and
receive service.”
Several Tuskegee airmen at Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945

During and after the war, six million blacks moved into the northern
states in the Great Migration, fleeing lynchings and Jim Crow
segregation. In 1910, Before the Great Migration, ninety percent of
blacks lived in the rural Southern states, and were a majority in
Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. By 1970, only half of
American blacks lived in the Deep South, and eighty percent of blacks
lived in cities, mostly in the North. You can see this movement pictured
in this map.

Distribution of Blacks
in America Before and
After the Great Migration,
1900 and 1990

“Clyde Ross was among” the
blacks who moved North.
“He came to Chicago in 1947
and took a job as a taster at
Campbell’s Soup. He made a
stable wage. He married. He
had children. His paycheck
was his own. No Klansmen
stripped him of the vote.”
Black Family who moved to Chicago during Great Migration.

“When Clyde walked down the
street, he did not have to move
because a white man was
walking past. He did not have
to take off his hat or avert his
gaze. His journey from peonage
to full citizenship seemed near-
complete. Only one item was
missing: a home, that final
badge of entry into the sacred
order of the American middle
class of the Eisenhower years.”
Black Family who moved to Chicago during Great Migration.

Except that he could not qualify to buy a house with a mortgage, his
black neighborhood was redlined, only whites in white neighborhoods
were deemed good credit risks. Clyde was forced to buy his house “on
contract,” which meant that the seller kept the contract for the house
until it was fully paid. This was not quite as predatory as sharecropping,
but it was predatory. If you missed one payment, the seller could
invalidate the contract and keep all past payments made. The seller
could force the buyer into paying additional insurance or other
expenses that came up, and the seller could refuse to make repairs. And
the seller often sold the house at an inflated price. Often the seller sold
the same house three or four times until someone was actually able to
buy it.

New Kids in the
Neighborhood,
by Norman
Rockwell, 1967

Norman Rockwell painted “New Kids in the
Neighborhood” in 1967. Google Arts in 2023 had
links to narratives about the paintings he dedicated
to the Civil Rights struggle of the Sixties. In this
painting, he carefully shows the viewer what unites
the children: their age, and their love of baseball and
animals; and what seemingly divides them: their
race, and perhaps their parent's attitudes, giving us
hope for the future.

New Kids in the
Neighborhood,
by Norman
Rockwell, 1967
The links are to
narratives
about the
paintings he
dedicated to
the Civil Rights
struggle of the
Sixties.
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ZgWxOs7llcWMIg
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/4QXBpe8lCP9QJg

New Kids in the
Neighborhood, by
Norman Rockwell, 1967
Rockwell carefully shows
the viewer what unites
the children (their age,
love of baseball and
animals) and what
seemingly divides them
(their race, maybe even
their parent's attitudes).
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ZgWxOs7llcWMIg
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/4QXBpe8lCP9QJg

The Northern states did have a legal system open to blacks, and the
article does not examine this question, but I presume there was some
legal redress available. Some blacks in Chicago were able to combine into
the Contract Buyer’s League, which were able to negotiate reasonable
terms for some black buyers. Many whites became millionaires many
times over by selling houses to blacks on contract.
Our author Coates also examines the issues behind black poverty. The
decades of discrimination, sharecropping, and the contract-buying
system means that few black families have inherited wealth.

As Coates notes, “Black families,
regardless of income, are significantly
less wealthy than white families. The
Pew Research Center estimates that
white households are worth roughly
twenty times as much as black
households, and that whereas only
fifteen percent of whites have zero or
negative wealth, more than a third of
blacks do. Effectively, the black family
in America is working without a
safety net. When financial calamity
strikes: a medical emergency, divorce,
job loss, the fall is precipitous.”
Sign directly opposite the Sojourner Truth homes, a new
U.S. federal housing project in Detroit, Michigan. A riot was
caused by white neighbors' attempts to prevent African
American tenants from moving in. February 1942

Coates also states: “And just as black
families of all incomes remain
handicapped by a lack of wealth, so
too do they remain handicapped by
their restricted choice of
neighborhood. Black people with
upper-middle-class incomes do not
generally live in upper-middle-class
neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research
shows that black families making
$100,000 typically live in the kinds of
neighborhoods inhabited by white
families making $30,000.” How true
this is influenced by the state and city
in which you live, more than likely.
Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting
integration of Central High School.

After slavery, after the Civil War, blacks
continued to face discrimination. As Coates
tells us, “Having been enslaved for 250
years, black people were not left to their
own devices. They were terrorized. In the
Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the
North, legislatures, mayors, civic
associations, banks, and citizens all colluded
to pin black people into ghettos, where
they were overcrowded, overcharged, and
undereducated. Businesses discriminated
against them, awarding them the worst jobs
and the worst wages. Police brutalized
them in the streets.”
Due to threats of violence against her, US
Marshals escorted 6-year-old Ruby Bridges to and
from the previously whites only William Frantz
Elementary School in New Orleans, 1960.

The Problem We
All Live With, by
Norman
Rockwell, 1963

Plunder in the past made
plunder in the present
efficient. The banks of
America understood this. In
2005, Wells Fargo promoted
a series of Wealth Building
Strategies seminars. Dubbing
itself “the nation’s leading
originator of home loans to
ethnic minority customers,”
the bank enrolled black
public figures in an
ostensible effort to educate
blacks on building
“generational wealth.”
A mortgage brokerage in the US advertising
subprime mortgages in July 2008.

But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft, as we
learned in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
Coates summarizes the history of blacks in America, beginning with
describing how brutal slavery was. This brutality was described in the
slave autobiography of Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave who
became a leading abolitionist orator and best-selling author in the
1830’s, before the Civil War. Douglass and Coates describe how many
slave families were broken apart on the slave auction block. We also
have the interesting story of the first ex-slave to be ordained a Catholic
priest, and the slave autobiography of Booker T Washington, who after
the Civil War founded the black trade school and college, the Tuskegee
Institute.

https://youtu.be/dZbzWJkAf5k
https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc
https://youtu.be/M0sx85oMRQA
https://youtu.be/7VkzhyNnuQk

WEB Du Bois is best known for Black Reconstruction, a
history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction which
emphasizes the leading role that African Americans played
in these conflicts, arguing that blacks were instrumental in
the Union victory in the Civil War. Both Du Bois and Coates
remind us that slaves were the most valuable assets
before the Civil War, more valuable than land, more
valuable than the factories in America. His Souls of Black
Folk are revealing essays on the role blacks played in
America.

https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA
https://youtu.be/J3TnQyig6Nk
https://youtu.be/CK4V3e-TPFU
https://youtu.be/JeRCM4PAqPk

Frederick Douglass was a first-generation black leader; Booker
T Washington was a second-generation black leader; while
WEB Du Bois, a contrarian activist leader, was a third-
generation black leader. As Du Bois rose in prominence in the
black civil rights movement, he came into conflict with the
accommodationist educator Booker T Washington. While WEB
Dubois encouraged blacks to insist on their civil rights, dignity,
and equal opportunity; Booker T Washington encouraged
blacks to get an education so they would have marketable
skills, to be submissive and hardworking and to save their
pennies.

WEB Du Bois was born free in Massachusetts in the
early years of Reconstruction. He was a brilliant
student and prolific author, he earned a PhD from
Harvard. He was a co-founder of the NAACP and the
leading civil rights leader in the years before World
War II.

https://youtu.be/N2ZqixUxPmo https://youtu.be/Ntjl4xqQSfw
https://youtu.be/MNhkq69CIfo https://youtu.be/YwgrKvIjoc0

The brutality of slavery and Reconstruction described by Coates and by WEB Du
Bois in Black Reconstruction is also described in the two Yale undergraduate
courses on Black History, which are also influenced by Black Reconstruction. The
brutality increased when the federal troops were withdrawn from the South during
the Redemption era, leading to passing the Jim Crow segregation laws. Coates and
these Yale lectures note that blacks were excluded from the New Deal programs
and legislation. In particular, social security excluded farmworkers and household
servants, thus excluding most black workers.
Nevertheless, the tide started to change during the FDR administration during
World War II, he and Truman did support some civil rights initiatives, and real
strides were made during the Civil Rights era of the Sixties. Coates discusses the
issues of white flight and low-income housing and problems with crime in the
ghettoes of Chicago.

https://youtu.be/kmLg8CDjOOY
https://youtu.be/89ulb20cy8Q
https://youtu.be/f5nPNnvDBCY https://youtu.be/weGmYOe0Lyg

We also have videos on the remarkable career of Ida
B Wells, co-founder of the NAACP and journalist who
exposed the brutalities of lynching, and also on
peonage, or how Southern states used the vagrancy
laws to round up both innocent blacks and those
guilty of petty crimes, enslaving them in chain gangs
and work crews. Sometimes these camps had
horrendous mortality rates.

https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
https://youtu.be/GQesHoV5IdI https://youtu.be/sLDHs0AigvY
https://youtu.be/2TCXcEpohaM

Few know that the Nazi lawyers, in the early days of
Hitler’s regime, used the precedents set by the Deep
South Jim Crow segregation race laws of America in
drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws that began the
persecution of the Jews.

Should Blacks Receive Reparations?
Should blacks receive
reparations? Ta-Nehisi Coates
says that “For the past 25
years, Congressman John
Conyers Jr., who represents the
Detroit area, has marked every
session of Congress by
introducing a bill calling for a
congressional study of slavery
and its lingering effects as well
as recommendations for
‘appropriate remedies.’” Congressman John Conyers, standing, second from right, with fellow
founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/obama-reparations-white-resistance-b1807255.html
What does former President
Obama say? “If you ask me
theoretically ‘are reparations
justified?’ the answer is yes,” he
said. “He went on to say that the
descendants of those who suffered
‘terrible, cruel, often arbitrary
injustices’ deserve compensation
and recognition.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/obama-reparations-white-resistance-b1807255.html
“Mr Obama’s current stand is in contrast
with his earlier comments on the subject.
During his presidential campaign in 2008,
he appeared to oppose reparations and
said, ‘the best reparations we can
provide are good schools in the inner city
and jobs for people who are
unemployed.’ He said that a reparation
proposal during his presidency would
have met with ‘the politics of white
resistance and white resentment’”.

This is the key argument by Coates:
“To ignore the fact that one of the
oldest republics in the world was
erected on a foundation of white
supremacy, to pretend that the
problems of a dual society are the
same as the problems of
unregulated capitalism, is to cover
the sin of national plunder with the
sin of national lying. The lie ignores
the fact that reducing American
poverty and ending white
supremacy are not the same.” Ta-Nehisi Coates

How valid is this statement by Ta-Nehisi Coates? I would agree with this
statement logically and rhetorically. But, politically and practically, I
would push back and argue that reduction American poverty and ending
white supremacy ARE indeed the same. Too many white erroneously
believe that they have been harmed by affirmative action for arguments
about reparations to get anywhere. Raising the minimum wage to a living
wage, possibly to twenty dollars an hour, and ensuring health care,
quality public education, and increasing the minimum social security
benefits are indeed the proper first step, and white supremacists oppose
these policies simply because they will help blacks disproportionately. We
do hope, however, that Coates will continue his advocacy for reparations,
because if his arguments for reparations ever gain traction, they will likely
result in a compromise that will fight poverty for all who are poor, both
white and black.

DISCUSSION OF SOURCES:
In addition to these sources, the Atlantic magazine had a special
Civil War issue. These include essays by such American giants
like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Emerson, and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, as well as our three generations of black leaders,
including Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and
WEB Du Bois. If you purchase a subscription to the Atlantic
magazine, you have access to all these historical articles from
Civil War days and forward.

https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/library/digital-exclusives/

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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Should Blacks Receive Reparations? Happy Juneteenth from Atlantic Magazine, Civil Rights Articles

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