Just a few years ago, at roughly the turn of the millennium, slavery reparations seemed the coming thing. A New York Times article in June 2001 reported that the movement to obtain compensation for slaves' descendants had "taken on substantial force" and was "gaining steam" both in the nation's universities and in the black community.
All the major black organizations had signed on, including the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Randall Robinson's book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," had hit the bestseller lists in 2000. Many state and local Democratic politicians started to talk up the idea.
Then: nothing. Today, reparations seem to have completely disappeared from the national agenda. Few mention them anymore. What happened?
The idea of reparations for blacks had briefly come up at the time of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, but then was largely forgotten until 1969, when black militants, led by James Forman, began demanding a down payment of $500 million on future reparations. The brouhaha inspired liberal Yale law professor Boris Bittker to write "The Case for Black Reparations," a book that appeared in 1973 and remains well worth a look 35 years later.
Bittker examined closely, but in the end dismissed as unpromising, the idea of filing lawsuits over blacks' past maltreatment. For Bittker, it made sense to pursue reparations not through litigation but through legislation funded from government revenues. And in the years that followed, the U.S. did just that, in a way, by vastly increasing spending on social welfare, education, housing and urban programs, aimed primarily at relieving black poverty, as well as taking explicitly compensatory and race-based steps in the schools and workplace -- though these were not specifically designated as reparations.
The movement reemerged in the late 1980s. This time, its advocates came mostly from law schools and embraced what Bittker had once ruled out: lawsuits against private parties. They sought to establish links between slavery and private actors not widely regarded as tainted by it -- the more respectable, forward-minded and non-Southern these institutions, the better.
Thus it came to light that some New England insurance companies in antebellum days had collected premiums from slaveholders for policies written on slaves' lives, and elite universities such as Harvard and Brown had received major financial benefactions from slaveholders and traders. As revelations of this kind emerged, a number of businesses and universities issued apologies or pledged increased donations to black causes.
