So long, slavery reparations

In late 2000, a new project called the Reparations Assessment Group began making preparations for lawsuits. The dollar sums mentioned were staggering. Harper's magazine estimated that it could require $97 trillion to pay for the hours of uncompensated work done during the slavery era, which would require extracting, on average, about $300,000 from every American of non-slave descent. So confident were reparationists of success that they began to map out how the court-ordered funds would be spent.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, broke this momentum with an abrupt jolt. It wasn't just that for quite a few months thereafter Americans of all races preferred to discuss issues unrelated to reparations; it was also that some of the persistent themes that ran through those days, such as national unity, individual heroism, mutual dependence and the implications of mortality were at cross-purposes with the reparations narrative. According to LexisNexis, U.S. newspapers and wire services ran nearly 2,600 stories including the words "slavery" and "reparations" in the year leading up to 9/11. Since then, the yearly average has been less than 1,000.

But that was only part of what stopped the movement. The fact is, the hoped-for mobilization of public opinion had hit a wall. Editorialists and liberal churchmen aside, only a very small share of whites supported the idea -- 5% in one poll, 4% in another -- while those opposed routinely topped 90%. The polls made it clear too that a substantial sector of black opinion quietly opposed reparations as well -- and sometimes vocally, as when author Juan Williams slammed it as "a dangerous, evil idea [that could] take American race relations on a crash course."

The issue did resurface briefly in the media in the spring of 2002, with the filing of a class-action reparations suit that demanded $1.4 trillion from eight major corporations, including Aetna, Bank of America and the railroad concern CSX. Reparations lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann and another freelancer, Richard Barber, had filed it, reportedly having grown impatient with the failure of the Reparations Assessment Group to act.

As a legal matter, the reparations claims proved desperately weak.

Consider the seemingly precedential claims arising from atrocities in wartime Europe. These suits did have several crucial advantages over slavery claims, most obviously that they arose from mistreatment of persons still or recently alive. Yet they mostly went nowhere before actual judges.

In 2005, a federal judge tossed out the Farmer-Paellmann and related reparations suits, in a decision largely upheld by the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals the next year. For most newspapers, the suit's dismissal was a back-pages story; everyone had moved on. To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time onstage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for -- a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation's perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren't it.