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The Dallas City Council voted Wednesday to support federal legislation that could provide reparations to the descendants of slaves.
The legislation, pending in Congress, would create a commission to examine slavery and recommend ways to remedy its lingering effects. One step being considered is monetary compensation to slaves' descendents.
A City Council resolution supporting the bill passed, 13-2. The dissenters, Donna Blumer and Alan Walne, said they had no problem with a healthy dialogue on slavery but were opposed to monetary compensation.
Resolution sponsor Al Lipscomb said the vote "means quite a bit, not only to me, but to the overall city of Dallas." As he often does, Mr. Lipscomb dressed Wednesday in a traditional African outfit to symbolize pride in his heritage.
Mayor Ron Kirk said the United States would benefit from an examination of the horrors of slavery and its impact today.
"This debate can do nothing but make this nation stronger," said Mr. Kirk, who in 1995 became Dallas' first black mayor.
Dallas is one of several cities to pass resolutions in support of the legislation, sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich. Others include Detroit, Cleveland and Washington.
Mr. Conyers' bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it is believed to have little chance of passing.
The City Council's action would impose no financial burden but endorses Mr. Conyers' call for a federal panel to study the effects of slavery and to make recommendations.
Council member Laura Miller said she decided to vote for the resolution only after Mr. Lipscomb agreed to delete specific references to "reparations."
"I don't support reparations at all," she said.
Ms. Blumer and Mr. Walne said they didn't think the changes in wording mattered. Mr. Walne said Mr. Conyers' bill is known, according to the city's resolution, as the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act."
"If your are supporting the bill, you are supporting reparations," he said. "I'm afraid what's going to happen is we are going to end up in a war over who gets money or who doesn't get money or how much money somebody gets."
Former City Council member Diane Ragsdale spoke in favor of the resolution.
"The vast amount of America's wealth was built on the backs of African slave labor," she said. "Dallas, too, was part of that."
The idea of reparations for victims of slavery dates to the post-Civil War years, when freed blacks were led to believe they would receive land and farm equipment. One proposal, vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, specified payment of 40 acres and a mule.
By Shawn D. Lewis and Oralandar Brand-Williams / The Detroit News
Ray Jenkins, a real estate broker in Detroit, champions reparations for the enslavement of Africans. "I'm not trying to get it for myself. I'm trying to get it for all black people."
President Bill Clinton wants Americans to close the racial divide. Many agree that it's time for action.
The question is what to do.
Clinton isn't ready to accept the controversial issue of reparations for the nation's blacks. But, along with the idea of an apology to African Americans -- which Clinton is considering -- comes the reparations issue. And it's an idea that nearly has blacks and whites jumping to their respective sides of the racial line.
"If the apology opens the door to something tangible it is all worthwhile," said the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP. "If it is just words with no deeds -- history will judge that," he said.
It is changes that are important, said Dr. Lyn Lewis, of the sociology department at the University of Detroit Mercy.
"An apology without economic, moral, educational and political reconciliation is meaningless," Lewis said. "I do not need an apology. I need the playing field to be leveled. That would be enough of an apology for me."
Although most African Americans are several generations removed from slavery, they are still affected by their painful history, said Russell Adams, chairman of Howard University's Afro-American Studies Department.
"There is a clear continuity of consequences from the slavery period to the present," Adams said. "I still remember seeing ... my great-uncle's back. I saw his back and it was pitted -- corrugated and pitted by beatings." But Adams does not support reparations. "It does not deal with the structural problems," he said. Yet many black activists have said reparations are needed to begin rectifying more than 200 years of inequality experienced by blacks. Some note the $1.3 billion in reparations given to Japanese Americans nearly a decade ago for forcing them into internment camps during World War II.
"I hope they do like they did with the Japanese when they apologized," said Detroiter Ray Jenkins, a longtime activist for reparations to African Americans. Last week, Ohio Congressman Tony Hall, a white Democrat, proposed that the the U.S. government apologize to African Americans for 246 years of slavery of their ancestors.
"My resolution will not fix the lingering injustice resulting from slavery, but reconciliation begins with an apology," Hall said. "I hope this apology will be a start of new healing between the races." Please see APOLOGY, Page 2C
A recent poll shows race relations have improved on some fronts. According to a Gallup Poll, 93 percent of whites said they would vote for an African-American presidential candidate. That number is up from 77 percent a decade ago and up from 35 percent in 1958.
Legislation studying the issue of reparations, introduced in 1989 by U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit) remains before the House Judiciary Committee. Sponsors of the bill hope that the current issue of the slavery apology will prompt the committee to begin new hearings soon, a Conyers spokesman said.
But Armstrong Williams, a nationally known black conservative and a commentator on America's Black Forum (seen locally on Sundays on Channel 7), said he finds the idea of an apology and reparations "a wasted argument."
"It further divides and builds toward a separate America," Williams said. "It would further separate blacks from the fabric of this country." Williams agreed with other critics that an apology and reparations makes whites appear that they are "agents of slavery."
"There are no white Americans living today who were alive during slavery," Williams said. "Also, there were many white Americans who took risks with their lives to teach slaves how to read."
Kevin Fobbs, vice-chairman of the state Republican party and an African American, is in favor of an apology but hastens to add that without action, it is not enough.
"If the apology is used for something constructive, to try to find ways to empower the African-American community to become more economically stable, then it is good." But Fobbs said he does not support reparations.
"I don't think that's the route or direction to take," he said. "We should be looking at more viable efforts like economic empowerment. Those would be more targeted, long-lasting."
Black lawmakers since Adam Clayton Powell and before have insisted on an apology from America, which has not come.
"The benefit to the U.S. is that it would begin a healing process between black Americans and America, that has not been established since the beginning of this country," said Mario Morrow, a Detroit-based political analyst and an African American.
"It is a small step for white Americans in Congress to take this position openly, but it is a larger step in the overall situation of race relations in this country." Detroit News Staff Writer Jennifer Ackerman contributed to this report.
Apologies
President Clinton apologized earlier this year for the government's role in the Tuskegee syphilis study and for not awarding Medals of Honor to African-American soldiers in World War II. Here are some other recent, high-profile apologies:
* New British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized in May for England's role in the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1851.
* Australian Prime Minister John Howard last month expressed his personal regrets over the Australian government's seven-decade policy of seizing Aborigine children from their parents to be raised by white families and orphanages. The government, fearing legal claims, has not formally apologized.
* In May 1995, Pope John Paul offered an apology for violence during the 16th century Counter-Reformation.
* East German lawmakers apologized in April 1990 for the Holocaust, after four decades of denying responsibility.
* In 1988, the U.S. Congress apologized and made reparations to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II.
BY JACK E. WHITE JUNE 30, 1997
Okay, Mr. President, I'll accept your apology for slavery. Now where's my 40 acres and mule? I'm referring to the land and farm animals freed slaves like my grandfather George White expected to get after the Civil War to help them support themselves and make their new liberty real. For most of them, of course, the promise never materialized, even though the Freedmen's Bureau had the authority to rent abandoned or confiscated Southern farmland to freed slaves until they could afford to buy it. If that brave promise had been kept, Mr. President, you wouldn't be embroiled in the latest debate about a government apology for slavery. If the freedmen had become landowners instead of penurious laborers, their descendants would be prosperous enough today to be, well, conservative Republicans.
Without some form of reparations, apologizing for a historical wrong is an empty gesture. For one thing, both the slaves and the slave owners are long since dead, and you can't repent for the sins of others. And even if you could, our legal system recognizes that repentance without compensation serves only to make the apologizer feel good while doing nothing for the victim. It's why the U.S. government not only apologized but paid $20,000 apiece to Japanese Americans who were sent to concentration camps during World War II. And why Germany not only apologized to the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust but sent more than $60 billion in restitution. Mr. President, if slavery was as big a historical crime as you suggest--and it undoubtedly was--those precedents ought to apply. But you've made it clear that you oppose reparations. If you're serious about being sorry, you should rethink that stance.
To be sure, it would cost you. Figure it this way. The first slaves arrived here in 1619, and emancipation came in 1863. That's 244 years of unpaid labor by a total of, say, 10 million slaves. Multiplied by 25 [cents] a day, the going rate for unskilled labor back then, it amounts to $222 billion. Throw in another $222 billion for pain and suffering, and you get $444 billion. At 3% interest compounded over the 134 years since emancipation, that adds up to $24 trillion. Serious money.
The second issue is how to distribute it. As the grandson of a slave, I naturally favor dividing it into lump sums and giving them to my generation of the slaves' descendants--but that would be too much like hitting the lottery. So here's another idea. Use the money to uplift those who have been most hurt not only by the legacy of slavery but by existing discrimination and poverty: the urban and rural black poor. Put the money into a fund--call it the New Freedmen's Bureau--to finance the construction of schools, housing, transportation grids, factories, you name it, in the most depressed areas where the descendants of slaves are a majority. Use it to help finance new black-owned companies, to put poor black kids through college and endow cash-poor historically black universities, to run drug-treatment and job-training centers. Since the government is too deeply in debt to put up the whole sum at once, it could pay it off in installments over, say, the next 244 years. With a program like that, Mr. President, you could scrap affirmative action, welfare reform and the entire host of Great Society programs. You'd be fighting present-day injustice and social ills instead of futilely trying to atone for the sins of the past.
In the front row of a packed City Council chamber Wednesday, tears streamed down the faces of four women. An expert witness, a psychologist, was describing in gruesome detail the events of one Sunday afternoon in 1829, the afternoon that an African-American man was lynched, burned, skinned, cut and stabbed.
On the wall behind the witness were images of hundreds of years of painful history: slave-sale advertisements, notices of Ku Klux Klan meetings, photos of segregated water fountains.
Tears would fill the eyes of Ald. Carrie Austin (34th), too, as she pictured how her own relatives must have suffered. "There's not enough money in this world that would be satisfactory," she said later, "but there should be something."
Listening to the emotional testimony of Austin and others was a crowd of hundreds, mostly African-Americans, gathered to discuss a question that has gone unanswered since the end of the Civil War: What debt, if any, does America owe for slavery, and how should it be paid?
After seven hours of testimony, two City Council committees approved a resolution urging Congress to study the question of reparations for the descendants of slaves. But many other questions remained -- who should collect such payments, who should pay them, and why has this long-ignored issue seized a spotlight now.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who also sponsored the bill that made a holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, introduced legislation in 1989 that called for studying slavery reparations.
Since then, the issue has been addressed in a growing number of books, law review articles and municipal resolutions, including the latest, sponsored by Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), which would make Chicago the largest city to support Conyers' effort.
The fact that black political leaders such as Tillman and Conyers are in a position to raise the issue helps explain why it's finally getting a wider hearing. "We just have come of age," Tillman said of herself and other civil rights veterans.
Ultimately, those who want to address this controversial topic are waiting for a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. Conveniently, that would put Conyers in line to replace Republican Henry Hyde as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and give reparations its first hearing in Congress.
"We study everything under the sun, from the cosmos down to microbiological questions deep under the sea," Conyers said in a phone interview. "But right now many people, let's face it, are in a position of avoidance. They're saying . . . 'Why, Conyers, do you have to go back into history and pull out this old chestnut?"'
Because, he went on, "We're talking about healing the most sensitive sore in the nation's psyche, the question of race."
The issue of reparations has percolated through American history ever since President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Gen. William T. Sherman's famous promise of 40 acres and a mule to newly liberated slaves.
In recent years, Holocaust survivors and Japanese-Americans have received payments for historical wrongs. And for decades the government has reimbursed Native Americans for the violation of treaties and other offenses.
But some legal experts question whether reparations for American slavery can be handled the same way. Today's African-Americans, they point out, are several generations removed from the institution of slavery.
Much of Wednesday's hearing had the feel of an academic seminar, as experts explained the myriad outgrowths of slavery, from the often-deadly conditions on slave ships to the devastating long-term effects on an entire group's culture, language, family life and dignity.
And, many witnesses contended, the end of slavery did not end the oppression. Witnesses raised concerns about today's issues -- racial profiling by police, police shootings of African-Americans and the percentage of African-Americans behind bars in this country.
While speakers suggested a variety of types of reparations, they focused more on the need for them.
Wade Nobles, a psychologist from San Francisco State University, said slavery had damaged both blacks and whites: "The premeditated, systematic use of violence toward Africans in America has resulted in untold physical and psychological damage that requires repair, requires reparation."
After hearing from Nobles, Austin told the audience how she had discovered that her father -- born in 1897, after slavery's end -- had been considered the property of a plantation owner in North Carolina. She said she had searched unsuccessfully for his birth certificate when she came across farming records that included her father, Tom, in a list of "livestock" of a rich plantation owner.
"How do they list him with the horses and cows?" Austin said in an interview afterward. Most important to Austin, she said, is an apology from the government. "What should reparation be? How can you tell me -- a descendant -- what's good enough?"
At day's end, the joint meeting of the Human Relations and Finance Committees voted to approve the resolution, which the full City Council is expected to address May 17. "I think we'll have the votes," Tillman said.
For all the day's poignant moments, she acknowledged that she would have been pleased if more white people had chosen to attend the hearing. "We need to educate the white community," Tillman said. "The fact of the matter is blacks have been suffering from post-traumatic slavery syndrome. Jews have been compensated. Japanese have been compensated."
In fact, the effort to win slavery reparations gained momentum after President Ronald Reagan signed legislation in 1988 that awarded Japanese-Americans $20,000 apiece to compensate for their internment in camps during World War II.
The Indian Claims Commission, a tribunal Congress established in 1946 to resolve the grievances of Native American tribes, eventually awarded $1.3 billion.
Michael Bazyler, professor at Whittier Law School in California who has studied World War II reparations, said he sees growing momentum for such payments because the success of Holocaust survivors has emboldened many "in seeking restitution for acts that occurred a long time ago."
But he sees a major difference. "We're talking about descendants," Bazyler said. "There is a basic principle in American law that certain wrongs after a certain time cannot be resurrected to make it a right."
The question is where that historical line can be drawn. It was effectively moved back for Holocaust survivors, who initially had their claims rejected. Could the descendants of American slaves do so too?
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Such questions are matters for a congressional commission to decide, in Conyers' view. He's patient: It took him 15 years to persuade his congressional colleagues to pass the bill for a King holiday.
In an effort to ingratiate himself with the conservative right, a movement noted for it’s justification of European and Euro-American imperialism, David Horowitz has penned a polemic for Salon.com news subtitled: Why reparations for Africans is a bad idea for black people and racist too. Needless to say from an Afrocentric perspective, Horowitz is grasping at straws to discredit the notion European capitalism in general and Euro-American capitalism in particular benefited from the African slave trade. He cunningly constructed his essay to de-energize the momentum the reparations movement is gaining amongst Africans world wide. In his arrogance Horowitz attempts to speak for black people as if he had our best interests at heart. He says “the claim for reparations is factually tendentious, morally incoherent and racially incendiary.” He even uses the ploy of reverse victimization saying the claim for reparations itself is racist?!
His essay is all the more duplicitous because Mr. Horowitz knows full well what racism is and is not. While blacks have a plethora of reasons not to like or trust whites, Africans in America are not racists because we have never marshaled our resources to fashion or control any group behavior or policy designed to harm, subjugate or dominate white people or any other group, except perhaps, ourselves. This behavior on our part is a byproduct of the very thing the reparations movement attempts to address, rectify and make compensation for, menticide. (The deliberate destruction of a people’s minds.)
In attempting to support his assertions, Horowitz demonstrates just how disingenuous he is. First he shifts the blame for Africans being in a subordinate position in this hemisphere consigned to the bottom strata in countries settled and governed by people of European extraction and cultural heritage to the Arabs and Africans who engaged in slavery on the continent?! While Horowitz is correct to point out the role Arabs played in the African holocaust (a role we Africans tend to overlook) Arabs had little to do with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He tosses in another red herring by stating blacks owned slaves in the American South and asks should descendants of black slave owners pay restitution also? (Maybe, maybe not.) It goes down hill from there. He writes, “Behind the reparations arguments lies the unfounded claim that all blacks in America suffer economically from the consequences of slavery and discrimination.” Horowitz is alluding to upper and middle class blacks in America; comparing their conditions to Africans throughout the diaspora.
First he over states the size of middle class blacks, then he neglects to acknowledge American middle class blacks are in that position primarily because of black people’s ongoing struggles to reduce oppression in America. Racial discrimination in America is less obvious now then, say, sixty years ago because of the sacrifices and blood shed of hundreds and thousands of blacks. (While some whites did support the civil rights movement, no hoses and dogs were sicced on whites, women, East Indians, or the other so called minorities that now benefit from the civil rights or Black Power struggle of the 50's, 60's and 70's. Only a handful of whites were killed fighting for our rights in the 20th Century). Horowitz says the American Civil War was over slavery, I beg to differ. The Civil War was over the political control of this nation. If the war was about slavery per say, then the quasi-slavery of the post Reconstruction era would have never happened. Why would people who style themselves so intelligent, so morally superior, fight and win a war only to do an immediate about face and reestablish a modified form of what they went to war to abolish in the first place? Horowitz’ grasp and understanding of American history is a bit flawed to say the least. Moreover, the example he uses of a prosperous black who is a descendant of slaves, Oprah Winfrey is superfluous. Oprah Winfrey is no threat to the status quo! She contributes to the illusion of America being an open society. His implication is that America is a progressive nation, a land of racial harmony, that racial animus and discrimination no longer exist. In his mind, middle class Africans in America are magically exempt from racial discrimination; that because they are better off they aren’t subject to racism on a daily basis. Has he heard of racial profiling, blacks being stopped merely because they are black driving decent late model automobiles? So much for his grasp of American social reality.
His ignorance or deceit aside, we must ask why he wrote such drivel in the first place? What is his motive? Factually he bends and twists the truth so much, it is hard to follow his line of “reasoning”. Is this due to ignorance, his admitted conservative bent, his racism or another agenda? America is a pluralistic amalgam of racial, ethnic, religious, philosophical and socio-economic groups jockeying and vying for power and prominence. Which group is Horowitz a member of and in which camp does his loyalties reside? Obviously not with us! Is he attempting to curry favor from the WASP community, the neo-conservatives or the various ethnic immigrants who arrived in America following slavery who while maintaining they had nothing to do with slavery, who hope blacks will forget they supported all the laws that oppressed us which coincidentally benefited them solely on the basis of their lack of melanin?
Horowitz says reparations were paid to German Jews and Japanese Americans not because they were Jews or Japanese Americans but because those who received reparations “suffered and hurt.” To his way of thinking this is the only reason reparations should ever be considered or paid; to people who were actually injured. He conveniently ignores the precedent of reparations being paid to descendants of Native American tribes for past and present injustices and payments to the black survivors of Rosewood. He trivializes the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on African-Americans. Nevertheless, the precedent has been established in America; reparations have been paid to both survivors, their descendants and their ethnic group.
I suspect Horowitz’s objections aren’t philosophical, but are designed to protect the wealth of those who directly profited from the slave trade, the post civil war socio-economic oppression and exploitation of Africans and European and American current imperialism? To buttress our case, we need to do thorough research to find out who the descendants are, not only of the slave owners, but those who invested in the slave trade, who financed the whole system by funding the building of ships, backing the insurance companies that wrote the policies that covered the voyages and human cargo. Who might they be? Which individuals or groups beginning in fifteenth century post feudal Europe had those kinds of resources? Which individuals or consortiums had the money or resources to back the early “trading companies” that originally brokered and supported the slave trade? Next we have to calculate the damage of present day wrongs and injustices that are an outgrowth of racially biases public policy and economic practice. I suspect Mr. Horowitz doesn’t want this type of information made public for a variety of reasons. Whatever his reasons, Mr. Horowitz has gone to great lengths to not only discount the impact of our holocaust but minimize the moral imperative to address and resolve this blight on human history. His duplicity and outright refusal to acknowledge slavery’s role in the development of Western capitalism and continued imperialism and how it impacts our current reality clearly demonstrates that Mr. Horowitz and those of his ilk are neither friends of truth nor morality.
By Mark P. Fancher
Although there are frequent suggestions that Africans in America are too afraid to make a militant demand for liberation, Kwame Ture often reminded us that our people have repeatedly demonstrated amazing courage. Little African children faced fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham. African freedom riders were beaten and tortured by racist mobs. Young gun-toting sisters and brothers in the Black Panther Party confronted racist police. The record of the raw courage of Africans goes on and on.
Even if we don't acknowledge our own courage, our oppressors have always been well aware of it. Our enemies (capitalists, the intelligence agencies, the police and Clarence Thomas- like lackeys) have always believed their task to be to ensure that our courageous young people misdirect their anger. Thus, the oppressor is always pleased when young Africans in gangs direct their anger at rival gangs. The enemy becomes concerned when, as in the wake of the acquittal of police who beat Rodney King, there is an interval of clarity. Gangsters united on that occasion and directed their anger at Los Angeles city hall and the police.
Our enslavement continues in spite of our militancy and courage only because we are disorganized. Our rebellions are usually spontaneous, and temporary rather than planned and sustained. There are many in our community who have recognized this deficiency and they are working around the clock on a remedy. In the meantime however, the enemy watches us carefully and develops a number of contingency plans.
Although we lack faith in the willingness and ability of our people to unite and fight, the enemy is absolutely certain that this will happen sooner or later. The only question for the enemy is whether the masses of Africans, once organized, will attempt to reform the existing system; or to instead engage in a revolutionary process that is calculated to dismantle the existing system and build a new one. Obviously, from the perspective of the enemy, reform is certainly the preferred option. Capitalists do not want to lose their ability to reap large profits from the exploitation of the labor and resources of Africans and others in America. If they can keep all of this by appeasing Africans in some way, that is certainly their preference. It is for that reason that it is almost inevitable that we will receive reparations.
On countless occasions, skeptics in our community have voiced the now familiar refrain: "Those white folks ain't never gonna give us reparations." But if one pauses to analyze our circumstances for only a moment, it becomes crystal clear that the enemy will do just that. Used skillfully, reparations can ensure the maintenance of the capitalist status quo for many years into the future.
Most of the activists who work diligently for reparations are among the most sincere Africans our community has produced. Many of them see reparations as an opportunity for true self-determination. Some want the money to be used to ensure that African people have their own land, economy, educational system, and maybe even an independent government. Others see reparations as a source of funds they can use to return to Africa for permanent residence. Still others would suggest that reparations be used to finance insurgent movements both here and in Africa for a serious challenge to corporate power. None of these options are acceptable to the enemy. They prefer an entirely different scenario.
The enemy's plan probably looks something like this: First, the government will resist all demands for reparations for as long as possible. As poverty, mass incarceration, police violence and other problems escalate, the anger in African communities will rise as well. It is only when Africans are on the verge of organized mass rebellion that the first hint of a willingness to grant reparations will be given. Government officials will refuse to negotiate with the "radicals" but they will speak with "responsible" Black leadership (i.e., mainstream civil rights leaders). Although a great show will be made about negotiations, corporate and government accountants will have, in advance, worked out an acceptable monetary figure that is calculated to impress the impoverished African masses, and at the same time not pose a threat to corporate profits and the government's treasury.
When the "negotiations" are completed, the President will host a grand White House ceremony where he will shed crocodile tears about White America's sins. Those in attendance will include all members of the Black leadership elite. With smiles and champagne glasses galore, they will announce great plans for use of the reparations money to develop corporate executive training programs for African young people that include guaranteed employment with Fortune 500 companies. Black-owned companies will be given new contracts with large corporations. Corporations will provide all Africans thousands of dollars in gift certificates. As they seek to preserve the status quo, they will give us lots of bangles, beads and opportunities for our children to be co-opted into their system. They will not give us power and independence.
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Mark P. Fancher is a writer, lawyer and activist. Books he has authored include: Misplaced Loyalty - Why U.S.-Born Africans Don't Believe They Are Africans Anymore; and Genocide With A Smile - The Campaign To Destroy Africans Born In America. He can be contacted at: mafancher@tbwtmail.com
By STEVE LASH
WASHINGTON -- Despite stiff opposition and 13 years of failed efforts, a group is continuing to press the federal government to pay trillions of dollars to blacks to compensate them for what it calls the lingering effects of slavery.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America points as the basis for its demand to the nearly 250 years of the American slave trade and the continuing treatment of blacks as second-class citizens. This inferior regard includes a criminal justice system that targets blacks for harsher penalties and a corporate America that pays blacks less than their white colleagues, said the organization, which goes by the acronym N'COBRA.
The Washington D.C.-based group contends that the federal government owes about $8 trillion to the descendants of slaves.
The 13-year-old coalition, which has been largely muffled in Washington amid the din of larger, better-financed lobbying groups, plans to raise its profile beginning today with a seven-day conference in the nation's capital and a rally on the National Mall this weekend.
Despite what the coalition calls newfound momentum for its cause, the likelihood that Congress will approve any reparations money -- let alone $8 trillion -- appears slim. Federal lawmakers have not even acted on a relatively benign piece of legislation that calls for the creation of a seven-member commission simply to study the issue of compensating descendants of slaves. The measure, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., has languished in the House for 11 years.
But supporters of the movement are buoyed by the support of Randall Robinson, who as president of TransAfrica Forum helped lead a successful international call for the end of apartheid in South Africa. His recently published book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, is a call for descendants of slaves to be compensated.
The group's effort to gain reparations also has had recent success in Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Washington, where city councils have passed nonbinding resolutions calling on Congress to provide reparations.
"It is for the memories of our ancestors, the quality of the lives of the living and the destiny of the still unborn that we work diligently to close this chapter of history in a just way, giving voice not only to the wrong but to the remedy," the coalition says in a mission statement.
Robinson said the federal government has an obligation to compensate the descendants of slavery.
"The United States government sanctioned violations of the human rights of African Americans with the imprimatur of law," Robinson said, noting that slavery was legal until 1865. "In order to redress the injury, the United States government must provide a fair forum for redress and pay the debt it owes to African Americans."
Robinson added that he does not hold living white Americans responsible for slavery, noting that none has legally kept slaves and most abhor that the practice ever existed. However, the government should be held liable for the slave trade, even 135 years after it was outlawed with the ratification of the Constitution's 13th Amendment.
"It's not too late" to be compensated, Robinson said. "It is neither too late in the sense that the claim of reparations for African Americans is stale, nor is it too late in the sense that there is no one or nothing left to compensate. It is never too late to seek justice."
But opponents of the group's call, while decrying the horrors of slavery, counter that blacks today are too far removed from the slave era to warrant compensation. They also argue that the group's focus on trying to right the wrongs of slavery detracts from the contemporary problems facing blacks in many cases, such as poor schools and housing discrimination.
The coalition, in defense of its request for compensation, noted that the federal government in 1988 issued a formal apology and paid $20,000 each to Japanese-Americans taken from their homes and held in internment camps during World War II from 1941 to 1945. Descendants of the centuries-old American slave trade, which flourished from 1619 to 1865, are as deserving of compensation, the group said.
Not so, countered Stanford University professor Clayborne Carson.
The Japanese-Americans compensated under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act were people who actually suffered the indignity of being uprooted in the name of national security following Japan's 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. But the slave descendants seeking recompense are many generations removed from their relatives who toiled under the lash, the U.S. history professor said.
Rather than focusing on the distant past, the well-intentioned people seeking reparations should strive to remedy the problems that continue to plague black communities, Carson said.
"What about getting reparation for the poor education, the poor housing, the discrimination that's happening right at the moment," he said. "A terrible wrong was done, but it's not to me a moral or ethical question of righting a wrong: What is the best way of resolving the present-day problems of black people?"
So far the opponents of compensation have prevailed.
And President Clinton has rejected calls that he formally apologize to the descendants for the government's preservation of slavery as a legal institution from colonial days until ratification of the 13th Amendment. He did express regret, during a trip to Africa in 1998, for U.S. involvement in the slave trade that emanated from that continent.
Critics of his refusal to apologize to the descendants say Clinton fears such a statement would add fuel to the reparations movement. But White House spokeswoman Elizabeth Newman denied the allegation, saying the president has worked hard to enforce civil rights laws and eradicate persistent discrimination against all races.
Dorothy Benton Lewis, the coalition's co-chair, said the 4,000-member organization remains "undaunted" by its lack of success in securing reparations.
"You have to do what you have to do, no matter how long it takes," she said.
Lewis said she did not know how many descendants would be eligible for compensation, adding that the calculation of beneficiaries would require more careful study, perhaps by a congressionally delegated commission.
At the conclusion of its conference June 20, the coalition said it intends to file a lawsuit against the federal government to recover compensation for descendants of slaves.
It’s been 135 years since Reconstruction, but many African-Americans are still waiting to be compensated for the harm and indignities of slavery and its legacy of discrimination.
The movement
for slavery reparations, or cash payments for past injustices, appears
to be stronger than ever. Consider these recent developments: This month,
with the support of Mayor Richard Daley, the Chicago City Council passed
a resolution urging Congress to consider reparations. Legislators in Detroit,
Cleveland, Dallas and Washington have taken similar action. Randall Robinson’s
recent book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, has catapulted
the issue onto the nation’s editorial pages and into major television studios.
A class-action lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of slave descendants is
expected to be announced this week at the annual conference of the National
Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, or N’COBRA, in Washington,
D.C. Indeed, after years of being marginalized on the radical fringes,
the reparations movement is getting mainstream attention, and supporters
hope to ride the publicity all the way to the nation’s coffers. “Reparations
is a movement whose time has come,” says Kalonji Olusegun, treasurer and
founding member of N’COBRA, “I don’t think it can be neutralized.”
40 Acres and a Mule
Statute of Limitations?
For Myron Magnet of the conservative Manhattan Institute
for Policy Research, the flaw in the slavery reparations concept is simple.“It’s
a very silly idea,” he says. “Instead of looking back and wallowing in
victimization, let’s just look forward and say that America has turned
itself inside out to become a colorblind society of equal opportunity.
Let’s as a society say ‘you can all succeed,’ and get on with it.” Opposition
to reparations, which has remained strong over the years, usually focuses
on these points: All former slaves have been dead for at least a generation,
and living descendants do not deserve payment for their ancestors’ losses.
White Americans now living should not be held responsible for the sins
of their slaveholding ancestors. And it would be difficult to figure how
who should get money, and how much. But the reparations issue is about
more than just money, others say.
“Arguably, if you want to go
back and classify some of the activity of killing slaves as murder, the
criminal concept of no statute of limitations should apply here,” says
Kevin Hopkins, associate professor of law at John Marshall Law School in
Chicago. Further, under tort law, the pursuit of reparations is nothing
more than compensation for wrongful death, he argues.
Long Way from Payday
Even some sympathetic to the idea, though, find it difficult
to accept that a cash payment would right the wrongs of the nation’s past.
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, black scholar Glenn Loury
wrote that atonement cannot be achieved through typical problem solving.
“I believe that framing the argument in these terms is a mistake,” he wrote.
“ … The tragic legacy of slavery is a problem that simply will not yield
to another application of American ingenuity.”
Advocates are a long way from
payday. So far, no one in any position to award slavery reparations has
seriously considered doing it. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced
H.R. 40, a bill that would create a national commission to study the impact
of slavery and recommend a remedy, in every Congress since 1989, but with
no success. Despite the setbacks, advocates are optimistic about recent
attention to their mission. “With Chicago, the third-largest city, running
with the issue, I don’t think it will be so easy for politicians in Washington
to evade it,” says Hopkins.
Who Would Get the Money?
Even if the U.S. government agreed to make reparations payments, the next — and perhaps more complicated — question would be: How is the payment distributed?
The simplest way to accomplish reparations, of course, would be for the government to cut checks to those who deserve them. But finding out who deserves them could be difficult.
Not all black Americans are descendants of slaves. But proving genealogy would be costly, and in many cases fruitless since much of the history of slaves is oral and undocumented. Regardless, many reparations advocates reject the idea of individual payments. “If you tried that approach you would just get a small amount,” says Kevin Hopkins of John Marshall Law School. “That’s not going to help anybody or change the status of life for African-Americans.”
Instead, Hopkins and others support “community trust funds” that would distribute money into the community for projects like investing in black-owned businesses or attracting doctors and nurses into economically depressed areas. “It would be using the money for the greater good,” Hopkins says. “Reparations is much more than a demand for money,” agrees Kalonji Olusegun, a founding member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “It is demanding restitution to encourage the healing of a people.”
But Olusegun says his organization would oppose any reparations “trust fund” operated by the federal government. “If someone’s been injured, you don’t put the total responsibility of healing them in the hands of the person who injured them,” he says.
Instead, N’COBRA has already established economic development commissions in several cities that the group hopes will provide a structure for distributing reparations funds, if they ever come. “You just don’t walk into reparations,” Olusegun says. “You have to get people’s minds around the idea first.”
By Bruce Alpert - Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Poignant new evidence that the U.S. Capitol and the White House were built largely with slave labor has sparked a bipartisan proposal to recognize the contributions of the unknown workers and may raise the temperature on debate over a national apology and reparations for the nation's long history of slavery.
Historians have long known that African-American slaves helped build both the Capitol and the White House, but work by Edward Hotaling, a historian and television reporter, recently uncovered proof that slaves constituted a majority of the 650 workers who built the structures, two of the most recognizable symbols of the nation's democratic heritage.
Hotaling found pay stubs dating from the 1790s that show payments to slave owners but nothing to the laborers. One of the stubs, dated October 1795, calls for the payment of $5 a month to Joseph Farrah for "hire of his Negro, Charles."
Construction of the Capitol was not completed until the 1860s and the White House was finished in 1800. Slavery was outlawed in Washington in 1865.
Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., chairman of the Republican Conference and the only African-American GOP House member, Wednesday called on Congress to create a task force to examine the contributions of these unpaid workers, and to recommend a permanent exhibition or memorial to mark their accomplishments.
Watts also became the first member of the GOP leadership to express support, albeit guarded, for a proposal by Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, for an official apology for slavery and a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and possible redress.
"I know some have questioned the motivation, but I know that the congressman from Ohio was motivated by his Christianity and the belief that when you do something wrong you need to apologize," Watts said.
But while the idea of a task force to recognize the work of the slaves who built the Capitol and White House has significant bipartisan support, Hall's proposal continues to face opposition from those who say an apology goes too far and those who say it isn't nearly enough.
--- Another point of view ---
Many members of Congress reflect the views of Reps. David Vitter, R- Metairie, Billy Tauzin, R-Chackbay, and John Cooksey, R-Monroe, that an apology would be hollow given that, as Vitter put it, "No one issuing the apology had anything to do with slavery in that historical period."
The three Louisiana members are quick to call slavery brutal and a permanent stain on the United States, but say an apology isn't the answer. "Far more meaningful" than an apology would be enforcing the civil rights laws and working to "purge bigotry and prejudice in our society," Tauzin said.
But Hall said Congress, which sits in a Capitol constructed by slaves, has an obligation to express remorse.
"It seems like it's an easy thing to do, but you know, we all have trouble with it," Hall said. "When we wrong each other, whether it's our wives or our best friends or somebody, when you hurt somebody, it's not an easy thing to say 'I'm sorry.' But if you don't say I'm sorry, if it's a deep wound, what happens is that this hurt lingers and it never goes away unless you settle it."
--- A good 'first step' ---
Hall, a white man and born-again Christian, first proposed an apology in 1997. It got scant support. This time, however, he has the backing of most of the congressional Black Caucus; Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, is listed as a co-sponsor. Caucus members say they were drawn to the bill by Hall's expansion of the measure to include an examination of possible areas of redress, including some form of reparations.
The Rev. Dwight Webster, pastor of Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans, said restitution must be part of America's effort to belatedly deal with slavery, noting that slaves were once promised 40 acres and a mule, but the U.S. government never acted on the promise.
"Where I was reared as a child, if something was done for which I needed to apologize, of course, the apology was forthcoming," Webster said. "But if I did something that needed restitution, that too was part of the equation."
Hall said he has heard from colleagues who do not think an apology would be enough, but he added that he has always looked it as a "first step."
"I personally believe that there ought to be some kind of restoration, some kind of restitution, whether it be scholarships, alleviation of poverty, a slave museum, acceleration of civil rights cases," Hall said.
He said he was surprised three years ago when researching the matter that he could find no evidence that the United States ever officially apologized for slavery. The closest it came was when President Clinton, during his visit to Africa in 1998, said that, "Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we were wrong in that."
--- Another alternative ---
Rhonda Miller, information officer for the New Orleans chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, said she supports a bill introduced in every session since 1989 by Rep. John Conyers, D- Mich. It acknowledges "the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity" of slavery between 1619 and 1865, and calls for creation of a commission to examine the long-term impact on African-Americans and recommend possible remedies.
Miller said that bill is succinctly written to develop a means to provide reparations.
"An apology means nothing unless you do something to prove you are sorry," Miller said.
Watts said he cannot predict whether the Hall measure, or the Conyers proposal, will ever be able to muster a majority vote. But he said that at the very least, he hopes Congress will move quickly to set up a task force to develop a permanent recognition for the slaves who built the Capitol.
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A similar measure has been introduced in the Senate by Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.
Co-Chairpersons:
Dorothy B. Lewis
Hannibal Afrik>
Release Date: IMMEDIATE
Contact: Wayne Young (202) 583-3438
Under the heading "Building One America," the 2000 Democratic National Platform includes support for H.R. 40, The Commission to Study Reparations for African Americans. This marks the first time that a major American political party has endorsed the bill that the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations America (N'COBRA) has long supported. "It represents a monumental accomplishment for Representative John Conyers, his relentless support and N'COBRA's grass-roots mobilization for the past eleven years for the most important human rights issue in America today," says N'COBRA national male co-chair Hannibal Afrik.
The Democrats' support comes only months after more than 500 people participated in N'COBRA's Town Hall meeting on June 16 during their week-long 11th annual conference in Washington, D.C. The Town Hall meeting focused on identifying the damages caused by the enslavement of African-Americans, its continuing effects, and remedies for repair. Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) was the Honorary Chairperson of the lively three-hour Town Hall meeting.
"Reparations seek to remedy the period in which at least four million of our ancestors were enslaved without compensation," said Conyers during the Town Hall meeting. Randall Robinson, president of TransAfrica and author of The Debt continued, "Blacks must understand that wealth is intergenerational" and that our ancestors were denied the opportunity to pass down the fruits of their labor to their children.
Specifically, the Platform statement reads:
Democrats believe that God has given the people of our nation not only a chance, but a mission to prove to men and women throughout this world that people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, of all faiths and creeds, cannot only work and live together, but can enrich and ennoble both themselves and our purpose. America's diversity is expanding, yet amidst important signs to progress, there is widespread evidence of persistent discrimination, growing racial segregation in our schools and neighborhoods, and dream-crushing barriers to opportunity. We cannot - we dare not - remain a divided nation. Our vision is of an America healed of hatreds and misunderstanding, with equality and opportunity so rich that legacies of discrimination and exclusion will be found only in history books, and not in our communities.
To that end, Democrats support creation of a commission of distinguished scholars and civic leaders to examine the history of slavery, discrimination, and exclusion suffered by all minorities; to report on the continuing effects of those tragic chapters in our history, and to make appropriate recommendations on behalf of the American people.
Since 1867, at least five congresspersons have introduced reparations bills including Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA). His bill called for the confiscation of Confederate property for the benefit of "slaves who have been liberated by the operations of the war and the amendment to the Constitution." Various Senators introduced subsequent reparations bills in 1896, 1898, 1899, and 1903.
Conyers has introduced H.R. 40 in Congress every year since 1989 where it has been stuck in committee. Chances of the bill coming out of a committee will be greater if the Democrats win the House of Representatives in this fall's elections. With Democrats in control, Conyers is slated to take over the powerful Judiciary committee.
However, N'COBRA female national co-chair Dorothy B. Lewis is not pinning her hopes on a Democratic victory. "I think H.R. 40 will come out of Committee anyway. Of course, I would love for Conyers to be chairman of that committee when the bill moves forward, but it is up to us to put muscle behind it."
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For more information, contact:
N'COBRA
P.O. Box 62622
Washington, D.C. 20029-2622
Telephone: (202) 635-6272
Fax: (202) 635-9060
Web Site: http://www.ncobra.com/
In recent years the issue of reparations has exploded among nations wrestling with the past. Scholars are beginning to see the German payout of $60 billion to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the United States decision to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and even Japan's awkward efforts to settle with Korean "comfort women" as bedrocks of a new political landscape.
Elazar Barkan, the chairman of the cultural studies department at Claremont Graduate University in California, contends that since the end of the cold war, the West in particular has entered a neo-Enlightenment period of political morality in which restitution increasingly plays a leading role. Political language has shifted, he writes in "The Guilt of Nations"(W.W. Norton), from machtpolitik, the politics of power, to a shared belief among nations in the rights of individuals and groups.
Consent and cooperation have become the buzzwords of global relations, Mr. Barkan says, and agreement is now being achieved through negotiation rather than force.
"Certainly the eagerness of leaders -- Clinton, Blair, Chirac, the pope -- to atone has been mocked," he said during a telephone interview. "But there is a growing sense that you have to do the right thing."
In this new era, Mr. Barkan and others argue, the issue of American reparations for slavery -- straitjacketed for decades in a kind of intellectual Bedlam -- is beginning to look sane. "For so long it was just ludicrous for black folk to even bring up the notion that they might be entitled to some just compensation," said Michael Eric Dyson, the Ida B. Wells Barnett professor of religious studies at De Paul University in Chicago. "It was simply crazy." But after so many successful reparations campaigns, including those for economic and cultural restitution to various American Indian tribes, the African-American case has gained momentum.
Every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has sponsored a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for slavery. It remains stuck in committee, but away from Capitol Hill other developments are having a significant impact on the national debate.
Black intellectuals like Randall Robinson, the president of TransAfrica, a lobbying group, and the author of "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," and the Harvard University professors Charles T. Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have publicly supported reparations. Individual cities and towns are confronting their racist pasts: some, like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Dallas, support Federal hearings on reparations while others, like Tulsa, Okla., Rosewood, Fla., and Elaine, Ark., are either considering or are paying monetary damages for past atrocities. As Mr. Dyson explains, "African-Americans themselves are beginning to be politicized around this debate."
Mr. Barkan writes that slavery remains "the most glaring example of an unaddressed historical injustice in the United States." He adds that this "stands in direct contrast with the public culture that embraces the concept of attempting to redress its imperfect past."
But opponents of reparations commonly argue that other examples of past imperfection are redressable in ways that slavery is not. In the case of the Japanese-Americans, the victims themselves were compensated for quantifiable, provable suffering at the hands of an identifiable perpetrator, the United States Government. With the descendants of slaves, this argument goes, the situation is entirely different.
It is, first of all, said to be impossible to determine the actual present-day effect of slavery -- to trace the impact of slavery on, for example, today's overwhelming incarceration rate among black males, or to calculate all those generations of lost or artificially depressed wages. Not to mention the quagmire of determining who should be compensated. All blacks? Only those who demonstrate direct linkage to a slave? Should those of mixed race be included? Or what about Oprah?
Supporters of reparations find this line of argument irrelevant. "The way I look at historical crimes or historical injustices is do the victims still suffer, whether it is the victim or the victim's descendants," Mr. Barkan says. "Another issue that's been raised is, 'Why should I pay for it, I didn't do it?' It is a foolish argument. No one is responsible personally for any wrongdoing. But just to stop the action doesn't mean to have paid for the past. The perpetrator is very clear. It's the identity of the U.S. The U.S. as an entity is responsible."
Scott L. Malcomson, the author of the forthcoming "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) points out that whites have been distancing themselves from moral culpability for slavery since as far back as the Revolutionary period. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, argued that it was the British who were to blame. Even so, many abolitionists at the time supported their own form of reparations: the establishment of a colony in Africa for freed slaves.
Although Mr. Barkan writes in "The Guilt of Nations" that national identity is a result of history, "for better and for worse," and therefore we "should pay our historical debts," Wendy Kaminer, a fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center, recently argued the opposite point. Writing in American Prospect magazine, she said that the campaign for reparations "reflects some of the premises of the aristocracy it attacks." She continued: "It allows the past to define our entitlements in the present; it relies on a belief in the justice of inheritance.
. . . If equality is a birthright, you don't have to purchase it with the sufferings of your ancestors, any more than you should be able to purchase privileges with your ancestors' achievements."
Indeed, just how the past should be used is at the crux of the debate. Ian Buruma, who has written extensively about the legacies of World War II, contends that the quest for reparations tends to mire the petitioners in the very victimization for which they seek payment, as well as encouraging a never-ending flood of restitution-seekers. "If every group that feels a historical wrong wants compensation, how far back do you go?" he asked in an interview. "It becomes problematic." As ethnic groups in the United States and elsewhere have assimilated, Mr. Buruma went on, they have tended to replace their cultural identities with the residue of past discrimination. This leads, in his view, to resentment, which undermines the possibility of mutual understanding between groups.
"Instead of identifying as an American entitled to freedoms and rights and all men created equal," he said of African-Americans seeking reparations, "you are born into an aggrieved group deserving compensation. Then that's your whole identity and you can never get out of it."
For some, the argument against reparations is simply that any kind of compensation would be wholly inappropriate and inadequate recompense, not just for slavery but also for the entire array of racial injustices that trailed in slavery's wake. As the sociologist Glenn C. Loury wrote recently in The New York Times: "Who can say what the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks would be, absent chattel slavery? How does one calculate the cost of inner-city ghettos, of poor education, of the stigma of perceived racial inferiority? The severity of slavery's 'injury' is far more profound than any cash transfer will be able to reverse."
But for proponents, the word reparations can cover a host of interventions, from cash payments -- the current equivalent of, say, 40 acres and a mule -- to a direct, official apology from the President. Some argue that affirmative action policies already in place should be considered sufficient, though Mr. Barkan responds that affirmative action aims at fixing present injustices rather than compensating for past ones.
Mr. Robinson and Mr. Ogletree, among others, have suggested that reparations be used to finance social and economic development programs for the benefit of all black Americans. In another development, a lawyer named Deadria Farmer-Paellmann is compiling evidence for lawsuits against a dozen companies that she says demonstrably benefited from the slave trade.
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Civil rights leaders are calling "despicable" a scam that lures elderly black residents -- some of whom may be descendants of slaves -- into relinquishing personal information with the false promise of reparations.
Fliers that have been sent to several thousand African-American seniors in Arkansas and North Carolina so far promise that the government will send money to people "of the black ethnic race" born before 1928 under the nonexistent "Slave Reparations Act." In return, the recipients must provide personal information, including Social Security numbers.
"Slavery and the issue of reparations is a sensitive and serious one," said Earnest Brown, Arkansas state president of the NAACP, who called identification theft a "high-tech form of taking someone's life savings."
There is currently no federal reparations program for descendants of slaves, but there is a growing movement seeking compensation for those whose families suffered under slavery. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced a bill that would create a federal commission to study reparations issue.
A 'cruel scam'
A letter aimed at Arkansas residents targets people born between 1917 and 1926 -- the so-called "notch babies" who, because of the way the program was set up, may be receiving lower Social Security payments than people born in other years. It promises recipients $5,000 apiece because of a glitch in Social Security collections.
Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor called the hoaxes a clear attempt at identity theft and a "cruel scam" that preys on the most vulnerable people.
"We believe the purpose [of the scam] is to steal identification so that they can apply for bank accounts and credit cards," said Michael Teague, spokesman for the attorney general.
The flyers were placed in retirement communities, senior centers and on the windshields of parked cars during church services.
A spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Mike Easley said there have been complaints about similar letters being distributed in the eastern section of the state.
Warning from attorney general
The letters list two post office boxes in Washington, D.C., one of which belongs to a legitimate organization called Senior Citizens League. The advocacy group, which lobbies to improve seniors' benefits, including Social Security, says it has no knowledge of the letters.
Teague said there have been a handful of cases where the recipients sent in personal information, but there are no known cases yet where someone's identity was stolen.
"We are trying to help those who sent in information protect their credit," Teague said.
The attorney general's office advises anyone receiving the letters to ignore them.
Similar hoax in Missouri
NAACP officials said the idea of luring someone whose parents may have been slaves to provide information on the basis of a false promise of reparations was extremely troubling.
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Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office, said the slavery scam bears a striking resemblance to a Missouri hoax involving real proposals to compensate descendants of lynching victims.
"If they find people tried to take advantage of someone who's gone through generations of suffering, land grabs, lynching, that is despicable," she said.
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