The Fight for Reparations

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac DeVer.

In a few weeks here in Washington, fireworks will go off behind the Lincoln Memorial.

The president, for the first time, will give a speech.

And he'll probably use the words independence and freedom a lot.

But there's another national celebration of freedom, one just before the 4th of July.

Earlier this week, America observed June the 19th, Juneteenth, a day celebrating the belated end of slavery in Texas, but which has taken on a bigger national significance.

And on this year's Juneteenth, the House of Representatives did something it hadn't in over a decade, hold a hearing on reparations.

My colleague, staff writer Van Newkirk, was there for that hearing, and he's here with me today.

Hi, Van.

Hey.

So let's start with this.

What is Juneteenth?

Why is this a thing that we have on the calendar?

I think some people know what it is.

Maybe some people have heard of the Ralph Ellison book,

but a lot of people don't know what it is.

Yeah.

So Juneteenth, as it's celebrated today, is kind of a shorthand holiday that represents all of the different Black Emancipation Day holidays celebrating the end of slavery.

It was first celebrated in Texas.

Texas was the farthest frontier of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

And so news of emancipation after the war reached Galveston, like one of the last places was Galveston.

So it's not a celebration of when slavery was officially ended, but when the very last enslaved people in the United States thought they were enslaved.

Right.

The Emancipation Proclamation is January 1st, 1863.

That ends slavery in the battleground states.

Right.

It makes the enslaved folks in those states contraband, for lack of a better term.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

But of course, there are two more years of the war.

And as you said, it takes some time then for the news of the war ending and the South losing to get to Galveston.

And that's how we get to Juneteenth.

What

happens in those early years in celebrating the end of slavery?

So.

Early on, of course, you know, you had formerly enslaved folks, this very first generation, they had lots and lots of parades celebrating the end of slavery.

It was a pretty good thing.

They liked to celebrate it.

And what was the reaction like among the Southerners who had lost the war, this former slave owners watching those parades?

What was happening with that?

You know, interestingly enough, there wasn't a whole lot of, I think, vitriol against these celebrations until the phase of redemption really got underway.

And that doesn't take place until a couple years after the war, right?

Maybe even a decade.

Right.

That's the backlash that leads to Reconstruction.

Right.

But in the beginning,

lots of these celebrations were done with some of the local politicians, some of the white folks.

There were

collaborations between most of these folks were carpetbaggers, but between some of the Republican white people and the black folks who were going out and doing the parades.

I don't know if it was a super controversial holiday in the beginning.

It began to be more and more controversial as it became clear that Southern whites saw any celebration of victory over the Confederacy as a threat to the Confederacy rising again.

Which they were still hoping for.

Right.

When they did it in less of a martial way, but redemption, which overthrew Reconstruction, was Southern whites throwing off Northern imposed government, getting rid of the Union Army, and also stamping out all of the kind of positive celebrations of the Union victory in the Civil War.

And one of the targets targets of stamping that out was not just Juneteenth, but all the different Jubilees, Emancipation Day parades,

and turning black communities more and more into sharecropping and some other forms of peonage, they actually killed the ability of those folks to have free time to celebrate.

So those celebrations go kind of dormant in lots of areas.

And for most of the 20th century, it's not something that's really happening.

Right.

Was it happening at all?

Yeah.

So there are people, I think every single year there have been jubilees.

There's always been an Emancipation Day celebrated around D.C.

in some communities, even in Texas.

Of course, people still celebrated Juneteenth around Galveston year after year, but it was more of a family heirloom holiday in lots of places than a big, even citywide celebration.

What brought it back to the fore was a civil rights movement.

Right, and that's Martin Luther King holds a celebration on the 100th anniversary, right?

Right.

And what happens as this intersects with Martin Luther King and his recovery of Juneteenth as a major day on the calendar?

So activists during the civil rights movement had celebrated Juneteenth, had also promoted the celebration of local Emancipation Days as part of reclaiming the fight against the lost cause mythology that permeated the South.

But the largest Juneteenth national holiday celebration celebration up until maybe even recent times was in 1968, a couple months after Martin Luther King Jr.

was assassinated.

During the Poor People's Campaign, which came to D.C.

to demand the package of reforms that he was working on when he died, Coretta Scott King, Ralph David Abernathy,

they dismantled that protest effort that has been on the national mall for weeks.

And

kind of as a, I don't want to say a celebration per se, it was a celebration of Juneteenth, but also a sorrowful type of thing.

It was you've noted you write an essay about Juneteenth the last couple of years, including one this year.

I encourage everybody to read the latest one and go back and read the others if you haven't.

But you've talked about this as a mix of sorrow and jubilation in those essays.

Yeah, and that's true to the, I think, original purpose of that holiday.

But in 1968, obviously they were mourning the death of Dr.

King, but also mourning what seemed to be what most historians mark as the end of the civil rights movement.

Aaron Ross Powell,

and

then how do things go forward?

Juneteenth is forgotten about or it's not?

Aaron Ross Powell, it is, it doesn't hit a national high the way it did in 1968 for several years.

What happens is Juneteenth and other regional celebrations become rolled into some of the more black nationalist, black radical celebrities of black freedom over the next couple years.

It resurges in Texas especially and across the South and becomes more and more of a composite holiday of all the different emancipation holidays, becomes more and more, aside from Emancipation Day in D.C., the signature celebration of the end of slavery.

And I think it's really not until the 90s,

when around the time of the Million Man March, when we have Juneteenth again becomes a big national name celebration.

And of course, that is an upswing that has continued to the present day.

I'm going to read a little bit from your essay from this year.

For decades, the successes of the civil rights movement elevated the jubilation, but in recent years, the tenor of Juneteenth has changed.

Black Americans see more clearly just how deep white supremacy rests in the country's bones.

The sorrow now predominates, and with it comes an urgency to hold power to account and to remember who and what is owed.

I like that.

You should meet that guy.

He's a good writer.

So it changes even more in the last few years, is your argument here.

Right.

I think as Juneteenth becomes more and more important, not just to the national black community, but to the national political discourse, and some of that's through Obama.

He becomes one of the first presidents to have a national recognition of Juneteenth.

And that catapults it to also having a deeper significance

with things like Black Lives Matter, with the growing,

I think, political consciousness among certain pieces of the black community that are rejecting the consensus that has been built since the civil rights movement that we are in a time of progress, the expectation of continued progress year over year.

There's been a reversal of that expectation since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement.

And

the conversations we are having today are a result of

really the end of that momentum, and it's probably symbolized best by the presidency of Donald Trump.

Aaron Ross Powell, and that brings us to what happened this week with the reparations hearing on Juneteenth, specifically on Juneteenth.

That wasn't just a coincidence, right?

What

happened

as

that

goes forward into the conversation?

It started moving with an essay in The Atlantic a couple of years ago by Tanahase Coates, and it's taken on much more significance.

He wasn't the only person who'd ever talked about it, but it helped galvanize a lot of the attention to it.

He testified at that hearing the other day.

Is that something that now is mainstream, you think, in the conversation?

Yeah, I think it is mainstream now.

Obviously,

being in that room, being on the hill, seeing the crowds and seeing the kind of buzz even even outside of the judiciary's hearing room there indicates that there is some national significance to this conversation.

Reparations has a really fascinating history.

You see it in, obviously, 2014 with that essay.

You see it become a blip again in 2016 when Bernie Sanders is asked about reparations and says he doesn't like it and there comes a bit of a dust up with Tanahasi Coates himself.

The Sanders argument, to be clear, is that

he believes that there are different structural changes that need to happen.

And so he's not -

it's not out of some hatred toward black people.

It is that it doesn't fit into his theory of how the economy needs to work and what needs to happen.

But that is not the way that has been received by a lot of people, it should be noted.

Right.

That's true.

And I think the tenor of that conversation reflected the fact that reparations was not yet a national partisan debate.

It was a debate among the left wing of the Democratic Party about this still kind of fringe program,

and it reflected only the ideological differences within that group where one group thinks that the racial wealth gap, the echoes of slavery and Jim Crow can be solved through more universal programs, and one group believes that they have to be targeted racially

as the

segregation was.

Those arguments do not reflect the larger arguments that we are having today over reparations.

And that's really how you can trace how big the issue has become.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And this is all happening in the backdrop, not just of the Trump presidency and what that has raised up, but something that predates the Trump presidency, the Shelby decision of the Supreme Court that cut away at the Voting Rights Act.

This is what Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, had to say about reparations.

He was speaking just before the hearing, but he was addressing the topic.

This is what he had to say earlier this week.

Yeah, I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea.

We've

tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation.

We've elected an African-American president.

I think we're always a work in progress in this country,

but

no one currently alive was responsible for that.

What do you make of that, Van?

Mitch McConnell is making an argument that actually has lost a lot of currency over the past couple years, especially in the face of work like the case for reparations.

What Tanahasse does

really well in that piece is that he grounds it not in talking about slaves at all really.

He talks about housing discrimination in Chicago.

He is making

not just a case for reparations as a concept, but the case that we should consider the last 100 years of history as well as everything since enslavement as part of two distinct but not

separate regimes of racial hierarchy and theft in the United States.

And so his case has become what has a not just his case alone, but his case has been part of

the restructuring of the reparations debate today to include Jim Crow on, to talk about housing discrimination that's happened even since 1965, to talk about voting rights

discrimination and then dispossession and disenfranchisement that has happened several times over the past century, to roll all that into a larger case, reparations, not just for slavery, which I think made

the title of the hearing was Reparations for Slavery, which was kind of unfortunate, because the conversation today is not just about slavery.

So it's contra McConnell, not just about something that happened 150 years ago.

That was a long time ago.

But

lots of living people could not vote and were only adults when they were able to vote for the first time.

Aaron Powell, you come at this with

a personal experience in your family.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I'm a black guy from North Carolina.

My grandmother was, my father was born in 1964.

So my grandmother could not legally vote in North Carolina when my father was born.

And that is the case for all of the older black folks that I grew up with.

None of them

were now people did go vote, and lots of people did it as a bit of resistance who were part of different civil rights movements.

But they all lived in a regime that illegally and unconstitutionally took away their guaranteed right to vote in lots of cases.

And those folks are not like, you know,

don't have a foot in the grave.

This is my grandmother.

Did she talk about that still?

Yeah, of course.

It's my grandmother.

I have great-grandparents still alive, right?

And there are people who I know who

were alive

when the very last survivor of the Greenwood massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I think, passed away last year.

Like, that's not, this is not interesting.

What does that mean for them beyond just they didn't get to vote?

When you talk to your grandmother or your great-grandparents about that, what does that mean for them?

It's interesting seeing how they process it because you would think there would be more outward manifestation of trauma or being upset.

Like, my other grandmother, my mother's mother, lived most of her early adult life under James Eastland's regime in Mississippi.

They don't talk about it necessarily with the kind of stress that the actual

what we know happened would do to a person.

I think there's a lot of internalization, a lot of

this is how we had to live.

This is how we had to cope.

And you can see the armor they've built up over the years.

It's never really gone away.

They don't like to talk about it a whole lot.

You know,

my folks love talking about some of the good things that happened in the 60s, but when you really start digging into the civil rights,

not just the civil rights movement, but Jim Crow itself, you know,

people remember it, but don't like to get into it.

We're going to take a break for a moment.

When we come back, we're going to go further into the argument for reparations and the state of the fight.

Hey there, I'm Claudina Bade, and I lead the audio team here at The Atlantic.

I think a lot about what makes great audio journalism.

It commands your attention, but isn't noisy.

It brings you closer to the subject, but leaves room for you to make up your own mind.

And when you hear someone tell their story in their own voice, you understand it in a deeper way.

When you subscribe to The Atlantic, you'll be supporting this kind of journalism.

You'll also enjoy new benefits just for Atlantic subscribers on Apple podcasts.

Think ad-free episodes of our shows and subscriber-only audio articles.

To join us, go to theatlantic.com/slash listener.

That's theatlantic.com/slash listener.

If you're already a subscriber, thanks.

You can head to the Atlantic's channel page on Apple Podcasts and start listening right now.

So, this June 19th, there was a hearing on reparations.

The Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties will come to order.

Thank the officers for

the case.

Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee, the Texas congresswoman who wrote the bill under discussion, is questioning Tanahasi Coates, and she reads him a recent newspaper article.

This is Kansas City.

Downtown is booming, but in the shadows of the city's thriving business and entertainment district are languishing eastside neighborhoods pocked with boarded-up homes, overgrown trash-strewn lots.

The shiny calfs and storefronts are almost non-existent, and residents like the Tanya Bowman felt forgotten.

I love downtown and I'd love to see it grow too, but you've got to be real, says Ms.

Bowman, who lives in the predominantly black east side.

It's like neglect.

We get the

leftovers.

Can you just bring that all together for us in what you have ascertained about the Commission, racism, and where we are today?

Sure.

You know, I think the consistent point from the comments that you just made, an article you just read from, stretching all the way back to the period of enslavement in in this country is the idea of theft.

Enslavement is theft.

250 years black people had the fruits of their labor stolen from them.

We don't often think about Jim Crow and the era of segregation as theft, but it's theft too.

If I agree to pay taxes, if I agree to fealty to a government, and you give me a different level of resources out of that tax pool, if you've given me a different level of protection, you have effectively stolen from me.

If you deny my my ability to vote and to participate in the political process to decide how those resources are used, you have effectively stolen from me.

And so

reparations, when people like Mitch McConnell talk about them, take the form of repayments for the crimes of chattel slavery, of slaveholders, and the things they did to the people they held in bondage.

But as we were talking about, the argument being made in the hearing room was not about those crimes.

It was an economic case.

So you were there.

How was that argument being made?

And what are the numbers that we're talking about here?

Included in Tatahasi's testimony, he actually gave a bit of

the estimations of the value of enslaved people in the United States at the moment of emancipation.

And he cites it, I think it's larger than pretty much any other sector in the United States economy at that time.

That

is the foundation for what he talks about in the case of reparations, where he discusses how billions, perhaps trillions, have been taken away from black folks just through residential or housing discrimination or real estate discrimination in the U.S.

alone.

You have a recent study on Chicago on contract lending or buying, which he talks about at length in that article,

how that phenomenon alone, and that's not even including all of the different mechanisms of housing discrimination in Chicago, that piece of it alone cost black families between $2 and $3 billion over just a 20, I think, year time span.

And that's just Chicago.

That's just this one lever.

If you really roll out exactly all of the economic effects of Jim Crow, all of the effects of how agricultural land was stolen from black folks, how different other types of land was stolen, how black labor was underpaid, how housing discrimination offset parts of the GI bill, and how black folks were carved out of the New Deal.

You're talking a tally that definitely runs into the trillions.

And that's trillions of dollars that were poured into the economy on one side of this ledger, into building the white middle class, that were either denied to black communities or taken directly from them.

That's what Coates calls the dilemma of inheritance, right?

Right.

And that's American law.

It's common law is

if you inherit something that has been ill-gotten in lots of times, in lots of cases, it becomes legitimate.

Were there conversations about reparations closer to the end of the Civil War?

This is something, McConnell's point, that nobody who was alive then, even though we're seeing that there is a distinction between what he's talking about and what this idea of reparations now would be about.

But closer to the end of the Civil War, there was the 40 acres Acres and a Mule.

There was Sherman giving land to the people who were in the areas that he had freed.

Yeah.

So South Carolina,

an entire town in the South Carolina Sea Islands, was given to black folks who had once lived there and been the property there by General Sherman and ended up being taken away and given back to the owners.

And that's where Hiltonet is now.

That is the entire story across the South.

Lots of people think of 40 Acres and a Mule as a kind of

almost mythology in lots of cases, but no, there were actual promises made by the United States government for land, for a guarantee of labor and education for black folks.

It was supposed to be executed by the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Freedmen's Bureau, in some cases, did provide that land.

And what happened since then is most of what was given and

clearly wasn't enough, and it clearly wasn't anything close to a universal land grant has been taken back.

The Freedmen's Bureau was dissolved and Reconstruction was ended officially in 1876.

And since then, there has been no follow through on that official promise from the United States government that was enforced by the Union Army to actually provide any type of restitution.

It makes me think of I've been to a plantation in South Carolina, a former plantation.

The home is still there, a beautiful home, that the family lived in long after the Civil War.

They had the bounty of what came before the Civil War, that of course was held up by the slave labor that was providing the work that made that money.

We need to have this conversation as part of the ongoing reparations debate because what you describe is exactly why that promise of land was so important.

The reason why land, especially in the South, was so critical for the enslaved folks, and Du Bois talks about it as a quote-unquote land hunger is number one they were most of the muscle that made that land productive that made it profitable and number two once you make land profitable and productive it's a wealth generating asset in perpetuity almost until you run it dry and that's uh what they were hoping for was not checks uh and checks are important and actual direct financial restitution was always part of this debate but what really moved those folks folks was the chance to have a piece of productive land they could give their children, they could have in their family forever, that would always make it so at the very least they could eat.

The bill that's being debated would create a commission to study reparations.

So, even if it passed,

which is

going to take some time if it's going to happen, it's not like we're going to be moving towards reparations anytime soon, even if we do.

But what was the mood in the room like?

It seems like this was

maybe somewhat of a breaking point tipping point in in this tale yeah so I've always viewed HR 40 as not just a

potential momentum step for reparations it does set the stage for a commission I also viewed it as a way to kind of

make it plain what exactly the resistance to reparations as an idea was.

If you can make a bill that only calls for a commission for how to do the thing and doesn't set aside any actual funds for giving reparations out and could very well conclude that reparations are not necessary, that's within the mandate of that commission.

If you make that bill and people still push back against it, what are they really pushing back against?

It's not just the mechanics of reparations, it's something deeper.

I actually believe this hearing was one of the first times when the debate between that something deeper and the more rigorous economic debates, the moral debates, the religious debates about the necessity of reparations really came into a clash in the public sphere.

Obviously, you had McConnell's comments beforehand, which were not just a rejection of the

proposed plans for reparations, but the very idea of restitution itself.

And you had that placed against through Tanahasi Coates' testimony, through Julianne Malveaux's testimony,

a very firmly grounded economic case that not only are reparations necessary, but you have to consider cash benefits.

So, this is one of the most sophisticated arguments that has really happened in the United States over reparations since you mentioned the end of the Civil War.

We haven't had this type of conversation since then.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it has entered the political sphere.

Corey Booker, senator from New Jersey, presidential candidate, was one of the people who testified.

We mentioned earlier that Bernie Sanders is opposed to reparations, still opposed to reparations.

Other people in the field have spoken out in favor of reparations.

What

does this do, do you think, in the Democratic primary process?

And what does it do as we get through that Democratic primary process, which will happen?

At some point, there will be a Democratic nominee.

It's my job to cover that.

I've got at least

probably the better part of a year before we figure out who the nominee is.

But at some point, someone will emerge from that process and be up against Donald Trump.

What is the effect of this entering the political conversation?

So obviously this hearing, yes, it was on Juneteenth, but it's also in a big inflection point as we're talking about the Democratic campaigns in South Carolina, where they will have to win the black electorate, right?

Jim Clyburn's famous fish fry is tonight, it's Friday.

And I'm on my way there, actually.

Wow.

Well, please enjoy the whiting for me.

This is a time when the racial wealth gap, yes, has become a litmus test issue for Democrats.

That's not just because they decided they want to start talking about race.

It's because it's become clearer and clearer that in order to build an Obama coalition, they have to activate black votes.

And those black votes are in some ways easier and harder to come by in 2020 than they have been before.

Obviously, you have the overall global trend of black turnout increasing from year to year, ever since the civil rights movement, which peaked with Obama's years.

But you have an intra-year midterm turnout that's been declining.

You've got black voters who are, I think, on the one hand, more and more lined up against Donald Trump.

You know, I think it's like 92% oppose him, 5% have nothing to say.

And those are the recent polls show almost no support for Donald Trump.

But But they are also, on the other hand, more and more skeptical of Democratic candidates and also pushing for more explicit racial reforms.

You have a plurality now of black voters who support reparations, for example.

And

those currents, I think, are forcing Democratic candidates to meet those black voters where they are.

Not to talk about reparations, but other plans for closing the racial wealth gap, for reducing racial disparities and criminal justice.

Those are going to be the things that are going to win a candidate, South Carolina.

You see Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren just this week putting out plans about the criminal justice system and what to do about prisons.

And as you say, there is this fish fry and then the South Carolina Democratic Convention, 22 candidates landing there over the weekend.

That is going to be happening with the backdrop of the comments from Joe Biden this week that have caused a lot of questions to be raised about him and his record and things that I've written about with that.

And also, it should be said, Pete Buttajudge, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who has been facing a situation back home this week where a police officer, a white police officer, shot and killed a black man who was holding a knife.

And he has been struggling with how to deal with the question of race relations in his city, which has been an issue for a long time in South Bend and now is obviously under a much bigger spotlight because of his surging presidential candidacy.

You have written essays for the last couple of years on Juneteenth.

You wrote one this year.

What do you want to be writing about on Juneteenth, 2020?

That's a tough one.

Usually I'd sit back and take stock of what exactly is happening and try to base it on that.

But

I don't know if it's what I want to be talking about, but I believe

what it's probable I will be writing about is

Juneteenth is always two days before the summer solstice, always two days before the beginning of summer.

And if I'm looking at some of the trends at the beginning of this summer, in 2019, I do think there are going to be some pretty pivotal moments in the racial discourse in this country.

You have violent protests against police brutality in Memphis, Tennessee, right now that I think are going to be paradigm shifting in a way.

You have a...

Trump has not actually started revving up the campaign muscles yet, but he's going to be deep

into his

appeal to his base in June 2020.

You're going to have

real Supreme Court movement on some of the biggest racial justice issues and voting rights issues between now and then.

I think what I'll be writing about on Juneteenth, 2020 is

the 2020 election is going to be a watershed for the racial trajectory of this country, one way or the other.

Possibly even with another black nominee, if If Kamala Harris or Corey Booker wins the nomination, we will probably know by next Juneteenth if one of them is the nominee or if one of them is a runner-up or however it may play out.

Yeah, and you also have potential interests within the race or as vice president candidates like a Stacey Abrams who could change the discourse of American politics.

Those are going to be all the currents I'll probably have to be braiding together next Juneteenth.

It's going to be difficult, but yeah, I think it'll also probably be the biggest Juneteenth celebration in the United States.

So you've got about 360 days to get it together, so start working, Van.

That's about how long it takes me to write, so it's fine.

All right, that'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by John Baptiste.

You can find show notes and past episodes at theatlantic.com slash radio.

If you like the show, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Thanks for listening.

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

Sort of.

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and subject to availability, light-inclusive packages are at all protected.