The Case for Reparations

[ismnotwasm]

I like this article because it directly and fairly thoroughly addresses racist loaning laws against blacks which led to the lack of inheritable wealth among other things. I learned about this in collage---taking an elective, which led to another. If I hadn't taken the elective, I wouldn't know. This isn't standard history taught, as far as I know. Yet it's so very, very important.

When whites, such as my self, hear the term "Jim Crow laws" I believe we regulate it to some part of history we had nothing to do with, and aren't responsible for, much as we do with Native Americans.

How many of us know what happened after? When hard working AA families tried to buy homes? As the article goes on it addresses problems of today--not to sound trite but how one thing led to another, all backed by now 'unfashionable racism'. And how the fight STILL continues.

On edit; while I was taking the class, affirmative action programs were being rolled back. I thought it much too early, as did the instructor, what he said in class was "time will tell"

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.



Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/