The question of political organization versus calls for reparations assume these are at odds. I see them differently. If both are approaches to the consequences of colonial slavery for peoples of the African world, then they should be engaged in tandem, not as odd couples. Political organization or mobilization for said peoples seek to redress collectivist and current socio-political violence in the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere, but so does reparations. While reparations might suggest near-term goals—monetary compensation, apology, etc.—political organizations of various stripes have lofty goals as well—socialist democracy, plain socialism, unification of Africa under scientific socialism, and too many to name. I’m suggesting we think about political organization through reparations, that is, the root mistrust and intra-cannibalism wrought by colonial slavery and which reparations to seeks to address inhabits any sustainable political organizing or organizations which require workable levels of trust and disciplined starvation—to fight the pivot against or toward each other. Mass movements don’t work, and neither do political organizations of any stripe. Their resumes, their fragmentation—the problem of too many organizations in intramural squabbles over finite resources and equally fragmented members—borne this out. Pointless are cadre classes, ideological seminars, dogma (read: political education), or quoting of this or that revolutionary (whose resumes, when you cut away the praise poetry, looks anti-revolutionary). Mass movements and political organizations can’t work unless we address the adhesive that holds organizations together, that make them workable, and that answer the crucial question of whether organizations are means to somewhere, to something, or whether they are permanent fixtures regardless of the state of the African world?

Reparations is immediately and ultimately about coming to terms with the historic enslavement of African (diasporic) peoples, atomized as they were into statistics or painful memories, which lie and tell the truth simultaneously. Any reparatory argument for (monetary) redress has its virtues and vices, as do political organizations. In the Americas, intellectuals, politicians, activists, and even the enslaved and their U.S. descendants have been at the forefront of reparations discourse and action. Some will no doubt point out the case of an African woman named Belinda in late-eighteenth-century Massachusetts, who filed multiple court petitions for redress and was compensated at least once for her years of enslavement. But cases like hers were unexceptional at the time, and her petition was for personal rather than collective compensation.

One of ironies of abolition in Europe and the Americas is that governments volunteered to compensate slaveholders while stubbornly refusing to do likewise for the formerly enslaved. Almost a year before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln signed the DC Emancipation Act of 1862, which provided slaveholders loyal to the Union compensation of $300 for each emancipated African and $100 for each of the emancipated who opted to emigrate outside the United States. When the Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, their government compensated slaveholders at a rate of 300 Dutch guilders (= $161) for each enslaved person. By the 1860s, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) used large allocations of taxpayer monies to compensate plantation owners and slavers. The British government, through its Slave Compensation Commission, paid out over £20 million in 1833 to approximately 3,000 slaving families, and recent reports indicate that British taxpayers, including persons from Africa and the Americas, are still paying this debt! But Portugal did not compensate its slaveholders because it didn’t possess the tax base to do so; instead, when slavery was outlawed in 1869 across the Portuguese empire, it was replaced by compulsory forms of labor conscription and vagrancy laws, similar to those in colonial Africa and the United States, where such labor conscription essentially became life sentences. This practice continued into the early twentieth century. Brazil terminated slavery in 1888, and its slaveholders, like those in the U.S. South, received no compensation for “property” forfeited with the passing of abolition laws.

In the wake of the U.S. civil war, the ex-slave pension movement was born. Its story is instructive for any discussion of reparations and political organization and mobilization. Pension bills for the formerly enslaved were introduced, but these were designed as a tax-relief for the white U.S. South, wherein the legally emancipated would spend their pensions in an economically devastated region. From the 1870s, however, African and their progeny at the grassroots had their own ideas and they pushed for reparations through various politicized pension organizations. Among them, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association (MRB&PA) stands out. Based in Nashville, the MRB&PA was led Isaiah Dickerson, an educator and minister, and Callie House, a widow, mother of five, and formerly enslaved. The MRB&PA sought to petition Congress to compensate the formerly enslaved and provide for mutual aid and burial expenses. Sophisticated in their organization and lobbying tactics, the organization proposed a pension payment scale based on the age of beneficiaries, that is, people seventy and older would receive an initial payment of $500 and $15 per month until death, based on the Civil War pension scale for soldiers and similar to Belinda’s reckoning.

As the movement and its membership grew, Dickerson and House came under intense U.S. government surveillance. Specifically, the Bureau of Pensions, the Post Office Department, and the Department of Justice worked aggressively to undermine the movement. The commissioner of the Bureau of Pensions accused organizers of arousing false hopes for “reparation for historical wrongs… and distrust of the dominant race and of the Government.” Hindered by legal suits and false investigations by federal agencies, the movement was still able to get a pension bill to Congress. The bill received little attention and was filed under “indefinite postponement.” Dickerson died in 1909, and House became leader of the movement. In 1915, House helped with the Johnson v. MacAdoo case, in which plaintiff Cornelius Jones filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Treasury to recover $68 million for the emancipated. The DC Court of Appeals claimed government immunity and the Supreme Court upheld the decision, while persistent charges of mail fraud sent House to jail. Marcus Garvey arrived in Harlem in 1916 and the fate of his movement, too, would be sealed by the Post Office and other federal agencies. House died in 1928, and the momentum for the movement perished with her.

In 1963, Queen Mother Moore organized the Reparations Committee of Descendants of US Slaves. She gathered over one million signatures and presented them to President Kennedy. A year later, Malcolm X visited African countries, met with heads of state, and even attended the second Organization of African Unity meeting. On this trip, he tried to convince African leaders to support a case, inclusive of reparations, against the United States at the UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague, on behalf of peoples of African ancestry in the United States. In fear of the United States, no leader supported Malcolm’s initiative. By 1969, a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Black Panther Party, James Forman, made yet another call for reparations. For Forman, compensation for reparations amounted to half a billion dollars—later raised to $3 billion—which would be used toward establishing a “Southern land bank,” “publishing and printing industries,” “audio-visual networks,” “research skill centers,” an effort to “organize welfare workers,” and creating a “National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund.” Forman’s Black Manifesto was read to a stunned congregation at Riverside Church in New York, but Black Nationalist organizations such as the Republic of New Afrika, which made similar calls for reparations, opposed the manifesto because it targeted churches and synagogues rather than the federal government. The manifesto’s demands never materialized, though churches did fund a few proposed projects.

Over the next four decades, the discourse and efforts concerning reparations varied in tactics, approach, and outcome. In 1973, Yale law professor Boris Bittker argued for reparations based on a post-slavery caste system and payments to individuals; this remedy for injustice operated on a “restitution principle,” whereby a court could order the defendant to give up their gains to the claimant, but this presupposed the federal government would agree to allow itself to be sued. For Bittker, the focus for reparations should be confined to a period between the late-nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the 1990s, the well-known Cato v. United States case sought damages for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and an apology. The district court ruled, “As the United States has not waived its sovereign immunity with respect to any of Cato’s theories of relief that might fall within the Federal Tort Claims Act or any other source that we can identify, and under well-established principles Cato lacks standing to pursue claims in court arising out of the government’s failure to do right as she sees it, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in dismissing both complaints with prejudice.” The district court suggested Cato might seek remedy through the legislative process, but when Congressman John Conyers introduced a 1993 bill to study the effects of slavery, rather than ask for reparations, the bill failed in committee.

At the start of the new millennium, Randall Robinson argued, “The question of reparations is critical to finding a solution to our race problems.” For Robinson, reparations are a medium for intra-race problem solving, which he sees as “not merely technical in nature.” A collective demand for restitution, he continues, is part of healing and “forgiving of ourselves” as “history’s orphans.” Wary of reparations as financial restitution, Robinson concluded, “Only in the case of black people have the claims, the claimants, the crime, the law, the precedents, the awful contemporary social consequences all been roundly ignored.” Also, in the early 2000s, Robinson, Harvard law professor Charles Olgetree, and Adjoa Aiyetoro, lawyer for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, joined forces as co-chairs of the Reparations Coordinating Committee. The committee’s work, beginning with the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the reparations cases brought on its survivors’ behalf, continues with no concrete results except a plague and memorial. More recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates, like Bittker, has focused his case for reparations on “actual living African Americans” rather than enslaved Africans and their progeny. Like Congressman Conyers, he advocates studying slavery and its legacy to determine whether reparations are feasible—“some sort of official document tallying up the specific costs for some three centuries of injury” so as to “argue for a plan for payment.”

If movies and television series are any indication, racialized chattel enslavement is increasingly popular as visual consumption—the films 12 Years a Slave grossed over $187 million and Django Unchained $163 million worldwide. As such movies and mini-series (e.g., Freedom Run, Underground, and a remake of Alex Haley’s Roots) continue to profit the heirs of pillage and plunder, might there be an opportunity to transform reparations from feasibility to reality, from an overly researched topic to a revolution in consciousness and decisive action? Recent court cases for African American reparations rest on moral and legal arguments for “unjust enrichment,” but these cases and their proponents have yet to make clear their ultimate goals. Is an apology, a payoff (whether in a lump sum or installments), or race relations the only or most effective ways to frame reparations? What forms would, or should reparations take? What would recipients do if they received reparations? Who would be eligible for reparations? Which slavery or slaveries and which African diaspora could qualify? What kind or set of evidences would be drawn together to buttress the case for whatever kind of reparation is sought? And is it sensible to pursue and expect redress in the highest courts of the nations that would be on trial? Does the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, used by Ronald Reagan compensate over 100,000 people of Japanese descent held in World War II internment camps, provide any lessons for present reparations seekers? These are neither idle nor academic questions, and they are not restricted to the United States.

In parts of Africa, the call for reparations has gained traction. In the Caribbean, the president of Antigua has called for reparations from the United States, while Jamaica has recently revived its reparations commission to seek compensation or a formal apology from Britain “to heal old wounds.” This same commission is charged with developing a “financial estimate for reparations,” which is viewed as “critical to coming to terms with the lasting legacy of slavery.” Ironically, the kind of arithmetic used to transform captive Africans into kinless commodities a few centuries ago is being evoked to once again re-assign monetary value to those departed souls so that some undefined group(s) can get their just enrichment in the present. It is difficult to fathom how any apology can “heal old wounds” or how the presence or absence of financial reparations could bring one “to terms with the legacy of slavery.”

In a fascinating study by Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, the two economists argue that contemporary individuals whose ancestors were brought into Atlantic and Indian Ocean slaving show low levels of trust in their neighbors, relatives, cultural groups, and local government on account of the “slave trade,” suggesting global slaving premised on African bodies and skills disrupted not only households but also cultural norms, core beliefs, and values. The resultant “culture of mistrust” and “400 years of insecurity” lay at the feet of any attempt to organize and have sustainable efforts—in and outside of organizations—for the outstanding remedy which the African world awaits.

Further Reading

Beckles, Hilary. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide. Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2013.

Berry, Mary Frances. My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War Two. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, “The Case for Considering Reparations,” The Atlantic, 27 January 2016.

Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda E. and Anthony P. Lombardo, Reparations to Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Miller, Eric J., “Reconceiving Reparations: Multiple Strategies in the Reparations Debate,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 24 (2004): 45–79.

Miller, Jon and Rahul Kumar, eds., Reparations: Interdisciplinary Inquiries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Nunn, Nathan and Leonard Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101, no. 7 (2011): 3249–52.

Ogletree, Charles J., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 38 (2003): 279–320.

Robinson, Randall. The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. New York: Plume, 2001.

Worger, William H. “Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870-1930.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 63–86.