Historians and Reparations

Roy E. Finkenbine

Those interested in exploring this subject further are urged to attend the forum on "Historians and Reparations" on Thursday morning, April 20, at the upcoming OAH annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Historians are beginning to pay attention to African American reparations as a historical subject deserving of scholarly attention. Although others in the academy–philosophers, economists, and legal scholars, for example–have explored the issue through their respective disciplinary lenses for some time, American historians have lagged behind, some even willing to participate in contemporary reparations struggles but failing to understand or address the past context of those struggles. Until recently, most scholars have even expressed a lack of awareness that these contemporary struggles have deep historical precedents. Three recent events convince me that this is changing.

The September 2005 publication of Mary Frances Berry's long-awaited My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) was the first event. Berry, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, uses the book to reconstruct the story of the ex-slave pension movement of the 1890s and early twentieth century, which repeatedly petitioned Congress for a monthly federal allowance as compensation to living former slaves. She focuses on the leading organization in the movement, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, and its spokeswoman Callie House, a Tennessee ex-slave and washerwoman. At its peak, the association had 300,000 members in chapters in cities and rural hamlets across the South. In 1915 it even sued the U.S. in federal court, seeking some $68 million collected in federal taxes on cotton between 1862 and 1868; this represents the first class-action lawsuit for African American reparations. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Service, which charged that the association was engaged in acts of fraud—as Congress would never award reparations to the former slave—harassed, intimidated, and ultimately destroyed the organization. Callie House even spent a year in federal prison for her part. Berry demonstrates, however, that the movement left a legacy that influenced African American advocates of reparations throughout the twentieth century. My Face is Black is True has been widely circulated and reviewed by historians and in the popular press.

The second event was a conference on "Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide, and Caste" at Yale University on October 27-29, 2005. Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, it addressed the issue of reparations in an international comparative perspective, with panels covering a variety of past victimizations and recent efforts at redress: the dispossession of the Mapuche in Chile, the Indian caste system, apartheid, the South African truth and reconciliation process, Bracero labor claims, Nazi genocide, and West German reparations to Israel for the Holocaust, among others. Legal scholars and philosophers also offered a variety of frameworks for addressing issues of apology, reparations, reconciliation, and atonement for historical harms.

Two sessions of particular interest to American historians were especially well attended. Berry gave the keynote address at the opening session, summarizing the story of Callie House and the ex-slave pension movement. On the conference's second day, a panel on "American Slavery and the History of Reparations" brought together scholars who are retracing the place of reparations thought and activism in America's past. Most notable were Martha Biondi of Northwestern University and John David Smith of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Biondi's article on "The Rise of the Reparations Movement" in Radical History Review (October 2003) is recognized as an important contribution to the emerging historiography on African American reparations. Her paper at the conference focused on the place of reparations advocacy in the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the efforts of economist Robert S. Browne and the Black Economic Research Council for a southern land bank and political scientist Charles Hamilton's call for a "black university" as a form of compensation to African Americans. While granting that the contemporary reparation struggles "mark a new phase in the growth of the African American reparations movement," she found that they build "on a deep indigenous history" dating back several decades. Smith, who is currently researching a volume on reparations thought and activism since the Civil War for Oxford University Press, pushed this history even further back. Noting that calls for compensation are "decidedly not new," his paper focused on the reparations movement from emancipation to the end of the ex-slave pension movement about 1917. Reparations advocates in this era based their claims on moral appeals, as well as the economic reciprocities at the heart of market capitalism, recognizing that, without compensation—whether in the form of direct cash payments, land, or pensions—the ex-slaves and their descendants would be marginalized and excluded from full enjoyment of the benefits of citizenship: economic, social, and political. Painting the late nineteenth century as formative for the contemporary debate, Smith dated white opposition to reparations for slavery, as well as emerging black grassroots support, to this earlier period.

The third event came two days after returning from the Yale conference, when I had a lengthy telephone conversation with a member of Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which was appointed by President Ruth Simmons in 2003 to "organize academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised" by the national debate over slavery and reparations. Five historians, including American historians James Campbell and Michael Vorenberg, are among the committee's sixteen members. Now engaged in writing its report, the committee is attempting to "explore the history of movements for retrospective justice in other times and places," including the idea of reparations for slavery and segregation in America's past. The committee had heard about my own research on the subject and wanted to pursue several threads of the story.

I am currently engaged in a study of reparations thought and activism in America prior to the Civil War. Far from being a postbellum phenomenon, calls for compensation in some form to slaves and their descendants date back to at least the 1760s. This long history included a range of individuals and groups: hundreds of eighteenth-century Quakers, who freed their slaves and personally compensated them for their unpaid time in bondage; a few newly-freed slaves in the North after the American Revolution, who sued in court or petitioned legislatures for a portion of their former masters' wealth; dozens of penitent masters in the upper South, who set their slaves at liberty (especially in their wills) as acts of "retribution" and gave them plots of land, often in the emerging free states north of the Ohio River; a small cadre of antebellum abolitionists, who argued that it was important not only to emancipate the slaves but to "compensate them for the crime"; and hundreds of thousands of slaves on southern farms and plantations before the Civil War, who sounded subtle calls for both freedom and reparations in their folk songs and tales, claiming that they were due "Egypt's spoil" for their unrequited toil. Such evidence demonstrates that African American reparations are far from new.

How will the emergence of reparations as a historical subject alter scholarship in American history? Only time will tell. It should, however, have ramifications for the study of slavery, abolition, emancipation, civil rights, and social justice in the nation's past. q