The redistribution of millions of acres of land that Lincoln promised freed people, ended with his assassination. It would prove to be one of the most consequential failures in American history.

Transcript

Interviewer  00:00

You agree, should the government apologize for slavery? Should there be reparations?

Mike Pence  00:05

I believe that the willingness of Americans to lay their sons down in the Civil War and the grief that ensued for virtually every American family with 600,000 American lives that were spent in ending slavery on this continent, probably recompense enough….

Katherine Franke  00:23

You look at some of the writings of the men who were leading that military campaign, they also felt a forward looking obligation, that if we are truly to render these people free, they need material resources, they need a place in order to live and the means to thrive in that place, if emancipation is to have any real meaning.

Sandy Darity  00:44

A point I’d like to make about the question of compensation for Blacks who are more recent immigrants to the United States is that I do in fact think that virtually all of them do have a claim for reparations but that claim is not something that should be directed at the United States government.

Osha Davidson  01:16

Welcome to the American project. We opened with clips from, in order, Vice President Mike Pence, Katherine Franke, Columbia University law professor and author of the book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, and Duke University professor and co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century, William “Sandy” Darity.

I’m Osha Gray Davidson, producer and host of The American Project. So, our last episode was a change-up from our original plan. It looked at racial disparities in the COVID-19 disease and the reasons for them. The short answer: more Blacks in service sector jobs that require interaction with the public and the racial health gap that makes the disease more lethal for Black Americans. Shorter answer: racism. Today, we’re back to where we left off in Episode Three.

In considering where many white people stand on reparations, here’s a good place to start.

Mitch McConnell  02:21

Yeah, I don’t think reparations for something that happened 250 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea…

Osha Davidson  02:29

That’s Republican US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Mitch McConnell  02:33

…deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing a landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president. I think we’re always a work in progress…

Osha Davidson  02:48

Did you notice the last part about the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, being a part of reparations? Well, first off, McConnell leaves out the fact that the majority of white voters went for President Obama’s opponents in 2008, and in 2012. But also, a Black candidate’s victory is their own achievement unrelated to reparations.

McConnell was actually using a racist riff on the theme that attributes job promotion or hires earned by Black folks to affirmative action. Oh, yeah. And then there’s the fact that Obama opposed reparations. One other argument McConnell used against reparations is the notion that they’ve already been “paid in blood.” Here’s Vice President Mike Pence on this same idea, recorded when he was Congressman Pence.

Interviewer  03:38

This week on “Newsmakers,” House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence is our guest. Do you agree should the government apologize for slavery? Should there be reparations?

Mike Pence  03:49

I believe that the willingness of Americans to lay their sons down in the Civil War and the grief that ensued for virtually every American family with 600,000 American lives that were spent in ending slavery on this continent probably recompense enough.

Osha Davidson  04:05

Except that half of those 600,000 American lives Pence was honoring were lost defending slavery, not ending it. He included Confederate soldiers who killed 300,000 Union soldiers fighting to preserve the United States of America.

Pence’s disingenuous math aside, what about the argument that ending slavery was in itself adequate reparations? Well, that wasn’t Abraham Lincoln’s view. Lincoln fully supported Special Field Order 15, issued by General William Tecumseh Sherman. The order is better known today by the promise it made: “Forty acres and a mule.” The program was designed so that formerly enslaved people would be able to provide for themselves and their families on parcels of land confiscated from plantation owners in the defeated Confederacy.

The story behind how this plan came about is fascinating, involving a meeting between Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, General Sherman, and a group of black leaders, mostly ministers, in Savannah, Georgia. We’ll save that story for a future episode and maybe a screenplay pitch. For now, it’s enough to note that the plan was remarkable for what it could have accomplished. Exhibit A is the fact that a few months after Sherman issued it, some 40,000 newly freed people were farming on 400,000 acres, part of a vast swath of land 30 miles wide, stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, all the way through Georgia and well into Florida. Eventually, 5.3 million acres were to be allocated to those formerly enslaved.

Osha Davidson  05:55

When Confederate supporter John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln on April 15, 1865 the plan died with the President. Oh, it continued out of inertia until the following January, when Lincoln’s former Vice President, Democrat Andrew Johnson, rescinded his predecessor’s program. The former Senator from Tennessee, who personally held 14 Black individuals in bondage, ordered the land on which Black families had begun their new lives, returned to its former white owners. When Black families insisted that the land was theirs, Johnson had Army soldiers remove them by force. Here’s Katherine Franke, the James L. Dohr professor of law at Columbia University, speaking on what was promised Black Americans and then denied.

Katherine Franke  06:44

When you look at some of the writings of the men who were leading that military campaign, they understood reparations both in a backward looking way that something had to be done to compensate or recognize, the horror of enslavement, the death, the theft of labor, the murder, the torture, the rape, the family separation. Mere emancipation, just the ending of that, wasn’t enough. But they also felt a forward looking obligation that if we are truly to render these people free, they need material resources. They need a place in order to live and the means to thrive in that place, if emancipation is to have any real meaning. And so what we actually only did was merely emancipate people. We didn’t also enable real free lives and I think that’s an ongoing project and ongoing debt. And as Martin Luther King said, “We’re coming for our check.”

Osha Davidson  07:45

If that land distribution had continued, the United States would be a very different place today. Journalist Patty Satalia asked Sandy Darity about that possibility on the WPSU program, “Pennsylvania Inside Out.”

Patty Satalia  08:02

If reparations had been fulfilled at that time, do you think we’d be talking about this today? How might things have been different?

Sandy Darity  08:08

Well, we can only speculate. But in my imagination, I think that had that initial land allocation been made, it would have affected the long term wealth, this wealth distribution in this society by race quite substantially and possibly, we would not have to ask about the question of reparations.

Osha Davidson  08:41

So here we are, living with the results of one of the most consequential failures in American history and trying to fix it with reparations, payment for a debt owed, proffered, and then yanked away.

In their book From Here to Equality, Sandy Darity and co-author Kirsten Mullen, make the case for a lineage-based standard for reparations. Meaning: To qualify, Black Americans need to show that they’re descended from people who were enslaved in the United States.

Why? Because the story of Black people in America includes more than slavery.

Of course, slavery was the beginning. Starting in 1619, hundreds of thousands of Africans were kidnapped and brought to Colonial America, packed into ships holds with little food or fresh air, and no sanitation. Thousands died during the long voyage. For the next 246 years. Those who survived the Middle Passage, and their descendants, live their entire lives laboring in appalling conditions. They were brutally whipped for any reason. When enslaved people were too sick to work, Southern doctors sometimes diagnosed the problem as “malingering” and the sometimes prescribed “nine drops of essence of rawhide.” To the doctors and owners alike, whipping sick black people could be the subject of a joke.

The Civil War brought about the end of chattel slavery in America. But after a revolutionary era known as Reconstruction that lasted just 13 years, brutal oppression returned and continued for nearly another century, a period known as Jim Crow. The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 60s forced an end to the second era of the Black American ordeal.

The third period, the modern era, includes mass incarceration, targeted police violence, educational bias, job discrimination, and a host of more subtle, but destructive, violations of basic human rights. The point is, as Sandy Darity put it,

Sandy Darity  10:49

And so there’s only one community that has had to experience all of that have to bear the burden of the cumulative effect of all that. And those are individuals who are descendants of persons who were enslaved in the United States.

Osha Davidson  11:06

And for those born in the US, but whose ancestors may have been enslaved elsewhere? Again, Sandy Darity.

Sandy Darity  11:12

I do in fact think that virtually all of them do have a claim for reparations. But that claim is not something that should be directed at the United States government. It should be directed at the various countries or array of countries that enslaved or colonized their countries of origin.

Osha Davidson  11:32

In fact, descendants of people enslaved in the Caribbean are making reparations claims against European powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France. The Caribbean community, or CARICOM, represent some 20 small nations, mostly islands. Here’s Richard Stein, a partner for the law firm representing CARICOM in Brussels, speaking in 2014 on the Al Jazeera TV network.

Richard Stein  11:59

This is a very serious potential legal case that we’ve been discussing with the CARICOM states. We have formulated with them a plan of action which primarily would depend on attempting to resolve the issue with the slave owning and trading states through discussion rather than litigation.

Osha Davidson  12:27

And in August 2019, One Scottish institution’s attempt to reckon with its past made the news on the BBC.

BBC anchor  12:34

Glasgow University is to raise and spend 20 million pounds to atone for the money it benefited from during the slave trade. It’s thought to be the first institution in the UK to put such a program in place.

Osha Davidson  12:46

Using lineage as a standard for reparations is essentially a legalistic approach. But there’s more to the argument and that’s based on the history of Black immigration to the United States, which is a surprisingly new phenomenon. How many times have you heard this phrase, “a nation of immigrants.”

Narrator  13:06

We in America are immigrants, or the children of immigrants.

George W. Bush  13:11

We’re a nation of immigrants. And we must uphold…

Mitt Romney  13:15

…is uniquely American. It’s what brought us to America. We’re a nation of immigrants….

Barack Obama  13:21

…We are a nation of immigrants and that means…

Tim Kaine  13:23

…We are a nation of immigrants. Mike Pence and I both…

Hillary Clinton  13:25

…the Statue of Liberty reminding us of who we are and where we came from. We are a nation of immigrants and I am proud of it.

Osha Davidson  13:38

Hitting the “Nation of Immigrants” theme, we heard a documentary from the 1940s, President George W. Bush, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama, vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine and presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. We could have found a lot more. The phrase is generally used to counter xenophobic fears, fears that are once again being stoked by President Donald Trump.

Donald Trump  14:07

The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards…

Osha Davidson  14:34

The problem with the “Nation of Immigrants” trope is that it effectively erases two groups, Native Americans and kidnapped Africans. In 1958, then-Senator John F. Kennedy used that phrase as the title of a book. But what Kennedy was really talking about was limited to the flow of people from western and northern Europe. For much of our history, most immigrants came from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia.

But from 1870 through the years following World War I, an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Russia, including many Jews fleeing persecution, alarmed the previous immigrant groups. As nativist sentiment began to rise, a growing chorus of voices called on the government to crack down on the arrival of undesirables. This article in “Good Housekeeping” from February 1921 was typical.

Calvin Coolidge  15:32

There are racial considerations too great to be brushed aside for any sentimental reason. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.

Osha Davidson  16:01

A month after the article was published, its author was sworn in as the 29th Vice President of the United States. Calvin Coolidge. Two years later, he became the 30th President of the United States, after the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding. When Coolidge accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1924, he made it clear that a crack down on immigration would be a key priority in his administration. He told the GOP delegates:

Calvin Coolidge  16:33

Restricted immigration is not an offensive, but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree, but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.

Osha Davidson  17:12

Keeping America American. If anyone didn’t get Coolidge’s meaning, racist and ethnic code words were largely thrown out the window during congressional debate on the new restrictions. Here’s Maine’s Congressman, Republican Ira Hershey:

Ira Hershey  17:28

America, the United States, bounded on the north by an English colony, on the south by the tropics and on the east and west by two great oceans was, God intended, I believe, to be the home of a great people. English speaking, a white race with great ideals, the Christian religion, one race, one country and one destiny. It was a mighty land settled by Northern Europe, from the United Kingdom, the Norseman and the Saxon, the peoples of a mixed blood. The African, the Orientals, the Mongolians, and all the yellow races of Europe, Asia and Africa should never have been allowed to people this great land.

Osha Davidson  17:28

His floor speech was read by an actor for the invaluable resource, “Facing History and Ourselves.” We’ll have a link in the transcript. The racial immigration policy was left largely unchanged over the next four decades. But then came the Cold War.

Beginning in the late 1950. decolonization in Africa forced the United States and the Soviet Union into a battle for influence on the continent. In 1960 alone, 17 new African nations declared independence. On October 3, 1965, a new Immigration and Naturalization Act replaced the racist policy from 1924. President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the bill into law on Liberty Island with the Statue of Liberty, and the Cold War, in the background.

Lyndon Johnson  19:17

This bill says simply, that from this day forth those wishing to emigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here….Yet the fact is, that far over four decades, the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted, and has been distorted by the harsh and justice of the national origins quota system.

Osha Davidson  19:50

The new law allowed immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and other areas outside of Western Europe, to come to the United States in record number. But a flood of non-white immigrants didn’t pour into this country immediately following the new law. For years, Black immigrants trickled in. Even by 1980, just 3% of the country’s Black population was foreign born. That changed over time, and by 2016, Black immigrants and their children made up a full 18% of America’s Black population, or roughly one in five Black Americans.

If reparations are for slavery, Jim Crow, and the injustices of the post-Civil Rights era, it seems relevant that the vast majority of Black immigrants didn’t arrive in the United States until long after even the Civil Rights era had ended.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the lineage-based formula, even among reparations advocates. In June 2019, Congress held a hearing on the reparations bill, HR 40, the first [hearing] in a dozen years. While covering the hearing for “The Crisis,” the magazine of the NAACP, I stood with scores of other people waiting to get into room 2141, in the Rayburn House Office Building for that hearing. It was there that I met Carlton Waterhouse, a law professor at Howard University.

Osha Davidson  21:20

So as a legal scholar, what are you looking for today?

Carlton Waterhouse  21:24

Well, I reviewed the bill and the commission as proposed. And I think it’s got a lot of very excellent attributes to it and approaches that they’re using which is comprehensive. I think I’d want to emphasize the importance of the Jim Crow experience of mistreatment in America that Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about and will be testifying about today, and that people don’t, as Mitch McConnell did yesterday, completely bifurcate the question of enslavement from the question of the mistreatment following that.

Osha Davidson  21:56

 Good. Okay. Thanks for talking with us.

Carlton Waterhouse  21:58

My pleasure. Thank you.

Osha Davidson  22:01

Professor Waterhouse has a very different take on reparations, one which we didn’t get to during our brief conversation in that noisy marble hallway. Here he is in a 2016 interview.

Carlton Waterhouse  22:14

No, I don’t believe that African Americans alive today should receive financial recompense based on slavery.

Osha Davidson  22:21

In his view, monetary reparations should be made for discrimination during Jim Crow. He does believe the government owes a debt for slavery, but the payment would take a different form.

Carlton Waterhouse  22:33

For slavery, the reparations should be in the form of monuments, memorials, and museums. Because the harm was to the dignity of the enslaved and the enslaved are no longer here. But our memory of them is still here – or our forgetting of them is still here, which is more like it.

Osha Davidson  22:51

Professor Waterhouse’s idea of monetary reparations solely for living victims of Jim Crow is in the minority. Although the idea of museums, monuments and other ways to restore the history of slavery to our national consciousness is widely accepted. But most Black supporters appear to believe that monetary reparations should be for all of the three periods of oppression.

How much would that cost? And can we afford it? That’s what we’ll be looking at, in Episode Six.

We had help today from George Webber, who was the voice of Calvin Coolidge. Our guest interviews included professors Katherine Franke, Sandy Darity, and Carlton Waterhouse.

We’re also starting a new short segment today. And by short, I mean a maximum of 280 characters. Yep, we’re talking about Twitter, here. Each episode we’ll run a tweet related to reparations, read by the person who wrote it. Here’s our first, from an American descendant of slavery, or ADOS, living in Memphis, Tennessee,

Tweeter  24:06

I understand black nationalists. But, you can miss me with building a separate nation. We already built this one. I’m an American, and I need America to work for me.

Osha Davidson  24:22

If you have a question or comment about anything on our podcast or something we should have included but didn’t, want to hear from you. Go to our website, TheAmericanProject.us, or you can always record your thoughts and send them by email to osha@theAmericanproject.us. And please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Osha Davidson  24:54

Next time on The American project:

Reporter  24:57

These changes are being made to address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak. “Flooding the zone” is understating what it looks like they’re doing right here..

Mnuchin  25:07

…It is a big number. And this is a very unique situation in this economy. We’ve put a proposal on the table that would inject a trillion dollars into the economy. That is on top of the 300 billion from the IRS…

Reporter  25:22

We’ve got breaking news…

Reporter 2  25:23

…Stephanie, the House has passed the $2.2 trillion relief bill…

News anchor  25:27

…this price tag on the war in Iraq, the number may surprise you: $3 trillion. That’s the estimate calculated by the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co author, Linda…

Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez  25:40

We write unlimited blank checks for war, we just wrote a $2 trillion check for that tax cut, the GOP tax cut, and nobody asked those folks how are they going to pay for it? We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do.