Question

• The Civil Rights Movement achieved all of the following EXCEPT:

	A.	reparations payments to the descendants of slaves
	B.	the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal government the right to strike down state voting regulations that were deemed discriminatory
	C.	the gradual end of official racial segregation in schools
	D.	the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring and in providing public accommodations

Answer 1

(A)

There have been no reparations payments to the descendants of slaves due to many complex reasons discussed below.

First and most important, the debt, whatever it may have been, has already been repaid. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his Second Inaugural. There he argued that it would be just if the Civil War consumed all the wealth piled up by the slaves and if every drop of slave blood drawn by the slaveholder’s whip was paid for by a drop drawn by a sword. It took the South decades, perhaps almost a century, to recover the wealth lost in the war. The lives lost on both sides of course were never recovered. It was the sacrifices of those who fought and died in the war, Lincoln announced at Gettysburg, that would make possible a new birth of freedom in the United States. Every American, regardless of color, has benefited from that sacrifice.

If Lincoln’s principled moral accounting does not suffice, we might offer a more political argument against reparations. When those arguing for these payments ask the descendants of the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans and then sold them to European slave traders to make them, then Americans might consider listening to arguments about reaparations. And if the descendants of Africans still in Africa involved in the slave trade paid reparations, then the U.S. government might consider doing the same.

But in fact, we are already paying reparations in a way. Affirmative action programs have been in place for over 30 years. They are very expensive. Federal, state and local governments spend money administering and enforcing them. Businesses spend more to make sure they are following the rules and defending themselves from administrative and legal action when someone thinks they are not. We also pay costs from increased incompetence and lower morale in the workplace.

Finally, when considering the question of reparations we should return to a point suggested by Lincoln. All blacks descended from slaves are more than compensated for the damage of slavery by the good fortune of living in the United States. Every black in the United States is much better off economically, legally, politically, and morally than any black living in Africa. This is a debt of course that all Americans, not just blacks, owe and it can only be repaid by being a good citizen.