The wounds left by segregation on the souls of black folk lie nearer the surface than those that slavery inflicted on blacks long dead. The U.S. government’s dereliction of duty during the Jim Crow era stands clear and shameful. An argument that the U.S. ought to pay reparations to blacks should leave slavery out of the picture and deal with more recent wrongs. But reparations advocates are too enthralled with Afrocentrism to trust living blacks’ actual memories.
After the end of the Civil War in 1865, while the U.S. Army still occupied the Southern states, the federal government tried to enforce the 13th Amendment–which ended slavery–and the 14th Amendment–which granted citizenship and its privileges to all those born or naturalized here. The efforts met with some early success: In the late 1860s and early 1870s, blacks voted in the South.
But these efforts were doomed because the white South would not consent to do penance. In 1869 the Supreme Court was asked to rule that the 14th Amendment required states to abide by the Bill of Rights. The court allowed that a reasonable person might think the 14th Amendment said that, it certainly looked like it said that, but if it did say that, it would mean that “the whole theory of the relations of the state and federal governments” would have to be altered. It would require changes in states’ attitudes toward their citizens, especially the new black ones, that were “so serious, so far-reaching and pervading” that the court couldn’t contemplate them.
This lack of imagination spread from the high court through the other branches of government, which increasingly despaired of bringing white Southerners to heel. In the early 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant used the Army to crush the Ku Klux Klan. But as scandals engulfed his administration, even the hero of the Civil War could do little to keep the South in line. The last straw was the contested election of 1876, in which the voters of Florida returned two slates of electors for president. In desperation for a quick solution, the North and South struck a deal: Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio would be president, and the Army would withdraw from the South.
Shortly thereafter, Southern states began passing segregation ordinances, and white Southerners began lynching blacks who defied the new racial order. In the spirit of 1876, the North left the South alone. In 1896, the Supreme Court approved the new American apartheid by ruling that blacks could have “separate but equal” accommodations.
Separate they were, equal they were not, but the U.S. government turned a blind eye. White Southerners disfranchised blacks by as many methods as they could–inventing the poll tax, the literacy test and the grandfather clause (you could vote if your grandfather could)–to keep blacks from the ballot boxes.
The tide of white supremacy did not turn until 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce the Supreme Court’s belated discovery that “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal.” Even then, the White House dragged its feet on every civil rights issue until black and white activists forced its hand. Not until Lyndon Johnson became president did the government move seriously to enforce the laws that made blacks equal citizens.
The U.S. government’s unwillingness to enforce its own laws for nearly a century remains a shocking failure of U.S. democracy, and Washington’s collusion in perpetrating an unconstitutional apartheid falls squarely under the “crimes against humanity” provisions of international law.
The age of segregation lies well within the living memory of most of the U.S. population, and its immediate victims still suffer the real consequences of an inability to get a good education or good jobs.
Why, then, have reparations advocates focused on the much weaker case of slavery? Slavery, unlike Jim Crow, initially was in keeping with the laws and customs of five continents. The U.S. government preserved it but ultimately undertook a costly war to end it. Slavery’s direct victims died long ago.
The only thing going for slavery as a basis for reparations is that it feeds the Afrocentric therapeutic mythology of black identity. For Afrocentrists slavery has a special place as the tragedy that separated blacks from their cultural past. Yet any of us who remember Jim Crow and its corollary of casual violence toward blacks knows that the U.S. government has much more to answer for in recent crimes.
Demanding reparations for slavery may suit Afrocentric preferences, but government policy to repair the damage done by segregation would do far more for blacks today.