Students are rattling skeletons in the closets of the entitled at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Missouri. They dominate headlines protesting racist Halloween decorum and emergent KKK culture on Ivy League campuses: Harvard students black-taping faces on the portraits of African American professors; Yale students hiding behind free speech to don racist Halloween costumes. Princeton students protest buildings named after staunch racist Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president.
Minority students across the U.S. are finding their voice, making demands for “safe spaces” and freedom from the systemic stench of racism. Why not double-down on the media attention and get to the root of injustice against African Americans. Why not start a conversation about the prickly issue of reparations for the abominable crimes of chattel slavery, Middle-Passage genocide, and European colonial theft.
In 1968 Columbia students joined with local residents and protested the school’s ties to the Viet Nam War machine and the building of a gymnasium in Morningside Park that offended the African American community. They occupied campus buildings and when negotiations failed, a campus-wide strike led to some 700 arrests.
In 1985 Cornell University students and faculties built a shantytown on the campus and lived in them to mimic the miserable Black shantytowns in South Africa and get the university to divest from South Africa. Students in college campuses across the country formed anti-apartheid organizations and 70 campuses demonstrated in solidarity on National Divestment Protest Day, National Anti-Apartheid Day, and Southern Africa Political Prisoner Day to bring an end to Botha’s racist regime.
Generations ago there were no safe spaces on college campuses for anyone as the Kent and Jackson State incidents proved. In 1970 in response to student protests at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, national guards fired into the crowd and killed two African American students and injured 12. Eleven days later at Kent State, members of the Ohio National Guard broke up a student demonstration protesting President Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia by shooting into the crowd and killing four white students, wounding nine others.
Today there seems to be an obsession over the predictable racist bad behavior of white people. Do we really want to politicize hurt feelings and play the victim card? Students who are offended by Jim Crow school icons may miss the point that Craig Steven Wilder made in his book Ebony and Ivy. The bigger fish to fry is the fact that the slave trade was actually foundational in the development of Ivy League institutions. Are they trying to fry a mackerel when the culprit is a whale?
Compensation for the crime of slavery is a very dangerous domino that some white people are afraid to touch. It is much like the subject of the Haitian revolution when former slave Toussant Louverture out-foxed Napoleon and defeated French, Spanish and British powers. Slave-owners in the New World feared an epidemic of Toussants on their own soil and God-forbid dark Africans storming the Big House. Repairing unspeakable crimes against African American survivors of a “3/5 of a human being” system is a similar domino that makes white people nervous.
Controversial though the subject may be, reparations have been paid to black people. However, they would better be described as bribes.
In 2013 Post-Eric Garner, post-Michael Brown, post-Freddie Gray, post-Sandra Bland, post-Tamir Rice Chicago Mayor Rom Emmanuel set aside 5.5 million dollars to compensate the families of fallen victims of officers who act as though they have a license to kill. In 2015 prior to the first-degree murder indictment of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke who put 16 bullets into Laquan MacDonald, the city of Chicago paid the grieving MacDonald family five million dollars reparations/bribe for the murder of their son.
This was the second time in history that reparations were paid to Black people. The first time was in 1994 when the Florida state senate awarded survivors of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre US$2.1 million. In Rosewood African Americans were terrorized by a whole town of white people (without pointy hoods), six murdered and the town’s churches, homes and stores torched.
But in spite of U.S. Rep. John Conyers proposed bill HR-40 to set up a Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, in spite of very well-researched and sober books by Black authors like Should America Pay by Raymond Winbush, in spite of excruciating hours of intellectual debate, the demand for reparations has not been a major battle on college campuses. However, there was a minor skirmish in March of 2001 at Brown University.
Conservative writer David Horowitz wrote an article entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea and Racist Too” that was rejected by 34 school newspapers but accepted by the Brown Daily Herald. The article not only said that reparations for Black people were wrong, but that African Americans actually owe a debt to the United States. Minority students responded by stealing the free newspapers from newsstands and demanding that they be given free space for a rebuttal article. Horowitz paid US$725 for the ad that protesters said management should donate to a minority fund. The newspaper refused all demands on the grounds of free speech but students countered that the article was merely “propaganda and lies”.
The Brown ACLU and interim President Sheila Blumstein stood on the First Amendment and defended the paper, but in 2003 President Ruth Simmons, the first African American Ivy League president, appointed the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The impetus for the committee was not so much an African American president, but the fact that there were class action lawsuits at the time threatening banks, corporations and academic institutions, including Brown, that had ties to slavery. In March 2004 a letter went out to the Brown community from the Committee stating:
At the time of Brown’s founding, Rhode Island was the epicenter of the North American slave trade, a trade in which some of the university’s early benefactors were directly involved. As President Simmons noted in her letter charging the committee, this history gives us “a special obligation and a special opportunity” to engage the reparations issue in all its complex, historical, political, legal and moral dimensions.
In 2006 the Committee issued a final report, a product of three years of research and community input. The report exploded slavery tropes and added to compelling research on Brown’s connections to slavery in the Americas. However, in 2012 the Brown Daily Herald ran a story about “the forgotten report”. Apparently the report has fallen into the dustbin of history and “next steps” like building a memorial on campus, were never taken. President Simmons had this to say, “The committee’s work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past.”
Brown’s minority students most recently staged a die-in to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. They have become yet another bee in the bonnet of college administrations. Campuses are buzzing over insensitivity to minorities and disrespect for cultures and rightly so. It is an exciting time. Students are sending shock waves around the country with bold actions and voices that may sound shrill. But I have not heard anybody use the r-word. Reparations. As Brown President Simmons said about Brown’s involvement in the slave trade, we have “a special obligation and a special opportunity”. The time is ripe…
Auset Marian Lewis’s journalism has been published in over 50 media outlets from coast to coast and abroad. She was the first female African American columnist for the Wilmington News Journal. Her poetry and fiction have won awards and she has been invited to speak in venues on radio and TV from Yale University to homeless shelters in Baltimore, Maryland.
Lewis has written two books: A Settling of Crows and From My Lips to God’s Ear: The Joanne Collins Story.
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1 Comment
Ms. Lewis: Thanks for your article. I am from Kanawha County West Virginia. I work as a substitute teacher in the school system and at JobCorps. I also work as a youth worker at a foster home. While West Virginia is 96% white, The Kanawha Valley is more diverse. We have a major medical center here, and we are home to state government. As far as racism goes, Urban Renewal came late to the valley with the path of the interstate obliterating the Triangle District, a predominately Black community in Charleston. Then ensued the predictable white flight to Cross Lanes and Putnam County.
We live in a 1960s inner suburb. My son attended the primarily white Schoals elementary-we have a private pool in the neighborhood which has recently become integrated. My son attended Stonewall Middle School which is split about 50 50 with Black and White students. (There are some rumblings to change its name). He graduated from Capital High School which is about 2thirds White and One third Black. He now attends the University of Kentucky which is predominately white but which has a higher percentage of Black students than West Virginia University. I am also a product of the experiment in school integration, which has largely fallen to the wayside in the US.
Basically what we need in West Virginia is a teachable moment. Not only must we confront our local histories of racism, but as basically an internal colony we must see our fate tied to other Third World people home and abroad. Black Lives indeed should matter, as should the 29 dead miners at Upper Big Branch-coal baron Don Blankenship skated on a misdemeanor conviction. West Virginia has the lowest indices for health after Mississippi. Just as poverty in the Black Community is the result of structural racism, West Virginia is the product of benign neglect.