African-American History

In the wonderful book Strong Men Keep Coming by Tonya Bolden, there is a reprint of a letter dated August 7, 1865, written by Jourdon Anderson, who was once a slave in Big Spring, Tennessee. The letter is written to his former owner, Colonel P. H. Anderson, who had written to the ex-slave in Dayton, Ohio, where he had resettled with his wife and children. The colonel had written to persuade Anderson to return to Big Spring and work for him as a free man.

Sir:

I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdan, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can….

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,— and the children—Milly Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well…. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my freedom papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshall-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty-years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to….

Please send the money by Adam’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for our faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense…. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire….

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Colonel Anderson never paid Jourdon Anderson what was owed him for his labor, nor had any of the other slaveholders (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who had stolen the labor of tens of millions of blacks and, by so doing, robbed the futures of all who would descend from them. And the United States government was complicit in this mass injustice of defrauding “the laborer of his hire.”

Following emancipation, former slaves began asserting that they be paid the debt owed them if “emancipation” was to be more than a legal technicality. Indeed, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate passed legislation providing reparations to America’s former slaves. President Andrew Johnson, a pre-emancipation slaveholder, vetoed the legislation however.

With black Americans continuing to press for their own reparations, David Ben-Gurion responded thusly to Jews being awarded reparations by post-war Germany via the 1952 Luxemburg Agreement:

“…. a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.”

Some would argue that such an obligation does not obtain in the case of the black holocaust because the wrongful action took place so long ago. Such arguments are specious at best. Indeed, in 1994, seventy-one years after the Rosewood massacre in which white lynch mobs killed blacks and drove survivors into the swamps near a prosperous black community in Florida, Governor Lawton Chiles signed into law a bill (House Bill 591) that provided for the payment of $2.1 million in reparations to the descendants of the black victims of Rosewood.

In addition, slavery did not really end in 1865, as is commonly believed, but was extended well into the twentieth century. As Yuval Taylor has pointed out in I Was Born a Slave:

Although it was no longer called slavery, the post-Reconstruction Southern practices of peonage, forced convict labor, and to a lesser degree sharecropping essentially continued the institution of slavery well into the twentieth century, and were in some ways even worse. (Peonage, for example, was a complex system in which a black man would be arrested for “vagrancy,” another word for unemployment, ordered to pay a fine he could not afford, and incarcerated. A plantation owner would pay his fine and “hire” him until he could afford to pay off the fine himself: The peon was then forced to work, locked up at night, and, if he ran away, chased by bloodhounds until recaptured. One important difference between peonage and slavery was that while slaves had considerable monetary value for the plantation owner, peons had almost none, and could therefore be mistreated—and even murdered—without monetary loss.)

What slavery had firmly established in the way of debilitating psychic pain and a lopsidedly unequal economic relationship of blacks to whites, formal organs of state and federal government would cement in law for the century that followed. Thus it should surprise no one that the wealth gap (wealth defined as the net value of assets) separating blacks from whites over the twentieth century has mushroomed beyond any ability of black earned income ever to close it. This too is the fruit of long-term structural racial discrimination, government sponsored in many cases, acquiesced to in others.

So you can see that an unbroken story line of evidence and logic drawn across time from Jamestown to Appomattox to contemporary America renders the “it’s too late” response to reparations for African Americans inadequate. For blacks, the destructive moral crime that began in Jamestown in 1619 has yet to end.

Well before the birth of our country, Europe and the eventual United States perpetrated a heinous wrong against the peoples of Africa – and sustained and benefited from the wrong for centuries. In 1965, after nearly 350 years of legal racial suppression, the United States enacted the Voting Rights Act and, virtually simultaneously, began to walk away from the social wreckage that centuries of white hegemony had wrought. The country then began to rub itself with the memory-emptying salve of contemporaneousness. (If the wrong did not just occur, then the living cannot be deemed in any way responsible.)

But when the black living suffer real and current consequences as a result of wrongs committed by a younger America, then contemporary America must be caused to shoulder responsibility for those wrongs until such wrongs have been adequately compensated and righted. The life and responsibilities of a society or nation are not circumscribed by the life spans of its mortal constituents. Social rights, wrongs, obligations, and responsibilities flow eternal.

American capitalism, which starts each child where its parents left off is not a fair system. This is particularly the case for African Americans, whose general economic starting points have been rearmost in our society because of slavery and its long racialist aftermath. American slaves for two and a half centuries saw taken from them the economic value of their labor which, were it a line item in today’s gross national product report, would undoubtedly run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Whether the monetary obligation is legally enforceable or not, therefore, a large debt is owed by America to the descendants of America’s slaves.

Here, habit has become our enemy, for America has made an art form by now of grinding its past deeds, no matter how despicable, into mere ephemera. African Americans unfortunately, have accommodated this habit of American amnesia all too well. It would behoove African Americans to remember that history forgets, first, those who forget themselves. To do what is necessary to accomplish anything approaching psychic and economic parity in the next half century will not only require a fundamental attitude shift in American thinking, but massive amounts of money as well. Before the country in general can be made to understand, African Americans themselves must come to understand that this demand is not for charity. It is simply for what they are owed on a debt that is old but compellingly obvious and valid still.

Even the making of a well-reasoned case for restitution will do wonders for the spirit of African Americans. It will cause them at long last to understand the genesis of their dilemma by gathering, as have all other groups, all of their history – before, during, and after slavery – into one story of themselves. To hold the story fast to their breast. To make of it, over time, a sacred text. And from it, to explain themselves to themselves and to their heirs. Tall again, as they had been long, long ago.

Randall Robinson, rr@rosro.com, founder and president of TransAfrica (1979 - 2001), is the author of national best selling works on the African-American reality such as “The Debt - What America Owes to Blacks” and “ The Reckoning - What Blacks Owe to Each Other.” He lectures internationally and is currently writing a book on the impact of the United States on governments and peoples of the Caribbean.