Historical Injustices and Precedents for Reparations

[Hawk1981]

In the United States, the first reparations plan was considered before the Civil War ended when General Sherman issued special orders allocating 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia abandoned by or confiscated from slave owners as a way to "assure the harmony of action in the area of operations." Although about 400,000 acres were allocated, the orders were rescinded by President Andrew Johnson. Additional efforts to pass bills redistributing confiscated land to freed slaves were defeated in Congress during the Reconstruction Era.

The next push for reparations for slavery occurred in the 1890s. Several black organizations lobbied Congress to provide pensions for former slaves and their children. One bill introduced into the U.S. Senate in 1894 would have granted direct payments of up to $500 to all ex-slaves plus monthly pensions ranging from $4 to $15. The proposals for pensions faded away at the onset of the First World War.

The first US reparations program passed by Congress was in 1946 to redress a wide range of claims pressed by Native American tribes, including violations of treaties for which a judicial remedy was denied, and the loss of lands under treaties signed under duress. Compensation has been paid to numerous Native American groups in the decades since.

Other notable reparations programs by the United States have included the payments to Japanese-American internees confined during the Second World War; compensation to people exposed to radiation from nuclear tests and mining; and victims of syphilis experiments who were denied treatment. An unusual case of reparations was paid by the state of Florida to the survivors and descendants of residents of the black town of Rosewood, Florida, destroyed following a race riot in 1923.

Since the 1960s there has been a resurgence in the requests for reparations for American slavery, for descendants of native Hawaiian groups who lost land following the annexation by the US, and for descendants of Mexican land owners whose Spanish and Mexican land titles were not recognized under the terms of the peace treaty of 1848. In the United States, the resurgence of requests has been, in part, due to the successful precedents set by numerous claims made in the last 75 years to both federal and state governments.

You have obviously thought a lot about reparations. Thanks for all the history.

What does the group think is a fair amount of money to be given to each black for reparations of slavery of their ancestors?

Reparations to individuals based on wrongs done to ancestors would be difficult to calculate and impractical in the current political environment.

However, more general societal benefits where the targeted population was certain to include the descendants of slaves could be structured as a form of reparations. Housing guarantees, minimum incomes schemes, universal healthcare, and subsidized college tuition, could be examples of reparations plans that could be marketed as reparations and as a general societal benefit that would be more politically palatable.

There are precedents for this sort of indirect reparations compensations.

 

[MaryL]

Historically, reparations are a relatively recent phenomenon. One type is the reparations paid from one state to another, extracted by the victors, as spoils, as a condition for peace. France paid Germany reparations after the Franco-Prussian War of 1872. Germany paid France reparations after World War I and the Soviet zone of Germany paid reparations to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and Iraq paid reparations for the destruction that it caused after the Gulf War.

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Another type of reparations seeks to accomplish a political or moral purpose, and they are usually paid to individuals or groups. In this sense, the most famous reparations are the Holocaust reparations paid by West Germany after the Second World War. Although the United States and other countries did pressure Germany to pay reparations to Holocaust victims, and although the West Germany reparations can be traced to earlier reparations programs imposed from 1947 to 1949 by the occupying powers, the Holocaust case differs from the standard cases of coerced wartime reparations. The Holocaust reparations did not go to the victorious powers, and the program emerged more or less autonomously from the German political system, at a time (the 1950s and 1960s) when Germany was no longer under imminent threat of further physical or economic destruction.

Other notable reparations programs were established by the Czech Republic to compensate owners who had property confiscated by the Communist regime between 1948 and 1990; and by Germany to owners of confiscated property and political imprisonment during the Communist era in the Eastern Zone. Chile set up a pension system for the victims and families of the Pinochet regime; and Canada has set aside considerable funds for the forced assimilation of aboriginal children.

The history of reparations for past injustices have a number of important elements in the process of effectively compensating the victims and their descendants. There is the importance of financial compensation as the tangible token of society's recognition and commitment. There must be some measure of punishment for the perpetrators crimes against the victims. There must be strong financial and political backing for the process to move forward. Finally, there is the element of lasting moral responsibility driving the process of commemorating and rectifying past wrongs.

The most consistent factor for reparation: It has to be within a time frame of a couple of generations of the event. That seems reasonable. Oh, NO say SJW's, let's go back 8 generations. So how far back does this go? Ancient Greece? Mesopotamia? A million years ago on the african savanna, some little group was persecuted by a larger group...there is a statute of limitations here. Poor blacks now just have their heads up their asses and think robbing, murdering, and hating each other or whites is a valid culture. Want to fight racism? Mirrors are the biggest threat to racism I know. As for reparations? That's my ten cents towards paying lazy ass violent drunk/high irresponsible irrational people with a darker melanin level.