/Justice calls on the government for reperations
Hunter 19 — Tera W Hunter, a Professor of American history and African-American studies at Princeton, author of “Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century”, previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019 "When Slaveowners got Reparations," NYtimes, April 16th, Available Online at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/when-slaveowners-got-reparations.html, Accessed on 07-23-23)
The long and insistent coupling of compensation for slaveowners with emancipation is useful for consideration in current debates about reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Critics and skeptics are fond of saying that enslaved people should have asked for recompense back then. African-Americans did precisely that, going back to the colonial era. They petitioned for “freedom dues,” they sued the estates of former masters for their unrequited toil, and they asked for land to restart their lives as free men and women. Relatively few of those efforts were successful.
An overwhelming majority of white people believed that slaveowners, not enslaved African-Americans, deserved recompense for the benevolence of manumission. The only “reward” that was widely supported was colonization: a trip “back to Africa.” The act allocated $100,000 for the voluntary removal of the newly freed people (at $100 per person) to go to Liberia or Haiti, which rarely happened.
Preserving sacred property rights and moving the Negro problem offshore meant that there was no justice for enslaved African-Americans. All of the candidates running for president must support the federal government’s issuing of reparations to African-Americans who were economically affected by slavery. Justice requires this.