George Mason, like many of the founders, wanted to outlaw slavery and made an eloquent plea to do so.

By Allen C. Brownfeld

IN JUNE, THE Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. The House is expected to pass a similar resolution. The resolution explicitly says that slavery descendants are not entitled to reparations.

Nevertheless, Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, sees the Senate’s apology as a “confession” that should lead to reparations. However, the question of reparations is far more complicated.

Reparations Movement
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced legislation into every Congress since 1989 calling for comprehensive study of reparations; the legislation has been stalled repeatedly.

In 2001, the state of California passed legislation mandating every insurance company licensed in the state to report to the state whether it ever sold policies insuring slaveowners against the loss of their slave property, and if so, to whom. Other initiatives have been launched in other states and localities.

David Horowitz, a conservative author and political activist, placed full-page advertisements in newspapers attacking the notion. The ads declared: “Only a minority of white Americans owned slaves, while others gave their lives to free them. ... There is no single group that benefited exclusively from slavery.” The ads also stated, “there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians — Englishmen and Americans — created one.”

Slavery has existed almost universally among people of every level of material culture — nomad pastoralists of Asia, hunting societies of North American Indians, and sea people such as the Norsemen. Black Africans were sold into slavery to white Europeans by other black Africans.

Challenges of Reparations
The current reparations movement overlooks important facts. First, reparations usually are paid to direct victims, such as to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and Holocaust survivors. In addition, not all blacks were slaves; an estimated 3,000 blacks were slaveholders. Many immigrants not only came to the U.S. long after slavery ended, but many were also confronted with discrimination. Should they pay reparations, too, or receive them?

Reparations would raise more concerns than they relieve, argues black commentator Armstrong Williams: “One wonders, for example, what percentage of black blood would entitle a citizen to reparations? What reparations, if any, would Africans be required to pay for selling their own citizens into slavery? Would American Indians be able to make a similar claim? Plainly, forcing this government to pay reparations to the biological, cultural, or religious offshoots of every group it wronged over the last 200 years would bankrupt this country.”

Framers’ Views
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in l787, not a single nation had made slavery illegal. What is historically unique is not that slavery was the accepted way of the world in l787, but that so many of the leading men of the American colonies wanted to eliminate it.

Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were ardent abolitionists. John Jay, who would become the first chief justice, was president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Rufus King and Governeur Morris were in the forefront of the opposition to slavery. One of the great debates of the Constitutional Convention related to the African slave trade, and George Mason of Virginia made an eloquent plea for making it illegal.

The history of slavery is hardly a simple one. Those who continue to promote the case for reparations would do well to review this complex history and the real problems faced by minorities at the present time. Their crusade is a diversion we can ill afford.

Allen Brownfeld is a veteran columnist writing for the Fitzgerald-Griffin Foundation. His work can be seen at www.fgfbooks.com.