My Face Is Black Is True
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The messages of the UNIA and the Ex-Slave Association coincided in emphasizing the needs for African Americans to act for themselves. Pension supporters believed in a black-led movement, but they were not separatists. Mrs. House often talked of the white and black people she talked to and whites who supported the movement. Pension advocates, however, could embrace Garvey’s nationalist self-help message. The UNIA attracted business and professional people who depended on an African-American clientele but looked with disdain at the pension movement. They liked the message of economic uplift and racial solidarity.
Marcus Garvey spoke in Nashville early in 1917, and the UNIA organized chapters in Tennessee, including one in Nashville. Reverend James Carruthers, probably a Primitive Baptist minister whose South Nashville church and home were both listed at the same address in the city directory, was the president. He was at various times a tailor, pressman, and clothes cleaner. The local African-American press ignored the UNIA just as they overlooked the Ex-Slave Association. However, the Negro World, Garvey’s paper, reported that it attracted professional blacks. No connections with the UNIA were apparent, but a black-owned-and-operated ice cream factory remained solvent. Also, just as the UNIA ran a doll factory, the Nashville Negro Doll company was so successful that it had difficulty keeping up with the Christmas trade.13
In the period after the deportation of Garvey in 1927 and Mrs. House’s death in 1928, black nationalists promoted reparations, although they often split over which groups best represented the cause. After the UNIA collapse, several movements picked up the banner, among them the Nation of Islam, which has always supported reparations. The Peace Movement of Ethiopia petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Virginia legislature in the 1930s. Leaders went so far as to support the 1939 congressional bill introduced by Mississippi’s racist senator Theodore Bilbo that would have provided federal funds to transport African Americans to Africa.14
In the spirit of Callie House, another woman, Audley Moore, spent time in the Garvey movement, and then became the queen mother of the reparations cause. Born just after Mrs. House organized the association, in New Iberia, Louisiana, July 27, 1898, Moore was the descendant of former slaves. Her grandmother was the daughter of her master. Her grandfather had been lynched. Forced to quit school in the fourth grade, she went to work and then trained as a hairdresser to care for herself and her sisters. She came into contact with the Garvey movement in New Orleans. During the 1920s, she traveled around the country, finally settling in Harlem, where she became a member of UNIA and a community organizer.15
Like other African-American activists of the period, she vacillated between black nationalism and communism in groups organized by others and founded some of her own. Impressed by their defense of the defendants in the Scottsboro case, she joined the Communists but left when they could not translate words about black self-determination in the Black Belt into action. In 1955, she joined a small band of activists demanding reparations for slavery. She was honored as an Ashanti queen in Ghana when she attended the funeral of Kwame Nkrumah in 1972.16
When Queen Mother Moore called for reparations in 1955, few listened. But as the Black Muslims grew and established new mosques outside Detroit, so did calls for reparations. Malcolm X, the leader of Harlem’s Mosque Number Seven, expanded Moore’s popular base. He made a dramatic demand for reparations at Boston University in 1960, telling his audience that African Americans had “worked 300 years without a pay day.” Therefore, the United States must “compensate us for the labor stolen from us.” He asked for land. After his assassination in February 1965, other black nationalists and radicals embraced the cause as their own. The Republic of New Africa, a black nationalist group favoring a separate state within the United States for African Americans, organized by Imari Obadele and his Malcolm X Society, called for $400 billion in slavery damages in 1968. In the same period, the African-American Repatriation League appealed for support for blacks to emigrate to Africa as compensation for slavery.17
Queen Mother Moore spent time in the Garvey movement and became a principal voice for reparations until her death in 1996.
Black leaders identified as pacifists and integrationists also called for reparations. In 1964, Martin Luther King justified the civil rights movement’s continued activism on these grounds: “The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in slavery.” The government should do something special for African-Americans since “our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.” Affirmative action, based on many different rationales, constituted one of the “special measures.” The pro-black business Urban League’s Whitney Young suggested a Marshall Plan for African Americans.18
The 1960s saw the most vocal clear demands for reparations since Callie House’s day. Unlike the ex-slave pension movement, James Forman, former executive director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), targeted religious institutions, not the federal government. Speaking in Detroit, in his Black Manifesto, Forman called for a “revolutionary black vanguard” to take control of the United States Government. To finance the revolution, Forman demanded $5 billion in reparations from the “white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism.” Lambasted by most whites, Forman’s manifesto received a respectful reading in such journals as Commonweal, Christian Century, and World Outlook. Christian Century typified such views: “We do not believe the idea of reparations is ridiculous. This generation of blacks continues to pay the price of earlier generations’ slavery and subjugation; this generation of whites continues to enjoy the profits of racial exploitation.” Some white Protestant churches responded to the manifesto by increasing their annual contributions to black organizations by $1 million.19
Black capitalists have had their own form of reparations. Some proposed black economic development through tax credits, and the establishment of preferred markets for black corporations and businesses. In 1969, President Richard Nixon launched a campaign for “Black Capitalism” to give blacks a greater stake in the economy, as a form of reparations. This “piece of the pie” approach had negligible results for the black elite and almost nothing for the poor. For example, in 1973, the government extended $26 billion in credits to white corporations but granted less than $1 billion to black-owned businesses. According to the Nixon administration, a special effort went toward increasing the assets of black-owned banks. Yet the thirty-five black banks received an average of only $3 million each. The “Black Capitalism” campaign, intentionally or not, was a colossal hoax. Republicans used it as propaganda to attract black voters to their party. The New York Times concluded in 1973, “The Nixon administration’s program to provide funds and other aid to minority businessmen was turned in 1972 into the vehicle by which the president’s re-election effort sought nonwhite support. Not only did minority businessmen sustain intense pressure from the White House and the president’s campaign staff to support him, few minorities received awarded contracts last year without at least an attempted political quid pro quo …” “Besides political misuse of the program, there were instances of money set aside for minorities ending up with whites.” In the aftermath, some of those African Americans who had once supported set-asides became reparationists.20
Labor activist and community activist Christopher Alston, shown here (standing left) with fellow organizers of a sit-down strike, heard about the movement and Callie House from an elderly man who had moved from the South to Detroit. Alston became a leading activist in the reparations cause.
In Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, Christopher Alston, a child of the 1940s radical labor movement, tried to keep up awareness of the Ex-Slave Association, as a major grassroots movement, in public consciousness. As a young Packard foundryman and a member of the Young Communist League, Alston had led black workers to shut down the foundry to demand that union leaders take more forceful action against recalcitrant whites who opposed blac
k workers’ advancement during World War II. Their militancy paid off; by the end of 1943, they had desegregated job classifications, moving five hundred blacks out of the Packard foundry and into heretofore all-white production jobs. Alston remained a union and community organizer for the rest of his life. When I met him in the late 1960s, he told me he had met “an old man who could have been ninety” and who, he recalled, had come to Detroit from the South and remembered that “there was once a great movement to get pensions for the ex-slaves run by a woman.” Alston remained committed to “the principle of the thing”—reparations—as a necessary goal for African Americans.21
The early-twenty-first-century interest in reparations stemmed from continued discontent. Many African Americans saw the slow rate of progress toward equality of opportunity and attacks on remedial measures such as affirmative action and contract set-asides as showing the need for more drastic solutions. The resurgent interest in reparations gained its greatest impetus, however, from the Japanese-American Redress ordered by the Congress. The federal government made several efforts to address the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1948, a law provided for compensation for property damage as a result of the evacuation. The Justice Department received about 26,500 claims, and the federal government paid out approximately $37 million. In 1976, President Gerald Ford formally revoked Executive Order 9066, which had authorized the evacuation and internment program.22
In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which recommended that although “no amount of money can fully compensate the excluded people for their losses and sufferings,” a national apology should be made, those convicted should be pardoned, and other attempts at redress should be undertaken. In 1983, in Hohri v. United States, nineteen Japanese Americans, former World War II internees or their living representatives, brought a class action suit against the United States, seeking money damages and a declaratory judgment on twenty-two claims based on constitutional violations, tort, and breach of contract and fiduciary duties. The district court dismissed the claims, holding that all but one, based on the Fifth Amendment ban against the government’s taking private property without compensation, were excluded by “sovereign immunity,” the rule that the government cannot be sued without its permission. The court then held that even the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause claim could not proceed. It was too old—barred by the statute of limitations. The court also found that the government had not waived its immunity to being sued without its consent.23
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed, and then the Supreme Court held that the Japanese Americans had sought appeal in the wrong court: they should have gone to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rather than the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. The court, however, refused to address the factual issues, and they affirmed the district court’s decision throwing out the claims. Judge J. Skelly Wright suggested in his lower-court ruling that by exhausting their judicial options they had made a case for congressional action. Congress then passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing for a formal apology and benefits, including redress payments of $20,000, to citizens and permanent residents of the United States interned during World War II. It established an Office of Redress Administration in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to administer it.24
As a result of the Japanese-American Redress Law, in 1989 Congressman John Conyers of Detroit introduced his own bill to establish a commission to consider reparations for African Americans. Conyers had long been urged by Christopher Alston and “Reparations” Ray Jenkins, a self-employed businessman and community activist who led the cause after Alston’s death, to introduce legislation. Jenkins promoted the idea in churches, in community meetings, at the NAACP, and wherever people gathered. At first people “laughed” at his persistent devotion.25
In 1988, Imari Obadele and Adjoa Aiyetoro, with other black nationalists, founded National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). N’COBRA initiates legislation, publishes a newsletter, sponsors national and regional conferences, and has its own Web site. Aiyetoro also became counsel to the organization.26
With new interest in the cause and congressional action remote, African-American plaintiffs filed a suit for reparations in the Federal District Court in California. They did so with no legal assistance. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law stepped in to handle the appeal after the court dismissed their claim. However, they confronted the same problem that had defeated Callie House and counsel Cornelius Jones in the cotton tax case and the Japanese Americans in the internment case: the court decided that the government cannot be sued without its consent. Therefore, just as in the ex-slave cotton tax case the court did not reach the substantive issue of whether slavery reparations are a debt owed to African Americans.27
In a second case, Imari Obadele, as the head of the Republic of New Africa, successfully won an indirect consideration of the legality of reparations in the federal court of claims. He and two other members of RNA demanded payment under the Japanese-American Redress Law, arguing that the enslavement of their ancestors and the continuing failure of the U.S. government to recognize African Americans’ rights of self-determination supported their claim. To decide their claim, the court had to decide whether the Japanese-American Redress Law was illegal because it applied only to Japanese Americans, excluding others on the basis of race.28
In analyzing the issues the court ended up discussing the status of African Americans and slavery. The court asked whether congressional failure to enact a claims process for African Americans constituted unlawful preferential treatment for Japanese Americans. Also, the court decided that the claims law did not permit dismissal without considering the facts in the case. This did not mean that African Americans could win. However, the government’s effort to have the suit immediately dismissed failed. In deciding against the claim, however, Chief Judge Bashir concluded that the plaintiffs had made a powerful case for redress as representatives of a racial group other than Americans of Japanese ancestry. “The treatment of African Americans enslaved, oppressed, and disenfranchised is a long and deplorable chapter in this nation’s history. Their plight may well be the subject of future legislation providing for reparations for slavery.” However, he noted, “Plaintiffs must make a legal case, which is far different from the political case they would make in Congress.”29
In recent years, turning against suing the federal government, lawyers who support reparations have targeted insurers or employers of slaves. Deadria Farmer-Paellmann sued Aetna Insurance Company, Fleet Boston Financial, and the CSX Railroad. The claim alleged that these companies conspired with slave traders and illegally profited from slavery. Fleet Boston is the successor of Providence Bank, founded by Rhode Island businessman and slave trader John Brown. Providence Bank lent substantial sums to Brown, financing and profiting from his slave trade, and also collected custom fees from ships transporting slaves. A predecessor company of Aetna insured slave owners against the loss of their slave chattel. CSX is the successor of several railroads constructed or run in part by slave labor. Even if they do not win these cases, the advocates hoped the public relations impact might influence the implementation of at least the study commission proposed by Congressman Conyers.30
Reparationists also succeeded in having resolutions passed in city councils in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities requiring companies that do business with the city to disclose their profits made from slavery. Chicago city council-woman Dorothy Tillman led the campaign for local legislation, and during Black History Month 2002, the New York City Council took up the Queen Mother Moore Reparations Resolution for Descendants of Enslaved Africans. Lawyers hoped the data collected as a result of these resolutions would provide information to strengthen the reparations claims in court or in the Congress.31
Focusing on other historical wrongs against African Americans, in
2003 a legal “dream” team of African-American attorneys, including Johnnie Cochran of O. J. Simpson case fame; Willie Gary, one of the most successful plaintiffs’ negligence lawyers; and Harvard law professor and N’COBRA counsel Charles Ogletree filed a reparations suit on behalf of 126 living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, riot. The oldest of their clients was 102 and the youngest 81. The argument presented was that state and city officials abetted the actions of a rampaging white mob that burned and looted much of Tulsa’s black community. The mob killed as many as three hundred people. The 1921 riot started with a confrontation between whites who had gone to Tulsa’s courthouse to lynch an African-American man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman and black men who showed up to stop them. Many members of the white mob received weapons from local law enforcement officials and were deputized, according to the 2001 report of a state commission that investigated the riot. The plaintiff’s lawyers argued that this “state” action violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.32
A historical study of the Tulsa riot led the state to establish a commission to make recommendations for a response. The commission reported two years ago in favor of reparations for the victims. However, the legislature has refused to enact legislation for the payment of compensation. The “Dream Team” lawyers used the fact finding of the commission as a basis of a damage claim. They hoped that a victory would establish a legal basis for other reparations claims based on government culpability for the abuse or exploitation of African Americans.33
However elusive the possibility of obtaining any form of reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves, lawyers may eventually develop a viable litigation claim against the federal government. Some experts argue that the government’s immunity to being sued without its consent, which confounded Callie House, is no barrier because the federal government gave consent to be sued when it passed legislation to protect freedpeople during Reconstruction. They cite the Freedmen’s Bureau courts and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gave blacks the same rights as whites to sue and be sued, own property, make contracts, and conduct other routine activities. Because blacks are still discriminated against, they argue the government’s consent to civil actions against itself in these instances is still relevant.34