There are those who still feel that if the [African American] is to rise out of poverty, …if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the [African American] must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. [They] never stop to realize that the nation made the black man's color a stigma; but beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.

In 1863 the [black man] was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful…[The nation] simply said, 'You're free', and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do….

…It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice. ___________________________________________________________________________________

Is It Payback Time? Contemplating Reparations
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue,January 20, 2002

By the time he preached the last sermon of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King had seen some great changes take place. He had seen the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and a year later the Voting Rights Act. He had seen the weight of law brought to bear on the side of justice, not only in the declarations of equal rights but in enforcement by the federal government. He had seen the tide of public opinion begin to shift as the entire nation, black and white, northern and southern, came to grips at least briefly with the gap between the black American reality and the ideals of equality and justice.

But in that last sermon of his, Dr. King did not focus much on the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation for which he is famous. He didn't focus on the goals that had been reached or the parts of the struggle that had been won, but on the long work of justice that was still ahead. As many of you will remember, in those weeks and months before his assassination, King had been busy planning the Poor People's Campaign and was organizing a massive march on Washington. His focus had not so much shifted from racial equality as it had expanded.

He recognized with growing clarity that poverty within this wealthiest nation had to be addressed as a national disease. And in pulling apart the many complex threads that went into chronic or institutionalized poverty, he recognized that racism was central to why blacks in this country were disproportionately poor. So in his last sermon, although he never used the word 'reparations', that was what King was pointing toward when he spoke of the 'debt' that was still owed to black America.

He went on in that sermon to make explicit the irony, as well as injustice, in leaving that debt unpaid: "[At] the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man", he said, "through an act of Congress it was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest -- which meant that it was willing to under gird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did it give the land, it build land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming: not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest loan rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every year not to farm. These are so often the very people who tell [African Americans] that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps."

The notion that some sort of debt is owed to black America is one with roots as long as our nation's history. Slavery existed here for 244 years, supported and enforced by the laws of the land. By 1860 there were at least 4 million people living as slaves in the United States. When they were freed, by proclamation and by the Civil War, reparations were actually written into law. This is where the famous 'forty acres and a mule' arose, as acknowledgement that those about to start a new life could not do so without aid, and that this aid was due to them not as largesse but as compensation for the wrongs they had suffered. In 1863 a freed slave in North Carolina wrote, "If the strict law of right and justice is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and yoke of tyranny."

But the promise of forty acres and a mule was never fulfilled, and when the brief glories of Reconstruction were rolled back those few ex-slaves who had been granted land were actually forced to relinquish it again. In place of the promised liberties new laws were enacted that supported a status quo much nearer to slavery than it was to freedom. An ex-slave, Thomas Hall, wrote: "Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves, and we still had to depend on the …white man for work, food and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery."

In the long years since the original reparations were left unpaid, many besides Martin Luther King have resurrected the question: What is owed to black America? How shall it be paid? It was given recent momentum by scholar Randall Robinson in his book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks". It has also been given new life and energy because there are now some precedents. Monetary reparations have been paid in recent years to survivors of the internment camps into which our government forced Japanese Americans during World War II. Some survivors of the Holocaust have received reparations, and others have lawsuits pending. In 1994 the state of Florida paid $2.1 million as reparations to the descendents of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, and early in 2000 the Tulsa Race Riot Commission recommended reparations for the survivors of the 1921 race riot in that city, in which as many as 300 African Americans were killed.

And yet even with some precedents, and even with the undeniable injustices of slavery and its aftermath, any proposal for reparations is one rife with controversy. It is mind-numbing to consider turning as a nation to face our past with the idea of somehow paying for it, making it right. And objections to reparations come fast and furious.

How can you think about rectifying a wrong done so long ago? And if we start down that road, paying for the sins of our ancestors, where in the world would it end? How many others whose ancestors suffered injustice would also want compensation? What about all the white folks in this country whose ancestors were themselves poor immigrants who never even dreamed of owning a slave? Can any of us today -- individuals or society -- be held accountable for the morals and choices and lives led or lost a century and a half ago? And what about present-day struggles that affect blacks but not only blacks? Doesn't it make more sense to put our energy there, in the struggle for education or health rights or better wealth distribution?

Those are all good questions. But there is a different sort of question we can ask that might bring us closer to the justice that reparations point toward. In an article last year in the Christian Century, author Victoria Barnett wrote, "While proponents of reparations present their case in the clear-cut language of a legal claim for damages, the issue is really political and moral, and this sets certain limitations. …Reparations do not offer tidy endings. They are not a way out or a means of settling accounts. They can't enact the kind of justice that many people would like to have. The key to understanding their potential is the root word reparare -- to repair something, which in this case is the political body and society as a whole."

So the question becomes: What is it that might move our society in the direction of repair from the damage of past slavery and persistent racism? One part of the repair inherent in the notion of reparations is truth-telling. Our nation has yet to include in its most basic narrative the truth about slavery. Our most basic national story has to do with the pioneer spirit, rugged individualism, Yankee ingenuity, the revolutionary courage that rose up against tyranny and created true democracy. It isn't that slavery is excised from the textbooks; it is that slavery, and the near-slavery that followed for so many decades after, are never given the weight they are due. We are never taught to weigh the enormity of those lost generations, nor shown the ways in which the echoes of that wrong keep on sounding through the national psyche.

I have found it surprisingly useful to look at my own ignorance in this particular context. I have been ignorant not in the sense of lacking knowledge but in the sense of failing to bring pieces of knowledge together for what they might teach me, and it is this form of ignorance that we must begin to challenge. I have always known about slavery, always felt horrified that it lasted for so long, and always felt exempt even from ancestral guilt because most of my own ancestors were poor Irish or English immigrants who had nothing to do with slaves. But then I began to ask questions.

I knew that my great-great grandfather Patrick McTigue immigrated first to Canada and then to the United States, and that he farmed on land in Iowa that was still in the family when my grandfather was born. I never asked, though, how he came to have that rich Iowa farmland. It was based on land acquired in 1855, and though I don't have the records to prove it, the year and the place make it almost certain that it was a land grant -- that is, free land that he had only to claim and then farm. On my mother's side, my great-great grandparents settled in Montana in the late 1800s, and made their living not as farmers but through lumber. I learned, when I finally thought to ask, that they didn't own the land on which their trees grew; it was federal and state land, to which they were granted lumber rights.

Neither side of my family became wealthy, but both sides experienced the slow accumulation of good things that added up to a solid middle-class lifestyle by the time my parents married and began raising my siblings and me. And my understanding of my nation, my comprehension of its problems, is incomplete if I do not recognize that my family's comforts began with outright gifts of land and lumber from the government. It was precisely this sort of leg up that was denied to African Americans once slavery was abolished: only in their case it would not have been a gift, but reparations: a payment, however small, for the wrongs that had been done.

This is a part of the truth-telling that seems essential if any healing is to take place. This is something that is within our grasp: telling an honest history of who we are and how we have come to be this way, told without gloss, without a softening of the awful edges that come to be revealed. And what might grow then, out of that truth-telling?

Just as it can be instructive to look at the question of truth-telling as it touches one's own family, it can be enlightening to look at it in one institution, or in one community. A recent exercise in truth-telling is a study published last year by three Yale graduate students, called "Yale, Slavery and Abolition". The students document there the fact that Yale's first endowment funds and its first scholarship funds were given by men who made their money directly in the buying and selling of slaves. They were not just slave owners but slave traders. Many of Yale's early leaders were outspoken supporters of slavery, and some of them also profited from the trade. Present-day Yale is understandably prouder of its leaders and graduates who were known for their abolitionist activities. And yet it is the slave traders and supporters who are commemorated in the names of buildings and gateways and by statues on Yale's campus.

Yale did not grow up as an island, separate from the prevailing currents and ethics of its day, and it would be anachronistic to suggest that all of its founders or benefactors ought to have been free from the taints of slavery. But it is not anachronistic to suggest that institutions built partly on ill-gotten gains might owe a debt of some sort in response to that truth. At the very least, might there not be some weight of justice in renaming some of the buildings in honor of the abolitionists instead of the slavers? Or in offering scholarships specifically to any qualifying New Haven student of African American descent?

Last week I interviewed my colleague, Rev. Eric Smith, minister to Community Baptist Church and leader of a group called the New Haven Reparations Committee. He has chosen to focus not on the enormous and overwhelming question of national reparations, but on the one city where he lives -- New Haven -- and the institution so wedded to its history, Yale. And it may be that if the changes come at all, they will come in this way: through small and local efforts, through the willingness to name the true history, city by city or institution by institution, and the courage to make that history part of the living narrative that teaches us who we are.

But toward the end of our conversation I asked Eric to say what, if anything, he could imagine happening on the national level that might actually make a difference. He thought about it and then said, almost wistfully, "You know, a national apology would be something. The President, or the President and Congress, standing up to name what had happened, to say out loud that they felt shame for it, that they were sorry. And then being willing to say that since we can't go back to the option of forty acres and a mule, what they would do instead to put weight behind their words would be to guarantee that every African American who qualifies would have a four year scholarship to college."

No one -- including Eric Smith -- would imagine that this sort of reparations would solve the problems of black America, or cure the ills of racism. But sitting in his office and thinking about it with him, I could imagine something shifting -- something large and important. The ground of the conversation would be different, the very language we use would be different, if we had this sort of national acknowledgement, this token and yet weighty commitment to give something back in the name of righting a long-standing wrong.

It is impossible to look steadily at the racial history of our country without recognizing that some kind of payment is due on a debt that's been gathering interest for centuries. Yet it's hard to talk about reparations in a way that feels real -- hard to think through how we might move in that direction without losing ourselves in an endless legalistic swamp. Where would it begin? Who would deserve what? Who would have to pay? Where would it end? And most urgently, how might a struggle for reparations distract from the enormous present-day injustices that only a broad class- or labor-based coalition might have a chance of changing?

Despite these questions, I don't think the challenge posed by reparations is likely to go away any time soon, partly because the debate alone is so important. It shows us, in case we had any doubt, that the passage of time alone cannot make things right. Our racial legacy, born of slavery, will continue to haunt us if we cannot find a way to face it more honestly.

We don't want to think about, much less pay for, the sins of the ancestors. But at a minimum the debate reminds us that we are already paying in a multitude of ways for the social problems that can be traced back to slavery's door. Reparations asks us to think about whether there is a better way to pay -- a way which, if we could be bold enough of mind and heart, might shift us all onto a new and higher ground.

I'd like to leave you with these words, written by Martin Luther King in an essay for Look Magazine that appeared twelve days after his assassination. He wrote: "America is reaping the harvest of hate and shame planted through generations of educational denial, political disfranchisement and economic exploitation of its black population. Now, [more than] a century removed from slavery, we find the heritage of oppression and racism erupting in our cities…The American people are infected with racism: that is the peril. Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals: that is the hope…. To end poverty, to extirpate prejudice, to free a tormented conscience, to make a tomorrow of justice, fair play and creativity -- all these are worthy of the American ideal."