Reparations for America’s Jim Crow Past

(originally posted on The BRC-REP)

The Reparations question, in terms of colonized African people within the United States, has seldom been discussed regarding the repressive institutions that replaced slavery’s formal dismantling, nor the viewpoint of slavery as a form of colonialism which merely assumed a different oppressive form after 1865.

 

Because almost all arguments for Reparations are connected with slavery, there is no benefit in rehashing points to those familiar with them, particularly when ample space exists to broaden the Reparations struggle. Anyone uneducated on slave reparations can find information from a large number of Black community sources, in forms oral, literary and electronic. Thus, I will depart from that perspective to begin the case for post-slavery Reparations.

 

Reparations has seldom been discussed for the period from 1865 to the end of the segregation era, itself a form of apartheid better known as Jim Crow, and an historical period from which the healing of culture and communities has been left to whim. Black people tend to apply the white view of history that this was a new historical period when, in fact, the status quo had not significantly changed.

 

Slavery is actually colonialism, as there is very little except geography and language to separate slavery in the US from colonialism in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia or Africa, Whereas, during the slavery period when Africans became the personal property of capitalists, lynching did not exist since it meant destroying the chattel of a capitalist who could press charges and recover damages via the law. So random violence against slaves rarely happened, since the slave meant many things to the master and those perpetuating hatred against Africans were usually disenfranchised whites.

 

This doesn’t imply that freed blacks did not suffer from the Black Codes and other repressive legislation, which carried over into the Jim Crow era.

 

Primarily, slaves produced wealth thru their labor. They were a thinking resource from whom the master cultivated many ideas and inventions. The slaves also had other value to the capitalists that historians do not typically recognize for fear of embarrassment or exposure that the belief in white superiority and African debasement was less than imperfect, it was absurd.

 

While white slavers waxed philosophical on the superiority of the European culture (capitalism) and the abject inferiority of the African, sometimes debasing blacks to the extreme that we were considered animals, these same slavers never hesitated to rape our women and sire children thru them. Do not forget, colonialism originated the doctrine of white racial purity, that is, the idea that white people cannot intermix with other “races” for fear that will eradicate white society. Which is true, because only Europeans — a subset of the Caucasian peoples — can maintain their “whiteness”, expressed thru a culture and ideology, which derives from their 500-year colonial domination over the World.

 

However, capitalism is a nationalistic, class-based system that is filled with the seeds of its own destruction. Its inherent contradictions form relationships based on deep-set antagonisms that can only tear society apart. The tension between slave and master, worker and boss, the community and the State, society and Imperialism, threaten to destroy capitalism at every level. Those who pay attention can say that Capitalism even threatens to destroy itself in its competition for cut-rate resources, including labor.

 

It was on a violent note when the US Civil War ended slavery in 1865 and was followed by Reconstruction, which for a brief historical interval restored rights to Africans. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 effectively ended Reconstruction. So it ran along these lines that following slavery’s end the lynching of black people became a cultural phenomenon within the white community. No longer having to answer to the law for random acts of violence, the savagery of white society expressed itself thru sensational crimes of near cannibalistic behavior against colonized Africans.

 

While the US government invaded Iraq under the pretense of bringing democracy to that country, black people have only been guaranteed democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to that, blacks briefly enjoyed democratic rule between 1865 and 1877, a period of a mere twelve years.  It is the right of all black people, nay, a duty, which everyone of us must enjoy, to let this society know, loud and clear, at every US holiday that we have not always tasted the fruits of democracy. Furthermore, our guaranteed right must be condescended to in the US Capitol and signed by the president every twenty years or so. This mocks our freedom and liberty as citizens of this country.  Therefore we demand Reparations because we have not been accepted as full citizens with every democratic right the US Constitution guarantees us.

 

We want Reparations for 88 years of Jim Crow racism. Eighty-eight years of racist lynchings, burning our homes and churches, bombing our businesses and communities, and wantonly murdering our family members, friends, and leaders. We want Reparations for those 88 years. 

 

Do you know that gerrymandering; the art of diluting black political power thru redrawing electoral districts was practiced thru out the South. White political leaders went to ridiculous lengths to divide and conquer the black community on a political level. Thru gerrymandering, entire black cities and towns and districts were completely and permanently disenfranchised. This was taxation without representation, because our tax dollars were used to keep us out of city hall.  Other practices such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause also effectively stopped our Constitutionally- guaranteed right of taxation thru representation. Even if gerrymandering did not exist, these measures were used exclusively against blacks and stopped us from even registering to vote. Lacking a voter’s registration card, nobody in our community was eligible to cast a ballot. 

 

Eighty-eight year of taxation without representation can be measured in the exact dollar amount that black people throughout America paid into the system and got exactly nothing in return except the word “nigger”. We want all that money back in today’s dollars, plus ten times that in punitive damages. If the Fed can take our tax money and bail out the bloodsucking banks, the US capitalist State can dig into its deep pockets and begin paying our Reparations right damn now!

 

Jim Crow whittled black districts down into ineffective political entities. During the early Sixties, Jim Crow swimming pools and movie theatres still existed in some of western Pennsylvania’ s little towns. Africans were forced into segregated housing, segregated neighborhoods, segregated jobs, segregated wages and benefits, and were buried in segregated cemeteries.  The losses on this side of the slate can also be measured in economics, property, political power, and the cost in human lives.  Whites prevented blacks from starting businesses; when we had developed successful businesses, we were taken over by racist whites. Whites exploited and persecuted and humiliated blacks with impunity. Obviously, Jim Crow did not just take place in Old Dixie.  Lynching took place in every state in the USA, tho it predominated in the South.

 

Whole neighborhoods and towns were eradicated by white mobs that descended upon black citizens like a swarm of demons. White citizens took pictures of themselves next to the burnt, mutilated corpses of black victims, sometimes with the genitalia or fingers or ears they severed as souvenirs of the crime.  Some of my close personal friends tell stories of relatives caught by lynch mobs and tormented to death. Many families who came north or went west did so to escape the daily persecution and hardship they endured down South.

 

In Mississippi and Louisiana, forced labor gangs (corvees) made of Africans were used to repair levees during heavy weather. Armed gangs of whites rode into black towns and rounded up as many black men as they could, transported them to the levees and then stranded them. By contrast, blacks were driven out of their homes so that whites could take over their property in Arkansas, Florida and Georgia. For those who want to make the argument that the direct descendants of the slaves are all dead, the survivors of Jim Crow still live. Jim Crow discriminated against my grandparents and my parents. It paid them unequal wages for their labor. It forced them into the lowest forms of labor.

 

Jim Crow drove my great grandfather out of his trucking business because it did not permit him to compete on a level playing field. Still he started his trucking business and built it to the point that Pittsburgh’s old airport was built with concrete hauled up some of Pennsylvania’ s crazy steep, long hills by his trucks. That feat alone helped put him out of business, grinding out the gears. What kind of financing does anybody think the government or the banks made available to a black man with nine kids?

 

Racism forced my family to accept segregated theatres, swim in Jim Crow pools, and hold reunions at apartheid parks and social halls. Colonialism is slavery, by any other name, pure and simple. The value these hard working people created has not disappeared. It has been transformed into wealth that reaches across the seas to exploit societies all over the world. Yet, we have a right to enjoy the fruits that our predecessors labored so painfully for, the dignity, which was denied them, and therefore denied to us.  In Sewickley, Pennsylvania, one of the richest little racist towns in America, blacks have worked as house servants for wealthy whites since the 1800s. The black Community Center and American Legion are still next door to the sewage plant. Meanwhile, rich kids play tennis at the Sewickley Academy, an ivy league prep school. Surely, this standard still stands for race/class relationships around the United States.

 

When a race-based system prevents you from voting, and elected officials look the other way as a person from your community gets robbed, raped, beaten or lynched, the social impact goes beyond just the person who directly suffered. So the black community deserves Reparations for more than just slavery.