 Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Critical Conversations, where we talk about hot topic issues related to American Muslims and other targeted communities. Today we will talk about reparations for slavery, an issue that has been repeatedly advocated by civil rights groups and social justice activists for a very long time. However, it recently became part of the national conversation when presidential candidates made it into a campaign issue. To talk about how the debate surrounding reparations has evolved over time and what are some of the practical and moral considerations that surrounded, we are joined today by Professor Amilkar Shabazz. He is a professor of history and Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Professor Shabazz, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, good to be here. So we'll start at the beginning. So when exactly did the conversation around reparations begin, and how has it evolved over time? Very good. In one way we have to situate the struggle for reparations on their two levels. We can have this conversation. One is on the individual claim of those for whom slavery was an act of wrongful taking of people's labor, of people's wealth, of people's productivity, and that individual level can be traced back to the beginnings of, to the first instances of slavery itself. Wherever you had Africans in the Americas who were enslaved that found a way to claim their freedom, to press for their freedom, to assert their desire to be free. And if an individual slave owner agreed and worked out some arrangement for emancipation, well right there a question would emerge, how am I to be repaid? How am I to be repaired for all of the years in which I have worked for you with making nothing for myself? And so then by these arrangements sometimes a certain amount of money or land or something to help the person who was formerly enslaved be able to go on with their lives as a free person would happen even then. What I think many are looking for in the conversation around reparations is on a group level. And on a group level we can trace some of this into the middle of the 1800s, particularly in light of the efforts of something called the American Colonization Society, which was a group that claimed as its members very important figures in the country, indeed presidents of the United States even backed the effort to colonize Africans out of the United States to take them out of the U.S. and to send them back to Africa, notably Liberia, to create a black state, a black Christian state actually, in Africa and that monies and support were given for these groups of Africans to return to Africa to go to Liberia. So questions emerged there, but where we really get to the full conversation is in the midst of the Civil War and as the war ends, of course that conversation is largely cut short in the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the collapse of the Freedmen's Bureau, which has a longer name that included the question of abandoned lands and indemnifying Africans who were coming out of slavery with some of the lands that had been abandoned by slave owners who supported the Confederacy. So we start really getting a conversation that happens in the context of the Civil War and immediately after the Civil War. And then so how did, I mean, there were several rights activists to sort of continue that conversation over time, but after a while it seemed to have died down. Why do you think that is? So one of the things is with, in the case of people who lived through enslavement after the Civil War, many of them believed that some form of reparations would come. Indeed, when we are in the Great Depression years of the 1930s, the Work Project Administration creates a program for writers to go south to interview formerly enslaved Africans who were still alive at the time. So these were folks who might have been 5, 10, maybe even 15 years old at the time of the end of the Civil War and so who did live some of their life under shadow slavery. They would go down and interview these people in their 80s and their 90s about what was life like back then. And we know in many of the instances when these writers would go and ask about the interview, one of the questions would come up from the formerly enslaved, well is this related to my pension? You say you're with the federal government, you're supported by the, is this going to lead to my getting my pension? And that was based largely upon the work of an African-American woman who had organized and had gone around the country organizing African-Americans to press for their rights to reparations in the form of an old age pension. And this was something again that didn't emerge. She ended up being hounded by the forerunner of the FBI as having engaged in male fraud, different fraudulent activities by the people she organized and who was supporting her in her efforts. And so we see even there in the 1930s working among living people who lived through this act of wrongful taking, there were efforts to suppress and to not pay any form of reparations. But the conversation continued. Going into the 1940s, we see efforts with respect to W.B. Du Bois and others as at the end of the Second World War and the United Nations is being constructed, pressing the case of we charge genocide. Queen Mother Moore, Audley Moore was a part of the efforts to demand reparations in this charge of genocide against the United States government, not only for the era of slavery, but for its ongoing denial of basic human rights to African-Americans. And then the civil rights movement coming up to that point. There are many instances, but James Foreman, an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he pressed the case, but not against the U.S. government, but against religious bodies who had sanctioned slavery and who had blessed the efforts of slaveholders. So the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, Presbyterian, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, saying that, look, based on your implication, some of the ministers of these churches had owned Africans and enslaved them, that you should pay back and indemnify African-Americans as a group. And further, in 1972, during the Black Power era, the provisional government of the Republic of New Africa had a campaign in 1972 demanding land and demanding independence of the Black Nation and the repayment of reparations to the payment of reparations to African-Americans as a group. But so there are moments in which the African-Americans have pressed this, they've just been ignored, but there has been, I would say, consistent efforts through time to make these demands, but in terms of their inaudibility by the larger society, yes, there are times when it has been less, they've been less receptive. The more, the modern kind of efforts begin to emerge in the 1980s, 1990s, the establishment of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America in Cobra, as it's known by its acronym, really pushed a resolution that was put forward in the House of Representatives by James John Conyers of Detroit. And this measure, HR 40, called for a study process to really make an assessment of the wrongful taking and what form of repayment, how much, when, could this be, how should this be administered, some type of reparations commission. And so Conyers had that bill but failed to get it out of committee, failed to get broader sponsorship for it. There wasn't much support at that for many years, but in more recent times it has, we've been able to kind of get more attention to this. And so, I mean, if we talk about reparations for different minority groups in this country, it's not as if the U.S. has never apologized or paid reparations. It was the Reagan administration that apologized and paid reparations to the Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II. The Clinton administration apologized and paid reparations to victims of the Tuskegee experiment. Why do you think that there is such a resistance and reluctance around apologizing and then paying reparations for slavery? I'd like to tell a little story on that. When I was starting my career as a university teacher, I spent a year at Prairie View A&M University. I was hired by a division of political science and history. And my immediate boss was a man who had been an activist in the movement as well as a political scientist named Mac Jones. And then also the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in political science was my dean, Dean Jewel Prestige. And one of the things we worked on, I worked on with Dean Prestige, was a grant to bring a prominent speaker to campus. And the person we chose and wrote the grant for was John Hope Franklin. Now, John Hope Franklin writes one of the first textbooks in African American history from Slavery to Freedom. He's considered the dean of African American historians, a prominent figure amongst all historians throughout his life. And indeed, he did come. But because of the work that, particularly Imari Obedelli, who was a professor in political science at Prairie View when I was there, some of the work he did, and I worked with, of educating the students about reparations during the Q&A of Professor Franklin's talk, where he was really talking about what was going on in Bosnia, and he was relating ethnic conflict there to ethnic conflict in the United States. Well, a question came up from one of the students about what about the question of reparations for African Americans. And at that time, this would have been about 95, I want to say, or 96. He just slopped it off and said, you know, let's be realistic here. Let's talk about things that have a realistic chance. White Americans don't want to hear anything about reparations. And so this is just foolishness for us to spend time here talking about reparations for slavery, or for any form of reparations because of the wrongs that have been done for us. Let's not waste our time talking foolishness. And he's an African American professor. Absolutely. And in later years, when I was teaching at, in Oklahoma, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, near his own hometown, he was born in Oklahoma. He was born in an all black town, no white people, no white people at all, where he where he grew up. And but his father worked in Tulsa as a lawyer. And in 1921, his father's law offices, as well as the whole of what was called Black Wall Street, this area of black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was all burned to the ground. People were run out of the black people were run out of the city all over a lie about some black man having attempted to rape a white woman. When the thing was he had gotten on the elevator, and it was a little bit of jar, and he stumbled into a white woman on an elevator, but that became a rape charge. And he was arrested, he was put in jail, and black people were in Tulsa were just like, we're not letting them kill this man, they're not going to lynch this man. And so they, they armed up, and they let it be known that they were planning to go to the jail and, and break this guy out if he was not released, because this was ridiculous. And that what led to the whites then rioting and, and, and running, trying to run all the blacks out of out of Tulsa. Well, he being there, his own father losing everything in that in later years, when an attorney at a law professor at Harvard, Charles Ogletree, a friend of mine, we both taught at University of Alabama, Al Brophy, law professor. When all of these and others got involved in bringing the state of Oklahoma and Tulsa up on for reparations, because there were still living descendants of that tragedy of 1921, he finally got on board. Because part of his thing was, well, if they're in that case, there were still living descendants. And he started changing his tune and started before he, he was dying, beginning to think about the whole reparations issue in broader and more meaningful ways through his own experience of what happened to his father. So, and his family and how they were, they were almost ruined by that, by that tragedy. So, you know, it before even talking about the, the resistance beyond African Americans, we have to look at the resistance amongst us African Americans. And partly for me as an educator, I like to think it's an educational problem. As we explain more, as we look at, as you say, other cases of where there have been reparations, even where there are no living descendants, but also where there are living descendants in the case of Jewish people after World War II, in the case of the, the internment of Japanese American citizens in World War II, in the case of Native Americans. There are Indian nations that, that have been paid reparations by the U.S. government. And as we begin to study all of these kinds of instances around the world, as we look at how Haiti, after it gained its independence from France, the French demanded reparations from Haiti for all of the enslaved Africans that constituted property for them that they had to be repaid. Otherwise they would continue to be at war with, with the Haitian people. So, when we look at all of these instances and, and really begin to analyze it, I think that opposition within and among African Americans has come down. And I don't know what the polling is, what the most recent polling is, but I think a majority of African Americans are positive about the, the conversation now, on reparations. And there was, I mean, there was a very recent polling done, data for progress among the sort of the general U.S. population, but they found that only 26 percent of the population supported reparations as, as a whole of the United States supported reparations for slavery. And you know, some of the arguments against paying reparations is, you know, includes things like, well, who will be paid? Does everybody get the same amount? Who will be, who's, you know, who needs to pay for, for reparations and everything? So, how would you respond to those concerns that people have around reparations payment? I think it is a problem that needs to bring together a lot of some of the people who really look at this carefully, who can look at it from a standpoint of what would be very meaningful ways, both on an individual level as well as a group level for, for reparations. My friend and my mentor Amari Obadele, one of his proposals when he was alive, was of reparations that, was of a reparations commission that would have process both individual checks, if you will, individual payments, but also have some of this that could be used to address group issues and group concerns of African American people, which they themselves would be empowered to, to vote on and to study and to vote on what kinds of things as a group, for example, how do we remember our history? How do we remember our, our ancestors that were victimized and, and direct proper monuments and proper ways in, of being able to study and educate about our past? You know, there's, museums now here and there, but, but what about a fund? What about part of the reparations money would, would constitute an endowment that could support those kinds of initiatives to better educate and to provide historical markers and to provide things? That's just one example. So there could be ways in which this commission could look at both ways as a group, certain kinds of things for the entire group of African Americans that would benefit, but then also how to process individual payments. My former teacher when I was an undergrad has put a lot of his intellectual energy on this as an economist and as a thinker, William Darity, Sandy Darity has looked at a lot of this and I think some of his ideas, Richard America, another, actually black economists have been on this project for, for many, many years looking at what the numbers might look at, how it could be paid out. But so from Richard America all the way to Julianne Malvaux and Sandy Darity, I would say we've got great minds that can help us figure this out. Absolutely. And so, and not, I mean, just in, you know, the form of direct cash payments, but institutional and other ways of being able to sort of address that historical injustice. So Professor Shabazz, we've talked about how the federal government has apologized and paid reparations for two different communities. What we've recently seen in, you know, recent years is cities and states sort of taking up this initiative in their own communities. So for instance, in 2015, the Chicago City Council paid about $5.5 million to more than a hundred black men that the Chicago police had tortured during a certain period of time in the late 1990s or 1980s. And they knew who those individuals were, who were victims of that torture and were able to pay them reparations. And the mayor at that time, actually Mayor Rahm Emanuel, had also, right, he was going, had mandated that public schools teach about that story of police brutality within their classrooms. Do you feel like that is an effective route going forward, given what we have at the federal level right now? Do you feel like that's a more practical way of being able to address community concerns? So I think the, again, remembering reparations at its root is about repair. And how do we repair communities? How do we repair individuals that have been wrong, descendants that have been wrong? How do we repair the whole country, the whole world? And in that regards, I think then, yes, we can see efforts at every, at every level, at local levels, at state levels, you know, also not just in the public sector, but even the private sector. Some of the very interesting work that's been going on, attorneys have been looking at corporations that existed during the time of enslavement that benefited from, made profits off of slavery that are still in operation today. How do those corporations want to repair their relationships within the community in terms of having started on the basis of human trafficking and having started on the basis of the enslavement of human beings? Don't you want to do better some of these insurance companies out there? So I think that at every level to individual corporations, to churches, we've got a lot of churches around here that have been continuously operating, where some of the earliest ministers had human beings held as slaves. You know, what might they want to do about that? Bob Romer is one of our physicist turned historian who has done a lot of work on this area of the valley, from Deerfield to Amherst. And notably in his research are the, is evidence about the enslavement of African people here into the 1800s that went on. So where's our responsibility here to teach about that, to educate about that, to provide proper markers and to find ways to again repair the harm, the damage that was done. And so in terms of the Democratic presidential candidates who've been talking about this issue recently and have made it into a campaign issue, what do you think that is going to do in terms of giving this issue momentum? Do you think there's significance in what they're saying? And do you feel that some of the issues, some of the policies that they're suggesting are actually concrete proposals that are actually going to address some of the historical injustice and sort of repair inter-communal relations? Here's what I would say. Even right now, if every African American in the United States was a millionaire, it'd still be a just basis for reparations. I have the feeling that in the election on the Republican side, if Donald Trump is their nominee, that he will point to the low unemployment rates and this, that, and I quickly answer that by saying, well, you know, whatever the, however low the unemployment rate is under Trump, that's nothing. We had absolute 100% full employment under slavery, so what does a low unemployment rate really mean to this? And so again, even if all African Americans in this country were millionaires, none of them living below the poverty line, none of their children on free and reduced lunch, even if we were all doing wonderfully well in millionaires, there would be a legitimate basis for reparations. And again, it wouldn't necessarily have to be in the form of a check, or even if it was, if we were all millionaires, we could take that check and then donate it to a trust, to a trust that could do things like, again, educate about our history, that could do things like, you know, properly remember this tragedy such that we never let it happen again, such that we never engage in human trafficking again, such that we never wrongfully take people from another land and suppress their rights and force them to work for nothing. That's the real issue here, and I'd like to think that candidates on whatever side of the partisan divide would begin to grasp this and could talk to these issues in really meaningful ways. I don't expect much on the Republican side. It does look like maybe on the Democratic side, there will be some, that some of the candidates are stepping forward to really interrogate the issue and look deeply at this, because, you know, as the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have pointed out, we can really see the thread, the long journey that, and impact that slavery has had and continues to have in such a corrosive way on the lives of people in this country, and especially on African-Americans, straight to our current issues of mass incarceration, millions of people in prison like that. So I think we hopefully will have a more information, better debate of these issues in the upcoming election, but I don't hold out too much hope from that. I wish we could continue the conversation, Professor Shabazz, because we've run out of time, but thank you so much for your insights and expertise, and we really appreciate you being here. Until next time, this is your host, Mehlaqa Sundani.