Summary
The Contract Buyers League were not the first Black people in America to request reparations—not by a long shot. In 1793, Belinda Royall, a woman who was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery from what is now Ghana, asked the state of Massachusetts to grant her an allowance out of the estate of her former slaveowner, a Loyalist who had fled the US in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. She was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, in one of the earliest successful reparation attempts.
The idea that America owes Black people reparations for slavery is also not new. In 1769, Quaker John Woolman wrote about how there is a “heavy account” laid against America because of the slavery, and in the late 18th century, reparations policies were both considered and enacted, particularly by Quaker communities in New York, New England, and Baltimore. Others like Edward Coles and John Randolph gave their former slaves land either upon inheriting them (Coles) or upon their passing (Randolph).
Fast forward to the 20th century, and we see that multiple people have become involved in the fight for reparations, from Confederate veterans to Black activists to the NAACP to Harvard professors. But the response from the country has remained the same: a firm no. The idea is that Black people were freed, so what do they have to complain about? But as we can clearly see, post-emancipation, Black people were not suddenly fine: discrimination, segregation, and methods of outright terror prevented the Black American community from accessing the same privileges as their white counterparts. While we as a society have made a commitment to move forward, the damage is still done—but some remain confused that the damage doesn’t go away with a simple apology.
One could argue that the resistance to reparations has been based on logistics—how could you hope to pay people back for centuries of injustice? But this doesn’t make sense in light of the fact that despite trying for over 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. has never been able to pass HR 40, which would establish a committee to study reparations and possible solutions—in fact, the bill has never even made it to the House floor. This would suggest that the problem is much deeper than just logistics.
It doesn’t work to claim the past only partially. Coates points out that we were not there when George Washington crossed the Delaware River or when Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into World War I, but these events are important to Americans nevertheless. If Jefferson and Washington’s heroic deeds matter, so too, must their histories with slavery. But instead, America seems to be attached to the idea that the debt owed as a result of centuries of white dominance can be erased if we simply look away.
Analysis
Learning about the history of reparations helps us to understand that asking for them is not a modern-day concept or a concept that has even always been rejected. Stories like Belinda Royall's, which are from as early as the late 19th century, demonstrate how America has been reckoning with the costs of slavery from a legal perspective for a long time. Royall's success points to the fact that even before slavery was abolished, America had a sense that slaves were owed something in payment for years of enslavement. Protests that economic reparations are impractical or have no precedent become a lot less convincing when viewed in the context of stories like these, where economic reparations were directly given.
That being said, the majority of reparations slaves received came from individual decisions rather than government mandates. Often people who felt that owning slaves was an injustice and/or regretted their ownership of slaves made restitutions themselves, while still acknowledging that American society as a whole had to do something. The diversity of the people involved in reparations over the years shows that instead of being new and restricted to a small, radical population, the idea of reparations is something has long been on the radar of different parts of the American consciousness.
Coates' demonstration that logistics is not currently the issue when it comes to reparations makes sense in this context. The American public is eager to embrace only partial views of the country's history, views that incorporate Jefferson and Washington's heroism, but not their mistakes. Even the study of reparations is a threat to this American idealist past—committing to thinking about and working through the idea of it would mean acknowledging America's deep history with slavery and how that history affects us even today, instead of relegating slavery to the distant and unimaginable past.
