Reparations for Slavery
Recalculating the price of human bondage

JASON B JOHNSON / San Francisco Chronicle 14apr02

Insurance records may aid cause of slave descendants who want compensation

When Lisa Lee of Oakland began researching her family history, the last thing on her mind was the idea that she could be compensated for her ancestors' toil as slaves.

But recent legal steps in California and on the East Coast have made Lee and other African Americans think twice about the issue of slave reparations.

Last month, lawyers representing slave descendants filed class-action lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn against FleetBoston Financial Group, the insurer Aetna and railroad giant CSX. The complaints accuse the businesses of profiting from slavery and call for unspecified damages on behalf of 35 million Americans descended from slaves.

And a new California law requiring insurance companies to make public any slave-related records in their files could arm slave descendants with historical facts they could use in court.

Lee, 45, who moved to the Bay Area from Detroit in 1987, started looking up her family tree about 30 years ago after seeing an interview with "Roots" author Alex Haley. She has been able to find relatives dating back to 1760 and is beginning to think that compensation for slavery is a good idea.

"There are a lot of things to make people feel maybe now is the time," said Lee, who has discussed reparations with other members of her genealogy group. "There are a lot of people who were damaged as a result, and those scars are long-lasting."

DETERMINING SLAVES' 'VALUE'

The state law, which took effect in January, authorizes state researchers to collect data on slaveholder insurance policies issued before 1865. The researchers must tote up "the economic value of slaves in building this country."

The California Department of Insurance is collecting information from insurers that covered slave owners against slaves' deaths or injuries. On May 1, the department will publish the names of any slaveholders and slaves found in the records.

According to Duke University researchers, there were about 2,000 African Americans in California in 1852. Although slavery was outlawed in the state, many of the blacks were slaves who came with their masters and were put to work in the mines and doing other manual labor. Others were free blacks or escaped slaves who hoped to earn enough to pay for their families' freedom back in the South.

So far, the state has compiled a list of 600 slaves and slaveholders and has received several copies of actual policies. State officials expect only limited records of slavery-era policies will be found here, given that most slavery business transactions took place in the South or on the East Coast.

But backers of reparations say lawsuits could be strengthened by establishing a link between a person's direct ancestor and businesses that profited from his or her work.

"The more you see efforts to document the role of slave labor in generating vast amounts of wealth for American industry, the stronger the case for reparations becomes," said Randall Robinson, president of TransAfrica Forum, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

But critics say too much time has passed for such claims to be brought.

"When this was first brought to our attention (in March 2000), we issued an apology," said David Carter, a spokesman for Aetna. "We issued only a small number of policies."

Carter said his company bears little resemblance to the one that handled slave policies more than 140 years ago. Almost one-third of Aetna's employees are people of color, and the company has focused on increasing the percentage of money spent on minority- and women-owned contractors.

UNFULFILLED PROMISES

The call for reparations is the latest reflection of the deep rift over slavery that began with nationhood and continues as the nation's political leadership struggles to reconcile issues of race and economic, legal and medical disparities between blacks and whites.

"(Reparations demands) come about at times when people feel the issue of race is not on the national agenda, when people feel the issue of race is not being addressed," said Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University. "It's a sign of pessimism, so to speak."

Demands for reparations began at the end of the Civil War, when the government reneged on a pledge to give freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. Union military leaders had made the pledge to reward blacks who fought the Confederacy, but Congress refused to take it up after the war, and President Andrew Johnson revoked the order.

That unfulfilled "40 acres and a mule" pledge is so well-known among blacks that it is commonly displayed on hats and T-shirts as an ironic symbol of racial pride, and film director Spike Lee uses it as the name of his production company.

A group of high-profile scholars and lawyers, meanwhile, is preparing its own legal case against the federal government and unidentified businesses. The Reparations Coordinating Committee, whose members include Harvard Professors Cornel West and Charles Ogletree and lawyer Johnnie Cochran, would sue over slavery and the subsequent 100 years of legal segregation and discrimination suffered by blacks in housing, employment and banking.

In Oakland, a chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America also has held workshops and strategy sessions.

Robinson, whose novel "The Debt" helped spark the current movement, said the federal government should live up to the same standard it set for Germany for crimes committed during World War II.

"The Nazi Holocaust lasted 12 years. The American holocaust lasted 364 years," said Robinson, who spoke yesterday at a two-day symposium on reparations at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. "We've been willing to urge everybody else in the world to be willing to accept what we are not."

OPPOSITION TO LAWSUITS

Officials at CSX, the railroad company, said lawsuits are the wrong way to address a "tragic chapter" in the nation's history.

"(Slavery's) impacts cannot be attributed to any single company or industry, " the company said in a statement. "The claimants named CSX because slave labor was used to construct portions of some U.S. rail lines under the political and legal system in place more than a century before CSX was formed in 1980. Courtrooms are the wrong setting for this issue."

While such lawsuits draw big headlines, they are difficult to prove and are often dismissed in court, said Curtis Bradley, an international law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

And the rise in recent years of prominent blacks such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and Oscar-winning actors Denzel Washington and Halle Berry, has made some question African Americans' claims of bias.

"It's an attack on America. It makes the entire American story a negative one," said David Horowitz, president of the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, based in Los Angeles.

BLACKS' UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

But Lisa Lee argues that slavery makes the black experience different from that of groups that have come to America on their own. She has traced her family back through Texas to Virginia and North Carolina, where they worked as farm laborers harvesting tobacco. She has gone as far back as Elias Crawley, a slave born in Campbell County, Va., in 1805.

She was able to find much of the information in detailed property records kept by the tobacco company that employed her relatives.

"The enslavers are dead and so are the slaves," Lee said. "(But) this is part of our history. We inherit both the good and bad of our past.

"The more I've thought about it, I've started feeling that, quite honestly, I think (making reparations) is fair."

E-mail Jason B. Johnson at jbjohnson@sfchronicle.com.