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?Much Is Owed?; Slavery Apology Vote Rekindling Talk of Reparations

By Ashby Jones

Can an apology from the federal government atone for 2 1/2 centuries of slavery? Perhaps not, but that fact isn’t keeping Congress from trying.

The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution. Click here for the WaPo story.

“You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the vote. “It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice.”

The apology follows a similar apology passed last year by the House. One key difference is that the Senate version explicitly says that the resolution cannot be used in support of claims for restitution. The House is expected to revisit the issue next week to conform its resolution to the Senate version.

(The WaPo story doesn’t mention this, but we wonder if, on the issue of reparations, the Senate had in the back of its mind a recent Supreme Court case involving Hawaii. At issue: whether a Congressional apology for an 1893 American-instigated coup in Hawaii conferred property rights on modern-day descendents of native Hawaiians. The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision made in March, held that it didn’t.)

In any event, Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.), who began pushing for an apology more than a decade ago said the vote was certain not to please everyone. He said: “there are going to be African Americans who think that [the apology] is not reparations, and it’s not action, and there are going to be Caucasians who say, ‘Get over it.’ . . . I look at it as something that makes people think.”

Still, there are those out there who want reparations. Charles Ogletree, for instance, the Harvard law professor who has championed restitution, said the resolution was not a substitute for reparations. “That battle will be prolonged,” he said.

Randall Robinson, author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” said he sees the Senate’s apology as a “confession” that should lead to a next step of reparations. “Much is owed, and it is very quantifiable,” he said. “It is owed as one would owe for any labor that one has not paid for, and until steps are taken in that direction we haven’t accomplished anything.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 19, 2009 (boomark / email).