Jim Crow did serious damage to black Americans. It deprived them of quality education, the right to vote and carry out civic duties (like serving on juries), and fair treatment by law enforcement. During Jim Crow it was perfectly legal to pay black people significantly less than their white counterparts, not to mention discriminating against them in hiring and promotion. The inequity reasonates even today. If you’re an elderly black person drawing a SS pension, you’re probably getting paid less than the white guys you worked alongside with. That has to sting.
Local governments turned a blind eye when black people were terrorized in their homes by the KKK and racist vigilantes. In one memorable case, they enabled the terrorism. They pretended that black schools received the same funding as white schools and crafted covenants to keep blacks in the ghetto. Jim Crow meant constant deprivation of civil rights and second-class citizenship. It was a horrible time.
I’ve always believed the pro-reparation people should focus on the Jim Crow era since 1)many of the descendants of Jim Crow are still alive and 2)many of the excuses trumped out against slavery reparations cannot be used. Jim Crow did not happen all that long ago (my parents were alive during that period). Many of the people who enforced Jim Crow are still alive. Jim Crow laws were blatantly unconstitutional. And for individuals, documentation can be provided to establish financial harm.
I’m not delusional to believe it will ever happen on a large scale, but I don’t think all the guffaws in this thread are warranted. The interned Japanese didn’t even have to establish “financial harm” to receive compensation. The case of Tulsa establishes further legal precedence for reparations, at the local level. When people stand up for their rights, they can get the justice they deserve. Too bad they often come up against a brick wall.
We have had decades of reparations in the form of minority scholarships, affirmative action and other social programs attempting to level the field. While I agree that it would be great if everyone who suffered institutionalized and systemic injustice could get money (and perhaps their choice of a kitten or dinner at Red Lobster every Tuesday), we are as a nation running on fumes and just barely: normal operating expenses, billions per week for a war, almost a trillion dollars in bailouts and counting- it simply can’t be done, period, end of statement.
Plus, as mentioned, should only old white people in states where Jim Crow laws were enforced have to pay the taxes for the reparations? What about white people who can prove they opposed Jim Crow? Should the descendants of middle class & wealthy blacks from the Jim Crow era [and they did exist] be excluded, or the black people who lived in a small town in Vermont and never really encountered it? Of course not- it’s impossible to gerrymander taxes, and besides most of the white people with any power in the Jim Crow era who are still alive [which is the minority] are too old to be in the work force and live mostly on pensions. (John Patterson, governor of Alabama during integration, still occasionally works as a freelance arbitrator- he’s 87- but he’s far more exception than rule.)
Since it’s impossible to gerrymander taxes then you’re going to be taking taxes from legal immigrants who weren’t even here in 2000, let alone 1950, from black millionaires like Barack Obama/Berry Gordy/etc. who overcame systemic racism, and from people of all shades and creeds just getting by (gee, that’ll do wonders for race relations) and others who may well can afford it but had nothing to do with it.
Then there’s the precedent: were you openly gay before Lawrence v. Texas? We owe you some money for the aggravation we caused by illegalizing your lifestyle. Epileptics and retarded people— we used to call you mentally deranged and idiots on the Census, here’s a check.
We acknowledge our past injustices and more importantly we’ve reversed the legislation of past times and endeavored to overcome it. I think this is enough. While I believe in reparations on the individual level for people who were specifically harmed by a state due to an unconscionable action: the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, for example, or those who suffered injuries from police beatings, but the point of the Civil Rights movement wasn’t to get punitive damages from a government that, in terms of office holders and laws, doesn’t even exist anymore.
In the context of this thread, the “see the last of you” comment cannot (from an admitted racist, once a racist always a racist) be read as anything other than a call for the extermination of black people through genocide.
Millions and millions and millions of reparation dollars have been paid to date in the form of AFCD, HUD, the expansion of welfare, affirmative action, the Community Reinvestment Act and other forms of “reparations.”
There is no comparison between what happened to blacks and whites under Jim Crow. To suggest whites suffered under Jim Crow is like saying I am a victim of 9/11 because my mutual fund took a hit.
The victims deserve reparations directly–not programs for blacks. Not all blacks were victims of Jim Crow. Those programs (some of them, what does welfare have to do with blacks, welfare is open to anyone) are directed towards blacks. And they are destructive to blacks.
I am not a racist and I meant I would be glad to see the last of you, personally; how you could make that a racist statement is beyond me as I do not know what your ethnicity is nor do I care.
Well, let me know when you’ve set a precedent on this case, JHC, so we can start discussing reparations to the citizens of Vietnam and Iraq unduly affected by your ministrations. Care to go there, as well?
I can’t tell if you’re being cavalier intentionally or not, but Jim Crow certainly made killing black people with impunity quite easy. There’s no doubt it robbed people of justice–particularly murdervictims. If people can create a good case against local governments showing they were denied civil rights, then why shouldn’t they sue? Surely no one in this thread would deny it happened on a grand scale.
If your city lobbed a bomb on your house and stole all your money, you would have no problem sueing city hall–even if by the time you got around to it, different officials had been elected. Governments exist in perpetuity, just like corporations. Documents last a long time. We don’t need eye-witnesses to know that black people were screwed a million times over in laws and policies for the first half of the 20th century. Should there be a statute of limitations? Sure. But we aren’t talking about hundred of years ago, folks. Baby Boomers grew up during the Jim Crow era. The older black people you see on the street? Most of them were victimized in documentable ways. Not by random white people, but by the governments they and their parents paid taxes to.
I don’t trust the government to come up with a reasonable statute of limitations for reparations. How many people would have been in favor of the West German government setting its own statute of limitation for Holocaust reparations? And I’m sure the interned Japanese would have loved it if Bill Clinton had told them, “Oops! You waited too long! No check for you!” How convenient that would have been for the US government.
There won’t be reparations made to the survivors and victims of Jim Crow, unfortunately. But it’s not because they don’t deserve them.
Anyone who’s attended public school during the era of political correctness has surely seen that quote about how hatred is like an acid that damages the one who holds it more than it damages anything else. Now if that quote is true, the reparations should be paid to Klan members and other racists, since they’re the ones who suffered the most.
The most important question and one that hasn’t been answered is,
WHERE’S THE MONEY FOR THIS COMING FROM?
Nobody denies Jim Crow was horrible and there were daily injustices and occasional outrages, but it affected millions of people. We can’t give them all a lot of money- we don’t have it, not to mention it’s not going to change anything about their past. Punitive damages by definition are meant to punish a person or organization, and 99% of the people who comprised those organizations (the Jim Crow governments) were dead.
Not to mention, should this be state or federal coffers? The Federal ruled that Jim Crow was constitutional, but they also later ruled it wasn’t, and it was the Federal government that abolished it, so it would seem they should be off the hook.
Should Alabama have to pay a lot more than Vermont since we were a Jim Crow state and Vermont wasn’t? If I were in Vermont I’d certainly hope so, but I also know that Alabama’s bloody broke. California and Nevada were Jim Crow states in the lifetimes of some people affected by it, but not as much as Mississippi and Alabama- should they have to pay the same to their ‘victims’ or not as much or…
And again, WHERE’S THE MONEY FOR THIS COMING FROM?
The past was horrible, never forget it. But let’s move on. Simon Dubnow called upon his fellow Jews in the Holocaust to “Write and record” lest it ever be forgotten, and the same was true of the Civil Rights: they wrote, they recorded, they are remembered. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery AL and had to leave town due to death threats, and when she died she lay in state in the U.S. Capitol, she was not forgotten; MLK Day is a Federal Holiday and there’s a beautiful monument to him in the same city where his house was bombed, and a black man is in the White House due in part to the 95% of black voters who exercised their rights and voted for him. THESE are the most powerful and helpful reparative codas to Jim Crow Laws.
