The Case for Reparations(colin)

WhenTheGoingGetsTtuff

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http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/?src=longreads

By - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the ****** from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants.

Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17.

“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”

The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”

Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

--- Read the rest in the article. While i was copying and pasting it was longer than i thought. :(
 
Excellent read...thanks for the drop.

The Atlantic said:
The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
 
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I think this article has been posted multiple times today. They should all be merged. Hell this should be a sticky
 
lol

I'm gonna read this shit when I'm in bed later on.. I'm actually more surprised the comments in the article there seems to be mostly civilized conversation going on.
 
BTW the author will on Chris Hayes show tomorrow at 8

I figured this thread would be a sticky by now...I read the article yesterday at work..so much knowledge dropped in that article...Bomani Jones was on twitter going OFF about that article yesterday....

I'm not a math person...but including interest..just in America..if each black person were paid what they were owed...we're looking at quadrillion..the price is steep...then you figure other countries including Brazil...the world economy would tank...:eek:
 
wow,

the crazy shit is all this was done right

here in this country with the blessing of the govt..

Jews had shit done to them in another country,

and STILL had to come HERE to get justice...


all that so called jewish unity aint do shit

for them in germany...

Meanwhile we just had affirmative action

ripped away, after white woman got all

they could out of it...

and the cracker wonder why his

birth rate is so low....


What you are not hearing, about

is all the women, men and children,

they fuckin ATE!!!

They aint telling you why they were

REALLY burning those bodies.


the cracker got a real savage fucked

up history, but they mastered revisionist

history and covering up their dirt...


but they left many blood stained trails...

We have more than a case for reparations,

but if you thought crackers lost their mind

for a black president..

watch them literally implode at us getting something

they are not...


as an historic group they really are a sick parasitc people...
 
This article eloquently sums up the "pit in my stomach" feeling that I've had for a long time. It's refreshing to read a treatise that states the case for reparations objectively and courageously intellectually, using distinct historical reference. Bravo Mr. Coates.
 
Heard Bomani Jones reference this article the other day. I look forward to reading it.
 
Man to all the new black dudes on this board they need to listen to this cat. Wow. Good show.

And especially at 10:00 in... he speaks about the problem of black children being damaged inherently by this system
 
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I would like to know more about this....
 
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He makes a good case, not that there haven't been good cases presented already. If he thinks he can take it somewhere else, I support, but I aint looking for shit.

I love what he's saying and how he presents
 
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The article laid out our history that some of you on here deny.. some of you try to marginalize the 'white man' when we talk about the issues we face. You parrot what they say about we needing to stop complaining and doing it ourselves. Ignoring the active involvement in them making sure that we stay this way. How they have never treated us fairly. How they duped us when we did do better out of fair housing practices. How they won't even STUDY reparations for black people.

Studying this, or granting this would be an admission of GUILT
and you tell me a white person who feels guilty about slavery..

The overwhelming majority of every white american is 'it was in the past.' Basically get over it.

to go along with the black people that have made it through the gauntlet saying 'get over it' too.

Programming.

The things that were in the article as past still goes on in the present...

Black family with a 100k income lives next to white families with 30k incomes..

Chris rock even spoke on it saying he lived next to mary j blige gary sheffield and a white dentist.. Not the inventor of anything, just a white dentist..

We cannot expect fair and equal treatment and we should NOT just get over that we can't expect fair and equal treatment. We should also NOT fuck with the people who are actively trying to keep us down whether you people making fun of black problems caused by 'the white man' choose to acknowledge it or not.
 
heard about this via twitter...yeah, this should be stickied.

i honestly don't know what the 'amount' would be, but to put the case out there, and show that it's not about slavery, it's about other factors after slavery where the majority AND the government were complicit in, put it out there for the public to digest...this is a good thing.
 
heard about this via twitter...yeah, this should be stickied.

i honestly don't know what the 'amount' would be, but to put the case out there, and show that it's not about slavery, it's about other factors after slavery where the majority AND the government were complicit in, put it out there for the public to digest...this is a good thing.

We don't need cash directly.

We just need access.

Don't give me 20k which is what the maximum would probably be per person.

Education on all levels should be FREE - then watch how many people that don't identify as black will suddenly become african american

Health care should be FREE- then watch how many people identify and african american

Business Loans should no longer be loans but GRANTS- same theme as above.

Insurance for life and house and car should be FREE, full coverage.

We should be exempt from paying state and government taxes- not 1 cent period.

that's just a start.
 
Tight post!


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