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- Ligne n°35 :
- Ligne n°36 : Carlos Javier Ortiz
- Ligne n°37 :
- Ligne n°38 : The Case for Reparations
- Ligne n°39 :
- Ligne n°40 : Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty
- Ligne n°41 : years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing
- Ligne n°42 : policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will
- Ligne n°43 : never be whole.
- Ligne n°44 : __________________________________________________________________
- Ligne n°45 :
- Ligne n°46 :
- Ligne n°47 : Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Ligne n°48 :
- Ligne n°49 : June 2014
- Ligne n°50 : Presented by
- Ligne n°51 :
- Ligne n°52 : Chapters
- Ligne n°53 :
- Ligne n°54 : 1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- Ligne n°55 : 2. II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- Ligne n°56 : 3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- Ligne n°57 : 4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- Ligne n°58 : 5. V. The Quiet Plunder
- Ligne n°59 : 6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- Ligne n°60 : 7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- Ligne n°61 : 8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- Ligne n°62 : 9. IX. Toward A New Country
- Ligne n°63 : 10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
- Ligne n°64 :
- Ligne n°65 : * Facebook
- Ligne n°66 : * Twitter
- Ligne n°67 : * LinkedIn
- Ligne n°68 : * Email
- Ligne n°69 :
- Ligne n°70 : And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee,
- Ligne n°71 : and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him
- Ligne n°72 : go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou
- Ligne n°73 : shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out
- Ligne n°74 : of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that
- Ligne n°75 : wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.
- Ligne n°76 : And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt,
- Ligne n°77 : and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing
- Ligne n°78 : today.
- Ligne n°79 :
- Ligne n°80 : — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15
- Ligne n°81 :
- Ligne n°82 : Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from
- Ligne n°83 : the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and
- Ligne n°84 : declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a
- Ligne n°85 : noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or
- Ligne n°86 : other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in
- Ligne n°87 : which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of
- Ligne n°88 : punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek
- Ligne n°89 : reparation.
- Ligne n°90 :
- Ligne n°91 : — John Locke, “Second Treatise”
- Ligne n°92 :
- Ligne n°93 : By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the
- Ligne n°94 : soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.
- Ligne n°95 :
- Ligne n°96 : — Anonymous, 1861
- Ligne n°97 :
- Ligne n°98 : I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- Ligne n°99 :
- Ligne n°100 : Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near
- Ligne n°101 : Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned
- Ligne n°102 : and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules.
- Ligne n°103 : Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse
- Ligne n°104 : and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a
- Ligne n°105 : Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they
- Ligne n°106 : gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all
- Ligne n°107 : black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the
- Ligne n°108 : protection of the law.
- Ligne n°109 : Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North
- Ligne n°110 : Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50
- Ligne n°111 : years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied;
- Ligne n°112 : mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos
- Ligne n°113 : Javier Ortiz)
- Ligne n°114 :
- Ligne n°115 : In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a
- Ligne n°116 : kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually
- Ligne n°117 : robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the
- Ligne n°118 : poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more
- Ligne n°119 : black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You
- Ligne n°120 : and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,”
- Ligne n°121 : blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman.
- Ligne n°122 : “You do it the night before the election.”
- Ligne n°123 :
- Ligne n°124 : The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of
- Ligne n°125 : the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage,
- Ligne n°126 : under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their
- Ligne n°127 : employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were
- Ligne n°128 : advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the
- Ligne n°129 : employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often
- Ligne n°130 : were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A
- Ligne n°131 : man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave
- Ligne n°132 : injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and
- Ligne n°133 : forced labor under the state’s penal system.
- Ligne n°134 :
- Ligne n°135 : Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from
- Ligne n°136 : Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In
- Ligne n°137 : her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the
- Ligne n°138 : story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963,
- Ligne n°139 : after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell
- Ligne n°140 : nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”
- Ligne n°141 : “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club
- Ligne n°142 : in Virginia,” the AP reported.
- Ligne n°143 :
- Ligne n°144 : When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his
- Ligne n°145 : father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did
- Ligne n°146 : not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He
- Ligne n°147 : could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross
- Ligne n°148 : family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law.
- Ligne n°149 : The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the
- Ligne n°150 : cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the
- Ligne n°151 : entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.
- Ligne n°152 :
- Ligne n°153 : This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a
- Ligne n°154 : three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching
- Ligne n°155 : back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims
- Ligne n°156 : and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The
- Ligne n°157 : land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.
- Ligne n°158 : “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club
- Ligne n°159 : in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi”
- Ligne n°160 : and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”
- Ligne n°161 :
- Ligne n°162 : Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a
- Ligne n°163 : more challenging school. There was very little support for educating
- Ligne n°164 : black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of
- Ligne n°165 : Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for
- Ligne n°166 : black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should
- Ligne n°167 : attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and
- Ligne n°168 : get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a
- Ligne n°169 : school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his
- Ligne n°170 : education.
- Ligne n°171 :
- Ligne n°172 : Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his
- Ligne n°173 : only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have
- Ligne n°174 : this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s
- Ligne n°175 : father $17.
- Ligne n°176 :
- Ligne n°177 : “I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they
- Ligne n°178 : took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to
- Ligne n°179 : him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just
- Ligne n°180 : one of my losses.”
- Ligne n°181 : Sharecropper boys in 1936 (Carly Mydans/Library of Congress)
- Ligne n°182 :
- Ligne n°183 : The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages
- Ligne n°184 : treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split
- Ligne n°185 : the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would
- Ligne n°186 : often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a
- Ligne n°187 : whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might
- Ligne n°188 : get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him
- Ligne n°189 : a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by
- Ligne n°190 : mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for
- Ligne n°191 : cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay.
- Ligne n°192 : The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.
- Ligne n°193 : reporter’s notebook
- Ligne n°194 : Elegant Racism
- Ligne n°195 : “If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage
- Ligne n°196 : another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing
- Ligne n°197 : discrimination.”
- Ligne n°198 : Read more
- Ligne n°199 :
- Ligne n°200 : It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an
- Ligne n°201 : American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under
- Ligne n°202 : the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing
- Ligne n°203 : principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told
- Ligne n°204 : him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”
- Ligne n°205 :
- Ligne n°206 : Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials
- Ligne n°207 : offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to
- Ligne n°208 : take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found
- Ligne n°209 : that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the
- Ligne n°210 : streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and
- Ligne n°211 : receive service.
- Ligne n°212 :
- Ligne n°213 : Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the
- Ligne n°214 : world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that
- Ligne n°215 : tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before
- Ligne n°216 : Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the
- Ligne n°217 : Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million
- Ligne n°218 : African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its
- Ligne n°219 : second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking
- Ligne n°220 : better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were
- Ligne n°221 : fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the
- Ligne n°222 : protection of the law.
- Ligne n°223 :
- Ligne n°224 : Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as
- Ligne n°225 : a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had
- Ligne n°226 : children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the
- Ligne n°227 : vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a
- Ligne n°228 : white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or
- Ligne n°229 : avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed
- Ligne n°230 : near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of
- Ligne n°231 : entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the
- Ligne n°232 : Eisenhower years.
- Ligne n°233 :
- Ligne n°234 : In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling
- Ligne n°235 : community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a
- Ligne n°236 : predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class
- Ligne n°237 : African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community
- Ligne n°238 : was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North
- Ligne n°239 : Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move
- Ligne n°240 : into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for
- Ligne n°241 : interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought
- Ligne n°242 : around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain.
- Ligne n°243 : But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale
- Ligne n°244 : kleptocrat, were lying in wait.
- Ligne n°245 : From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were
- Ligne n°246 : largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.
- Ligne n°247 :
- Ligne n°248 : Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew
- Ligne n°249 : out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact,
- Ligne n°250 : Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller,
- Ligne n°251 : not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought
- Ligne n°252 : “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the
- Ligne n°253 : responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of
- Ligne n°254 : renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his
- Ligne n°255 : house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new
- Ligne n°256 : kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before
- Ligne n°257 : selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until
- Ligne n°258 : the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross
- Ligne n°259 : would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment,
- Ligne n°260 : he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly
- Ligne n°261 : payments, and the property itself.
- Ligne n°262 :
- Ligne n°263 : The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at
- Ligne n°264 : inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their
- Ligne n°265 : down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d
- Ligne n°266 : bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up
- Ligne n°267 : with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago
- Ligne n°268 : Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he
- Ligne n°269 : takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings
- Ligne n°270 : three or four times.”
- Ligne n°271 :
- Ligne n°272 : Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood,
- Ligne n°273 : but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available.
- Ligne n°274 : The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross.
- Ligne n°275 : From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were
- Ligne n°276 : largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means
- Ligne n°277 : both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from
- Ligne n°278 : “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods
- Ligne n°279 : segregated.
- Ligne n°280 :
- Ligne n°281 : Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934,
- Ligne n°282 : Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured
- Ligne n°283 : private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in
- Ligne n°284 : the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured
- Ligne n°285 : mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a
- Ligne n°286 : system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived
- Ligne n°287 : stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand”
- Ligne n°288 : neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner
- Ligne n°289 : or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for
- Ligne n°290 : insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and
- Ligne n°291 : were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored
- Ligne n°292 : in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their
- Ligne n°293 : social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion.
- Ligne n°294 : Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire
- Ligne n°295 : mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black
- Ligne n°296 : people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
- Ligne n°297 :
- Ligne n°298 : Explore Redlining in Chicago
- Ligne n°299 :
- Ligne n°300 : IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/holc.html?v=15
- Ligne n°301 :
- Ligne n°302 : A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of
- Ligne n°303 : Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority
- Ligne n°304 : neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing
- Ligne n°305 : “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA-backed mortgages. (Map
- Ligne n°306 : development by Frankie Dintino)
- Ligne n°307 :
- Ligne n°308 : “A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have
- Ligne n°309 : required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams,
- Ligne n°310 : the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing
- Ligne n°311 : Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy
- Ligne n°312 : that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
- Ligne n°313 :
- Ligne n°314 : The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and
- Ligne n°315 : Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
- Ligne n°316 :
- Ligne n°317 : Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth
- Ligne n°318 : accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and
- Ligne n°319 : were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to
- Ligne n°320 : central-city communities where their investments were affected by
- Ligne n°321 : the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from
- Ligne n°322 : sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities
- Ligne n°323 : deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and
- Ligne n°324 : communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
- Ligne n°325 :
- Ligne n°326 : In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the
- Ligne n°327 : American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the
- Ligne n°328 : government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders
- Ligne n°329 : who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to
- Ligne n°330 : go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing
- Ligne n°331 : attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family
- Ligne n°332 : Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”
- Ligne n°333 : reporter’s notebook
- Ligne n°334 : The American Case Against a Black Middle Class
- Ligne n°335 : “When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the
- Ligne n°336 : crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots.”
- Ligne n°337 : Read more
- Ligne n°338 :
- Ligne n°339 : The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned
- Ligne n°340 : more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his
- Ligne n°341 : estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this
- Ligne n°342 : money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde
- Ligne n°343 : Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all
- Ligne n°344 : black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody
- Ligne n°345 : who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn
- Ligne n°346 : $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in
- Ligne n°347 : 1962, “he is loafing.”
- Ligne n°348 :
- Ligne n°349 : Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.
- Ligne n°350 :
- Ligne n°351 : Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the
- Ligne n°352 : emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his
- Ligne n°353 : community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked
- Ligne n°354 : him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.
- Ligne n°355 :
- Ligne n°356 : “We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that
- Ligne n°357 : ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His
- Ligne n°358 : glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of
- Ligne n°359 : Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in
- Ligne n°360 : another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I
- Ligne n°361 : was.
- Ligne n°362 :
- Ligne n°363 : “When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this
- Ligne n°364 : mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get
- Ligne n°365 : cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some
- Ligne n°366 : people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought,
- Ligne n°367 : ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my
- Ligne n°368 : kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the
- Ligne n°369 : cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.”
- Ligne n°370 : Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took
- Ligne n°371 : them for money and for sport.
- Ligne n°372 :
- Ligne n°373 : But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract
- Ligne n°374 : Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and
- Ligne n°375 : West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of
- Ligne n°376 : predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to
- Ligne n°377 : pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There
- Ligne n°378 : was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a
- Ligne n°379 : mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of
- Ligne n°380 : thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge.
- Ligne n°381 : Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their
- Ligne n°382 : clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about
- Ligne n°383 : properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer
- Ligne n°384 : responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as
- Ligne n°385 : real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided
- Ligne n°386 : their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.
- Ligne n°387 :
- Ligne n°388 : The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually
- Ligne n°389 : number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators
- Ligne n°390 : lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and
- Ligne n°391 : informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They
- Ligne n°392 : refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in
- Ligne n°393 : an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract
- Ligne n°394 : sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a
- Ligne n°395 : manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust
- Ligne n°396 : profits.”
- Ligne n°397 : The story of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League
- Ligne n°398 :
- Ligne n°399 : In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under
- Ligne n°400 : the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers
- Ligne n°401 : for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid
- Ligne n°402 : for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a
- Ligne n°403 : “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation.
- Ligne n°404 : Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had
- Ligne n°405 : “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this
- Ligne n°406 : action.”
- Ligne n°407 :
- Ligne n°408 : Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the
- Ligne n°409 : government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of
- Ligne n°410 : a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime
- Ligne n°411 : against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such.
- Ligne n°412 : They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society.
- Ligne n°413 : And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by
- Ligne n°414 : said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were
- Ligne n°415 : no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking
- Ligne n°416 : reparations.
- Ligne n°417 :
- Ligne n°418 : II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- Ligne n°419 :
- Ligne n°420 : According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the
- Ligne n°421 : wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its
- Ligne n°422 : population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of
- Ligne n°423 : “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its
- Ligne n°424 : homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole.
- Ligne n°425 : The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national
- Ligne n°426 : average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below
- Ligne n°427 : the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of
- Ligne n°428 : all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the
- Ligne n°429 : city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking
- Ligne n°430 : 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about
- Ligne n°431 : their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits
- Ligne n°432 : directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
- Ligne n°433 :
- Ligne n°434 : North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black
- Ligne n°435 : Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said
- Ligne n°436 : that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per
- Ligne n°437 : capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times
- Ligne n°438 : that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J.
- Ligne n°439 : Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great
- Ligne n°440 : American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the
- Ligne n°441 : highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than
- Ligne n°442 : 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate
- Ligne n°443 : (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for
- Ligne n°444 : community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind,
- Ligne n°445 : not degree.”
- Ligne n°446 :
- Ligne n°447 : Interactive Census Map
- Ligne n°448 :
- Ligne n°449 : IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/index.html?v=15
- Ligne n°450 :
- Ligne n°451 : Explore race, unemployment, and vacancy rates over seven decades in
- Ligne n°452 : Chicago. (Map design and development by Frankie Dintino)
- Ligne n°453 :
- Ligne n°454 : In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black
- Ligne n°455 : neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed
- Ligne n°456 : by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically
- Ligne n°457 : distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,”
- Ligne n°458 : writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.”
- Ligne n°459 :
- Ligne n°460 : The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century
- Ligne n°461 : ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black
- Ligne n°462 : poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record
- Ligne n°463 : lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has
- Ligne n°464 : shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation,
- Ligne n°465 : and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white
- Ligne n°466 : households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick
- Ligne n°467 : Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born
- Ligne n°468 : from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62
- Ligne n°469 : percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods.
- Ligne n°470 : A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had
- Ligne n°471 : changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to
- Ligne n°472 : remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.
- Ligne n°473 :
- Ligne n°474 : This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are
- Ligne n°475 : significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center
- Ligne n°476 : estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as
- Ligne n°477 : black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero
- Ligne n°478 : or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the
- Ligne n°479 : black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial
- Ligne n°480 : calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is
- Ligne n°481 : precipitous.
- Ligne n°482 :
- Ligne n°483 : And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack
- Ligne n°484 : of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice
- Ligne n°485 : of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not
- Ligne n°486 : generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research
- Ligne n°487 : shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds
- Ligne n°488 : of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks
- Ligne n°489 : and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that
- Ligne n°490 : it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white
- Ligne n°491 : children.”
- Ligne n°492 : A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored
- Ligne n°493 : man of means who was giving his children a college education.”
- Ligne n°494 :
- Ligne n°495 : The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work
- Ligne n°496 : their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of
- Ligne n°497 : watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.
- Ligne n°498 :
- Ligne n°499 : Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012,
- Ligne n°500 : the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined
- Ligne n°501 : since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the
- Ligne n°502 : most segregated ethnic group in the country.
- Ligne n°503 :
- Ligne n°504 : With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed,
- Ligne n°505 : comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might
- Ligne n°506 : see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no
- Ligne n°507 : particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of
- Ligne n°508 : poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting
- Ligne n°509 : conflagration has been devastating.
- Ligne n°510 :
- Ligne n°511 : One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that
- Ligne n°512 : these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that
- Ligne n°513 : can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior.
- Ligne n°514 : (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence
- Ligne n°515 : among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men
- Ligne n°516 : making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end
- Ligne n°517 : up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably
- Ligne n°518 : fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one
- Ligne n°519 : wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is
- Ligne n°520 : as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of
- Ligne n°521 : trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected
- Ligne n°522 : can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The
- Ligne n°523 : essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim
- Ligne n°524 : numbers, we see the grim inheritance.
- Ligne n°525 :
- Ligne n°526 : The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies
- Ligne n°527 : took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s
- Ligne n°528 : long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one
- Ligne n°529 : legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and
- Ligne n°530 : patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league
- Ligne n°531 : lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved
- Ligne n°532 : hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts
- Ligne n°533 : about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when
- Ligne n°534 : asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl
- Ligne n°535 : Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
- Ligne n°536 : An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country,
- Ligne n°537 : with no particular bias toward skin color.
- Ligne n°538 :
- Ligne n°539 : The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades
- Ligne n°540 : have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s.
- Ligne n°541 : Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack
- Ligne n°542 : Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his
- Ligne n°543 : daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He
- Ligne n°544 : answered in the negative.
- Ligne n°545 :
- Ligne n°546 : The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average
- Ligne n°547 : American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest
- Ligne n°548 : of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won
- Ligne n°549 : by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha
- Ligne n°550 : Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But
- Ligne n°551 : that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they
- Ligne n°552 : compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of
- Ligne n°553 : privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will
- Ligne n°554 : be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad
- Ligne n°555 : equality.
- Ligne n°556 :
- Ligne n°557 : IFRAME: //www.theatlantic.com/galleries/reparations/1/?layout=features
- Ligne n°558 :
- Ligne n°559 : III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- Ligne n°560 :
- Ligne n°561 : In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of
- Ligne n°562 : Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day
- Ligne n°563 : Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured
- Ligne n°564 : the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac
- Ligne n°565 : Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the
- Ligne n°566 : country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century
- Ligne n°567 : of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:
- Ligne n°568 :
- Ligne n°569 : The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time,
- Ligne n°570 : and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by
- Ligne n°571 : the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that
- Ligne n°572 : immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own
- Ligne n°573 : industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
- Ligne n°574 :
- Ligne n°575 : WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a
- Ligne n°576 : body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward
- Ligne n°577 : of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that
- Ligne n°578 : such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall,
- Ligne n°579 : as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in
- Ligne n°580 : the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and
- Ligne n°581 : downward path of their lives.
- Ligne n°582 :
- Ligne n°583 : Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to
- Ligne n°584 : be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest
- Ligne n°585 : successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black
- Ligne n°586 : people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and
- Ligne n°587 : the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the
- Ligne n°588 : national consensus, at least not outrageous.
- Ligne n°589 : Click the image above to view the full document.
- Ligne n°590 :
- Ligne n°591 : “A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions
- Ligne n°592 : committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John
- Ligne n°593 : Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals
- Ligne n°594 : were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to
- Ligne n°595 : them.”
- Ligne n°596 :
- Ligne n°597 : As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this
- Ligne n°598 : country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected.
- Ligne n°599 : Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make
- Ligne n°600 : “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782,
- Ligne n°601 : the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350
- Ligne n°602 : acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for
- Ligne n°603 : their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,”
- Ligne n°604 : wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in
- Ligne n°605 : the kingdom of men.’ ”
- Ligne n°606 : Click the image above to view the full document.
- Ligne n°607 :
- Ligne n°608 : Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder
- Ligne n°609 : through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a
- Ligne n°610 : plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s,
- Ligne n°611 : willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all
- Ligne n°612 : those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to
- Ligne n°613 : all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that
- Ligne n°614 : I have been the owner of one.”
- Ligne n°615 :
- Ligne n°616 : In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a
- Ligne n°617 : disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:
- Ligne n°618 :
- Ligne n°619 : Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.”
- Ligne n°620 :
- Ligne n°621 : Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?”
- Ligne n°622 :
- Ligne n°623 : In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse
- Ligne n°624 : cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who
- Ligne n°625 : believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black
- Ligne n°626 : activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother”
- Ligne n°627 : Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement
- Ligne n°628 : coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National
- Ligne n°629 : Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP
- Ligne n°630 : endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at
- Ligne n°631 : Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.
- Ligne n°632 :
- Ligne n°633 : But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the
- Ligne n°634 : response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have
- Ligne n°635 : been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They
- Ligne n°636 : have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English
- Ligne n°637 : language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with
- Ligne n°638 : the ex‑slaves.”
- Ligne n°639 :
- Ligne n°640 : Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not
- Ligne n°641 : left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a
- Ligne n°642 : second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic
- Ligne n°643 : associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into
- Ligne n°644 : ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated.
- Ligne n°645 : Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and
- Ligne n°646 : the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion
- Ligne n°647 : that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets
- Ligne n°648 : remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped
- Ligne n°649 : away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.”
- Ligne n°650 : But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card
- Ligne n°651 : bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the
- Ligne n°652 : balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest
- Ligne n°653 : accruing daily, are all around us.
- Ligne n°654 :
- Ligne n°655 : Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions
- Ligne n°656 : inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who
- Ligne n°657 : will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations
- Ligne n°658 : are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the
- Ligne n°659 : beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John
- Ligne n°660 : Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session
- Ligne n°661 : of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of
- Ligne n°662 : slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for
- Ligne n°663 : “appropriate remedies.”
- Ligne n°664 :
- Ligne n°665 : A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy
- Ligne n°666 : solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study
- Ligne n°667 : Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this
- Ligne n°668 : bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible
- Ligne n°669 : solutions. But we are not interested.
- Ligne n°670 : reporter’s notebook
- Ligne n°671 : What We Should Be Asking About Reparations
- Ligne n°672 : “Any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how
- Ligne n°673 : several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding
- Ligne n°674 : themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.”
- Ligne n°675 : Read more
- Ligne n°676 :
- Ligne n°677 : “It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who
- Ligne n°678 : helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are
- Ligne n°679 : considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying
- Ligne n°680 : [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study
- Ligne n°681 : the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not
- Ligne n°682 : authorize one red cent to anyone.”
- Ligne n°683 :
- Ligne n°684 : That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to
- Ligne n°685 : the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the
- Ligne n°686 : impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we
- Ligne n°687 : conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are
- Ligne n°688 : not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a
- Ligne n°689 : community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then
- Ligne n°690 : what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?
- Ligne n°691 :
- Ligne n°692 : One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing
- Ligne n°693 : the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral
- Ligne n°694 : immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time.
- Ligne n°695 : The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To
- Ligne n°696 : proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la
- Ligne n°697 : carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when
- Ligne n°698 : Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s
- Ligne n°699 : rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took
- Ligne n°700 : us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If
- Ligne n°701 : Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally
- Ligne n°702 : Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so
- Ligne n°703 : must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
- Ligne n°704 : Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of
- Ligne n°705 : neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
- Ligne n°706 :
- Ligne n°707 : In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that
- Ligne n°708 : “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful
- Ligne n°709 : members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was
- Ligne n°710 : lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching
- Ligne n°711 : era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still
- Ligne n°712 : live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange
- Ligne n°713 : and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the
- Ligne n°714 : bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops
- Ligne n°715 : the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a
- Ligne n°716 : delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.
- Ligne n°717 :
- Ligne n°718 : There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our
- Ligne n°719 : ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy
- Ligne n°720 : Dwight said in 1810.
- Ligne n°721 :
- Ligne n°722 : We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are
- Ligne n°723 : bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we
- Ligne n°724 : are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the
- Ligne n°725 : Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact
- Ligne n°726 : the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to
- Ligne n°727 : entail upon them a curse.
- Ligne n°728 :
- Ligne n°729 : IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- Ligne n°730 :
- Ligne n°731 : America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that
- Ligne n°732 : are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to
- Ligne n°733 : found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality,
- Ligne n°734 : either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,”
- Ligne n°735 : the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely
- Ligne n°736 : comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for
- Ligne n°737 : it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment
- Ligne n°738 : to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not
- Ligne n°739 : unconnected.”
- Ligne n°740 : Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy
- Ligne n°741 : H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress)
- Ligne n°742 :
- Ligne n°743 : When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their
- Ligne n°744 : families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of
- Ligne n°745 : Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that
- Ligne n°746 : would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them
- Ligne n°747 : intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants
- Ligne n°748 : who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying
- Ligne n°749 : under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.
- Ligne n°750 :
- Ligne n°751 : One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining
- Ligne n°752 : forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English
- Ligne n°753 : colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to
- Ligne n°754 : Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with
- Ligne n°755 : intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged,
- Ligne n°756 : tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the
- Ligne n°757 : same manner as slaves.
- Ligne n°758 :
- Ligne n°759 : This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was
- Ligne n°760 : boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the
- Ligne n°761 : colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even
- Ligne n°762 : more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were
- Ligne n°763 : still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain
- Ligne n°764 : protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted
- Ligne n°765 : from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s
- Ligne n°766 : indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of
- Ligne n°767 : only minimal resistance.
- Ligne n°768 :
- Ligne n°769 : For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a
- Ligne n°770 : class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens.
- Ligne n°771 : In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to
- Ligne n°772 : carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who
- Ligne n°773 : married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705,
- Ligne n°774 : the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of
- Ligne n°775 : unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white
- Ligne n°776 : servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that
- Ligne n°777 : same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now
- Ligne n°778 : belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and
- Ligne n°779 : sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of
- Ligne n°780 : the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people
- Ligne n°781 : alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down
- Ligne n°782 : Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th
- Ligne n°783 : century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.
- Ligne n°784 :
- Ligne n°785 : “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but
- Ligne n°786 : white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator,
- Ligne n°787 : declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as
- Ligne n°788 : well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and
- Ligne n°789 : treated as equals.”
- Ligne n°790 :
- Ligne n°791 : In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and
- Ligne n°792 : Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about
- Ligne n°793 : one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line.
- Ligne n°794 : The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia,
- Ligne n°795 : where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in
- Ligne n°796 : chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and
- Ligne n°797 : upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic
- Ligne n°798 : world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white
- Ligne n°799 : income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave
- Ligne n°800 : labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this
- Ligne n°801 : slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across
- Ligne n°802 : the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic
- Ligne n°803 : transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever
- Ligne n°804 : says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm,
- Ligne n°805 : “says cotton.”
- Ligne n°806 : In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known
- Ligne n°807 : illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated
- Ligne n°808 : at a slave auction. (Library of Congress)
- Ligne n°809 :
- Ligne n°810 : The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves
- Ligne n°811 : pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as
- Ligne n°812 : an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of
- Ligne n°813 : the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put
- Ligne n°814 : together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were
- Ligne n°815 : the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire
- Ligne n°816 : American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money
- Ligne n°817 : congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even
- Ligne n°818 : more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid
- Ligne n°819 : with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely
- Ligne n°820 : death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were
- Ligne n°821 : taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of
- Ligne n°822 : the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have
- Ligne n°823 : brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860
- Ligne n°824 : there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than
- Ligne n°825 : anywhere else in the country.
- Ligne n°826 :
- Ligne n°827 : Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread
- Ligne n°828 : that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my
- Ligne n°829 : dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We
- Ligne n°830 : constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very
- Ligne n°831 : strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”
- Ligne n°832 :
- Ligne n°833 : Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some
- Ligne n°834 : parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or
- Ligne n°835 : her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a
- Ligne n°836 : first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.
- Ligne n°837 :
- Ligne n°838 : When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond,
- Ligne n°839 : Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who
- Ligne n°840 : might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
- Ligne n°841 :
- Ligne n°842 : The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along
- Ligne n°843 : which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to
- Ligne n°844 : pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was
- Ligne n°845 : about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of
- Ligne n°846 : little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should
- Ligne n°847 : I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me,
- Ligne n°848 : exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me
- Ligne n°849 : good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which
- Ligne n°850 : my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O,
- Ligne n°851 : reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring
- Ligne n°852 : the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to
- Ligne n°853 : where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her
- Ligne n°854 : farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I
- Ligne n°855 : remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand
- Ligne n°856 : grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not
- Ligne n°857 : speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
- Ligne n°858 :
- Ligne n°859 : In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked
- Ligne n°860 : freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of
- Ligne n°861 : murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the
- Ligne n°862 : for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any
- Ligne n°863 : people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s
- Ligne n°864 : rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America
- Ligne n°865 : created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.
- Ligne n°866 : The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed.
- Ligne n°867 : America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the
- Ligne n°868 : realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love
- Ligne n°869 : of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in
- Ligne n°870 : Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can
- Ligne n°871 : profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of
- Ligne n°872 : the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being
- Ligne n°873 : there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
- Ligne n°874 :
- Ligne n°875 : V. The Quiet Plunder
- Ligne n°876 :
- Ligne n°877 : The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black
- Ligne n°878 : families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today,
- Ligne n°879 : slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned
- Ligne n°880 : slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss
- Ligne n°881 : the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders
- Ligne n°882 : traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor,
- Ligne n°883 : and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to
- Ligne n°884 : a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De
- Ligne n°885 : Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits
- Ligne n°886 : from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black
- Ligne n°887 : America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who
- Ligne n°888 : sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what
- Ligne n°889 : would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all
- Ligne n°890 : American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
- Ligne n°891 : Click the image above to view the full document.
- Ligne n°892 :
- Ligne n°893 : “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John
- Ligne n°894 : Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon
- Ligne n°895 : African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of
- Ligne n°896 : our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest
- Ligne n°897 : blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a
- Ligne n°898 : favored nation.”
- Ligne n°899 :
- Ligne n°900 : In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to
- Ligne n°901 : reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal
- Ligne n°902 : equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led
- Ligne n°903 : by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society
- Ligne n°904 : “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism
- Ligne n°905 : roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner
- Ligne n°906 : recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing
- Ligne n°907 : their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying
- Ligne n°908 : church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor
- Ligne n°909 : contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the
- Ligne n°910 : attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”
- Ligne n°911 :
- Ligne n°912 : Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in
- Ligne n°913 : 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political
- Ligne n°914 : violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted
- Ligne n°915 : out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were
- Ligne n°916 : burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who
- Ligne n°917 : attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At
- Ligne n°918 : the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were
- Ligne n°919 : assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization
- Ligne n°920 : of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into
- Ligne n°921 : competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a
- Ligne n°922 : succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from
- Ligne n°923 : Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white
- Ligne n°924 : violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob
- Ligne n°925 : leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the
- Ligne n°926 : black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
- Ligne n°927 : A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in
- Ligne n°928 : Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the
- Ligne n°929 : other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy.
- Ligne n°930 :
- Ligne n°931 : The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that
- Ligne n°932 : extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New
- Ligne n°933 : Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government
- Ligne n°934 : should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the
- Ligne n°935 : afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to
- Ligne n°936 : express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the
- Ligne n°937 : accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely
- Ligne n°938 : note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced
- Ligne n°939 : it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.
- Ligne n°940 :
- Ligne n°941 : “The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and
- Ligne n°942 : political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator
- Ligne n°943 : America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that
- Ligne n°944 : collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed
- Ligne n°945 : under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to
- Ligne n°946 : protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security
- Ligne n°947 : proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and
- Ligne n°948 : domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt
- Ligne n°949 : signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African
- Ligne n°950 : Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were
- Ligne n°951 : ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a
- Ligne n°952 : sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall
- Ligne n°953 : through.”
- Ligne n°954 :
- Ligne n°955 : The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by
- Ligne n°956 : mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy.
- Ligne n°957 : Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to
- Ligne n°958 : give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to
- Ligne n°959 : tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as
- Ligne n°960 : well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant
- Ligne n°961 : mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her
- Ligne n°962 : 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from
- Ligne n°963 : receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say
- Ligne n°964 : that blacks could not use this particular title.”
- Ligne n°965 :
- Ligne n°966 : In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling
- Ligne n°967 : patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who
- Ligne n°968 : owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt,
- Ligne n°969 : who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various
- Ligne n°970 : Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”
- Ligne n°971 :
- Ligne n°972 : But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated
- Ligne n°973 : throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black
- Ligne n°974 : family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests
- Ligne n°975 : and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill
- Ligne n°976 : Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see
- Ligne n°977 : $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
- Ligne n°978 :
- Ligne n°979 : The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were
- Ligne n°980 : from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved
- Ligne n°981 : next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’
- Ligne n°982 : property values would decline.
- Ligne n°983 : In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a
- Ligne n°984 : demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans
- Ligne n°985 : to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
- Ligne n°986 :
- Ligne n°987 : Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a
- Ligne n°988 : large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the
- Ligne n°989 : creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the
- Ligne n°990 : Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to
- Ligne n°991 : offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20
- Ligne n°992 : to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market,
- Ligne n°993 : massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J.
- Ligne n°994 : Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only
- Ligne n°995 : 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60
- Ligne n°996 : percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American
- Ligne n°997 : citizenship.”
- Ligne n°998 :
- Ligne n°999 : That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate
- Ligne n°1000 : industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950,
- Ligne n°1001 : the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned
- Ligne n°1002 : that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a
- Ligne n°1003 : neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose
- Ligne n°1004 : presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943
- Ligne n°1005 : brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include
- Ligne n°1006 : madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was
- Ligne n°1007 : giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled
- Ligne n°1008 : to live among whites.”
- Ligne n°1009 :
- Ligne n°1010 : The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan
- Ligne n°1011 : Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the
- Ligne n°1012 : practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that
- Ligne n°1013 : any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause
- Ligne n°1014 : in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than
- Ligne n°1015 : whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated
- Ligne n°1016 : white neighborhoods.
- Ligne n°1017 : One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every
- Ligne n°1018 : time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
- Ligne n°1019 :
- Ligne n°1020 : “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the
- Ligne n°1021 : discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T.
- Ligne n°1022 : Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of
- Ligne n°1023 : suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and
- Ligne n°1024 : individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public
- Ligne n°1025 : policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan
- Ligne n°1026 : guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the
- Ligne n°1027 : Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining
- Ligne n°1028 : by banks have continued.
- Ligne n°1029 :
- Ligne n°1030 : The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its
- Ligne n°1031 : citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as
- Ligne n°1032 : the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who
- Ligne n°1033 : repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in
- Ligne n°1034 : return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the
- Ligne n°1035 : society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the
- Ligne n°1036 : end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet,
- Ligne n°1037 : systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of
- Ligne n°1038 : New Deal liberals.
- Ligne n°1039 :
- Ligne n°1040 : VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- Ligne n°1041 :
- Ligne n°1042 : Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a
- Ligne n°1043 : fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white
- Ligne n°1044 : supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city
- Ligne n°1045 : founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long
- Ligne n°1046 : been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago
- Ligne n°1047 : Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied
- Ligne n°1048 : to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled
- Ligne n°1049 : against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue
- Ligne n°1050 : its agenda by more-discreet means.
- Ligne n°1051 :
- Ligne n°1052 : Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing
- Ligne n°1053 : Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which
- Ligne n°1054 : helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving
- Ligne n°1055 : federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in
- Ligne n°1056 : the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all
- Ligne n°1057 : residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to
- Ligne n°1058 : blacks.
- Ligne n°1059 :
- Ligne n°1060 : It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto,
- Ligne n°1061 : where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and
- Ligne n°1062 : steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the
- Ligne n°1063 : unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions
- Ligne n°1064 : endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and
- Ligne n°1065 : ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black
- Ligne n°1066 : people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.
- Ligne n°1067 :
- Ligne n°1068 : In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while
- Ligne n°1069 : permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other
- Ligne n°1070 : weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given
- Ligne n°1071 : Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public
- Ligne n°1072 : housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new
- Ligne n°1073 : federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other
- Ligne n°1074 : cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public
- Ligne n°1075 : housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s,
- Ligne n°1076 : the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian
- Ligne n°1077 : Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black
- Ligne n°1078 : Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family
- Ligne n°1079 : public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s
- Ligne n°1080 : were built in all-black neighborhoods.
- Ligne n°1081 :
- Ligne n°1082 : Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism
- Ligne n°1083 : of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black
- Ligne n°1084 : encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of
- Ligne n°1085 : enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They
- Ligne n°1086 : lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a
- Ligne n°1087 : group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to
- Ligne n°1088 : “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And
- Ligne n°1089 : when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when
- Ligne n°1090 : private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old
- Ligne n°1091 : tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of
- Ligne n°1092 : terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in
- Ligne n°1093 : the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.”
- Ligne n°1094 : On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park
- Ligne n°1095 : Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved
- Ligne n°1096 : in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The
- Ligne n°1097 : doctor moved away.
- Ligne n°1098 :
- Ligne n°1099 : In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of
- Ligne n°1100 : Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked
- Ligne n°1101 : blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union
- Ligne n°1102 : meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home
- Ligne n°1103 : was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be
- Ligne n°1104 : sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of
- Ligne n°1105 : whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked
- Ligne n°1106 : an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing
- Ligne n°1107 : bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on
- Ligne n°1108 : fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and
- Ligne n°1109 : instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white
- Ligne n°1110 : owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with
- Ligne n°1111 : conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites
- Ligne n°1112 : picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from
- Ligne n°1113 : downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.
- Ligne n°1114 : The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was
- Ligne n°1115 : one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a
- Ligne n°1116 : major city. (Associated Press)
- Ligne n°1117 :
- Ligne n°1118 : When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the
- Ligne n°1119 : neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind
- Ligne n°1120 : of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a
- Ligne n°1121 : triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist
- Ligne n°1122 : presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any
- Ligne n°1123 : nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as
- Ligne n°1124 : a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with
- Ligne n°1125 : the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century
- Ligne n°1126 : white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers
- Ligne n°1127 : decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist
- Ligne n°1128 : dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on
- Ligne n°1129 : market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment
- Ligne n°1130 : wherever black people lived.
- Ligne n°1131 :
- Ligne n°1132 : VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- Ligne n°1133 :
- Ligne n°1134 : Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos,
- Ligne n°1135 : knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to
- Ligne n°1136 : “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the
- Ligne n°1137 : neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and
- Ligne n°1138 : down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a
- Ligne n°1139 : number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole
- Ligne n°1140 : whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks
- Ligne n°1141 : who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so
- Ligne n°1142 : better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators
- Ligne n°1143 : then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as
- Ligne n°1144 : part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the
- Ligne n°1145 : ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap
- Ligne n°1146 : through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
- Ligne n°1147 :
- Ligne n°1148 : To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a
- Ligne n°1149 : second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.
- Ligne n°1150 : His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of
- Ligne n°1151 : his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to
- Ligne n°1152 : supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time
- Ligne n°1153 : that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white
- Ligne n°1154 : speculators.
- Ligne n°1155 :
- Ligne n°1156 : “The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you
- Ligne n°1157 : can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right
- Ligne n°1158 : kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this
- Ligne n°1159 : neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My
- Ligne n°1160 : kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I
- Ligne n°1161 : couldn’t keep them in there.”
- Ligne n°1162 :
- Ligne n°1163 : Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s,
- Ligne n°1164 : when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job
- Ligne n°1165 : as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she
- Ligne n°1166 : worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel
- Ligne n°1167 : Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50
- Ligne n°1168 : years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active
- Ligne n°1169 : with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner
- Ligne n°1170 : restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale,
- Ligne n°1171 : banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing
- Ligne n°1172 : Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an
- Ligne n°1173 : organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in
- Ligne n°1174 : 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James
- Ligne n°1175 : Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic
- Ligne n°1176 : back in 1972.
- Ligne n°1177 : Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April
- Ligne n°1178 : 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League.
- Ligne n°1179 :
- Ligne n°1180 : Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started
- Ligne n°1181 : moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are
- Ligne n°1182 : coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to
- Ligne n°1183 : blacks.”
- Ligne n°1184 :
- Ligne n°1185 : Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to
- Ligne n°1186 : Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just
- Ligne n°1187 : sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You
- Ligne n°1188 : know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t
- Ligne n°1189 : going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ”
- Ligne n°1190 :
- Ligne n°1191 : In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They
- Ligne n°1192 : were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim
- Ligne n°1193 : Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white
- Ligne n°1194 : people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house.
- Ligne n°1195 : And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black
- Ligne n°1196 : people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it
- Ligne n°1197 : is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept
- Ligne n°1198 : us. That’s just the way it is.’
- Ligne n°1199 :
- Ligne n°1200 : “The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they
- Ligne n°1201 : wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If
- Ligne n°1202 : everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white
- Ligne n°1203 : people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in
- Ligne n°1204 : the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I
- Ligne n°1205 : wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.”
- Ligne n°1206 : White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social
- Ligne n°1207 : engineering.
- Ligne n°1208 :
- Ligne n°1209 : Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the
- Ligne n°1210 : difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I
- Ligne n°1211 : would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’
- Ligne n°1212 : And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it
- Ligne n°1213 : costs us so much more.’ ”
- Ligne n°1214 :
- Ligne n°1215 : I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.
- Ligne n°1216 :
- Ligne n°1217 : “You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that
- Ligne n°1218 : payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”
- Ligne n°1219 :
- Ligne n°1220 : “You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,”
- Ligne n°1221 : Weatherspoon interjected.
- Ligne n°1222 : Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it
- Ligne n°1223 : in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos
- Ligne n°1224 : Javier Ortiz)
- Ligne n°1225 :
- Ligne n°1226 : “You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said
- Ligne n°1227 : Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a
- Ligne n°1228 : dancer and my other wanted to take music.”
- Ligne n°1229 :
- Ligne n°1230 : Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The
- Ligne n°1231 : suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers
- Ligne n°1232 : to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers
- Ligne n°1233 : League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses
- Ligne n°1234 : outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with
- Ligne n°1235 : Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny
- Ligne n°1236 : minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our
- Ligne n°1237 : exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel
- Ligne n°1238 : Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many
- Ligne n°1239 : thousands gone.
- Ligne n°1240 : Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract
- Ligne n°1241 : Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media)
- Ligne n°1242 :
- Ligne n°1243 : “A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me
- Ligne n°1244 : if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you
- Ligne n°1245 : out.’ ”
- Ligne n°1246 :
- Ligne n°1247 : VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- Ligne n°1248 :
- Ligne n°1249 : On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar
- Ligne n°1250 : Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black
- Ligne n°1251 : Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in
- Ligne n°1252 : his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale
- Ligne n°1253 : whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and
- Ligne n°1254 : college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old
- Ligne n°1255 : son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him
- Ligne n°1256 : up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some
- Ligne n°1257 : things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”
- Ligne n°1258 :
- Ligne n°1259 : Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it
- Ligne n°1260 : is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four
- Ligne n°1261 : times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The
- Ligne n°1262 : stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to
- Ligne n°1263 : go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here
- Ligne n°1264 : were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.”
- Ligne n°1265 :
- Ligne n°1266 : Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still
- Ligne n°1267 : working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice
- Ligne n°1268 : neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space
- Ligne n°1269 : is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t
- Ligne n°1270 : need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing
- Ligne n°1271 : sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises
- Ligne n°1272 : and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have
- Ligne n°1273 : nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You
- Ligne n°1274 : don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.”
- Ligne n°1275 : Visit North Lawndale today with Billy Brooks
- Ligne n°1276 :
- Ligne n°1277 : We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men
- Ligne n°1278 : were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men:
- Ligne n°1279 : In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The
- Ligne n°1280 : name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival
- Ligne n°1281 : group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow
- Ligne n°1282 : to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make
- Ligne n°1283 : an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of
- Ligne n°1284 : these young men as boys.
- Ligne n°1285 :
- Ligne n°1286 : “That’s their corner,” he said.
- Ligne n°1287 :
- Ligne n°1288 : We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No
- Ligne n°1289 : respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley
- Ligne n°1290 : to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother
- Ligne n°1291 : there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer
- Ligne n°1292 : back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is
- Ligne n°1293 : cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go
- Ligne n°1294 : anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.”
- Ligne n°1295 :
- Ligne n°1296 : Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He
- Ligne n°1297 : went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which
- Ligne n°1298 : ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he
- Ligne n°1299 : pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he
- Ligne n°1300 : wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North
- Ligne n°1301 : Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because
- Ligne n°1302 : he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have
- Ligne n°1303 : exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with
- Ligne n°1304 : me.”
- Ligne n°1305 :
- Ligne n°1306 : From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the
- Ligne n°1307 : great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had
- Ligne n°1308 : a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father.
- Ligne n°1309 : Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from
- Ligne n°1310 : plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon
- Ligne n°1311 : a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not
- Ligne n°1312 : target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard
- Ligne n°1313 : enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American
- Ligne n°1314 : citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a
- Ligne n°1315 : target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that
- Ligne n°1316 : singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.”
- Ligne n°1317 : Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find
- Ligne n°1318 : white predation to be thrice as fast.
- Ligne n°1319 : Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only
- Ligne n°1320 : tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.
- Ligne n°1321 :
- Ligne n°1322 : Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but
- Ligne n°1323 : as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long
- Ligne n°1324 : tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the
- Ligne n°1325 : elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal
- Ligne n°1326 : policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic
- Ligne n°1327 : civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is
- Ligne n°1328 : not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and
- Ligne n°1329 : still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
- Ligne n°1330 :
- Ligne n°1331 : After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders,
- Ligne n°1332 : including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address
- Ligne n°1333 : the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the
- Ligne n°1334 : president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly
- Ligne n°1335 : destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to
- Ligne n°1336 : specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group
- Ligne n°1337 : demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor,
- Ligne n°1338 : black and white.”
- Ligne n°1339 : reporter’s notebook
- Ligne n°1340 : White Racism vs. White Resentment
- Ligne n°1341 : “The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the
- Ligne n°1342 : greatest argument made for reparations—like ever.”
- Ligne n°1343 : Read more
- Ligne n°1344 :
- Ligne n°1345 : The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address
- Ligne n°1346 : broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But
- Ligne n°1347 : it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for
- Ligne n°1348 : instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for
- Ligne n°1349 : the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme
- Ligne n°1350 : Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v.
- Ligne n°1351 : Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous
- Ligne n°1352 : concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is
- Ligne n°1353 : affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only
- Ligne n°1354 : tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the
- Ligne n°1355 : problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
- Ligne n°1356 :
- Ligne n°1357 : This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our
- Ligne n°1358 : inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black
- Ligne n°1359 : disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed
- Ligne n°1360 : and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s
- Ligne n°1361 : Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you
- Ligne n°1362 : have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include
- Ligne n°1363 : preferential treatment.”
- Ligne n°1364 :
- Ligne n°1365 : Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395
- Ligne n°1366 : years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very
- Ligne n°1367 : little to redress this.
- Ligne n°1368 :
- Ligne n°1369 : Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an
- Ligne n°1370 : explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes
- Ligne n°1371 : from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the
- Ligne n°1372 : 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act
- Ligne n°1373 : might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In
- Ligne n°1374 : substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle,
- Ligne n°1375 : progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.
- Ligne n°1376 :
- Ligne n°1377 : The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed.
- Ligne n°1378 : Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely
- Ligne n°1379 : to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to
- Ligne n°1380 : blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did
- Ligne n°1381 : not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the
- Ligne n°1382 : act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that
- Ligne n°1383 : many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from
- Ligne n°1384 : it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually
- Ligne n°1385 : expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will
- Ligne n°1386 : be injured.
- Ligne n°1387 : Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in
- Ligne n°1388 : the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos
- Ligne n°1389 : Javier Ortiz)
- Ligne n°1390 :
- Ligne n°1391 : “All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some
- Ligne n°1392 : skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking
- Ligne n°1393 : cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over
- Ligne n°1394 : the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad
- Ligne n°1395 : public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in
- Ligne n°1396 : the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend
- Ligne n°1397 : that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of
- Ligne n°1398 : unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with
- Ligne n°1399 : the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing
- Ligne n°1400 : American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie
- Ligne n°1401 : ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to
- Ligne n°1402 : close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer
- Ligne n°1403 : higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job
- Ligne n°1404 : applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of
- Ligne n°1405 : getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
- Ligne n°1406 :
- Ligne n°1407 : Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black
- Ligne n°1408 : America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the
- Ligne n°1409 : pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft.
- Ligne n°1410 : The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the
- Ligne n°1411 : community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross
- Ligne n°1412 : working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North
- Ligne n°1413 : Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and
- Ligne n°1414 : consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young
- Ligne n°1415 : black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have
- Ligne n°1416 : their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most
- Ligne n°1417 : sacred possession—their home—taken from them.
- Ligne n°1418 :
- Ligne n°1419 : The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks
- Ligne n°1420 : says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are
- Ligne n°1421 : worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to
- Ligne n°1422 : get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re
- Ligne n°1423 : telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put
- Ligne n°1424 : down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never
- Ligne n°1425 : own anything, nigger.’ ”
- Ligne n°1426 :
- Ligne n°1427 : IX. Toward A New Country
- Ligne n°1428 :
- Ligne n°1429 : When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He
- Ligne n°1430 : was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a
- Ligne n°1431 : 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.
- Ligne n°1432 :
- Ligne n°1433 : “He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he
- Ligne n°1434 : was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t
- Ligne n°1435 : control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he
- Ligne n°1436 : was dangerous.”
- Ligne n°1437 :
- Ligne n°1438 : Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a
- Ligne n°1439 : progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In
- Ligne n°1440 : fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African
- Ligne n°1441 : Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century,
- Ligne n°1442 : Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by
- Ligne n°1443 : releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting
- Ligne n°1444 : them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes
- Ligne n°1445 : David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is
- Ligne n°1446 : synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be …
- Ligne n°1447 : Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery
- Ligne n°1448 : that survived the Civil War.”
- Ligne n°1449 :
- Ligne n°1450 : When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them
- Ligne n°1451 : that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the
- Ligne n°1452 : authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw
- Ligne n°1453 : Winter’s body.
- Ligne n°1454 :
- Ligne n°1455 : And this was just one of their losses.
- Ligne n°1456 :
- Ligne n°1457 : Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make
- Ligne n°1458 : reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was
- Ligne n°1459 : built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The
- Ligne n°1460 : Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could
- Ligne n°1461 : be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the
- Ligne n°1462 : population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That
- Ligne n°1463 : number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added
- Ligne n°1464 : to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles
- Ligne n°1465 : Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something
- Ligne n°1466 : broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial
- Ligne n°1467 : justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
- Ligne n°1468 : To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins
- Ligne n°1469 : in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
- Ligne n°1470 :
- Ligne n°1471 : Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our
- Ligne n°1472 : country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens,
- Ligne n°1473 : sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would
- Ligne n°1474 : seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth
- Ligne n°1475 : gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging
- Ligne n°1476 : it will require the same.
- Ligne n°1477 : When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we
- Ligne n°1478 : should picture pirate flags.
- Ligne n°1479 :
- Ligne n°1480 : Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40
- Ligne n°1481 : proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African
- Ligne n°1482 : Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a
- Ligne n°1483 : discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations
- Ligne n°1484 : is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The
- Ligne n°1485 : idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage,
- Ligne n°1486 : history, and standing in the world.
- Ligne n°1487 :
- Ligne n°1488 : The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and
- Ligne n°1489 : the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded
- Ligne n°1490 : slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the
- Ligne n°1491 : criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring
- Ligne n°1492 : hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of
- Ligne n°1493 : black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black
- Ligne n°1494 : children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black
- Ligne n°1495 : family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
- Ligne n°1496 :
- Ligne n°1497 : And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws
- Ligne n°1498 : joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its
- Ligne n°1499 : bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the
- Ligne n°1500 : federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap,
- Ligne n°1501 : which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we
- Ligne n°1502 : picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
- Ligne n°1503 :
- Ligne n°1504 : On some level, we have always grasped this.
- Ligne n°1505 :
- Ligne n°1506 : “Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his
- Ligne n°1507 : historic civil-rights speech.
- Ligne n°1508 :
- Ligne n°1509 : Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are
- Ligne n°1510 : differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful
- Ligne n°1511 : roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the
- Ligne n°1512 : individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are
- Ligne n°1513 : solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past
- Ligne n°1514 : injustice, and present prejudice.
- Ligne n°1515 :
- Ligne n°1516 : We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something
- Ligne n°1517 : about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize
- Ligne n°1518 : our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history
- Ligne n°1519 : does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular
- Ligne n°1520 : mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed
- Ligne n°1521 : lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear
- Ligne n°1522 : masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived
- Ligne n°1523 : something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not
- Ligne n°1524 : acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded
- Ligne n°1525 : demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so
- Ligne n°1526 : fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country
- Ligne n°1527 : without it.
- Ligne n°1528 :
- Ligne n°1529 : And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the
- Ligne n°1530 : full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the
- Ligne n°1531 : price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic
- Ligne n°1532 : may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at
- Ligne n°1533 : least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject
- Ligne n°1534 : the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of
- Ligne n°1535 : fallible humans.
- Ligne n°1536 :
- Ligne n°1537 : Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided.
- Ligne n°1538 : The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot
- Ligne n°1539 : say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its
- Ligne n°1540 : distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling
- Ligne n°1541 : with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and
- Ligne n°1542 : the banishment of white guilt.
- Ligne n°1543 :
- Ligne n°1544 : What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more
- Ligne n°1545 : than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m
- Ligne n°1546 : talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual
- Ligne n°1547 : renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the
- Ligne n°1548 : Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations
- Ligne n°1549 : would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate
- Ligne n°1550 : flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American
- Ligne n°1551 : consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great
- Ligne n°1552 : democratizer with the facts of our history.
- Ligne n°1553 :
- Ligne n°1554 : X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
- Ligne n°1555 :
- Ligne n°1556 : We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
- Ligne n°1557 :
- Ligne n°1558 : In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the
- Ligne n°1559 : Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us.
- Ligne n°1560 : Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were
- Ligne n°1561 : entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported
- Ligne n°1562 : feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that
- Ligne n°1563 : Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
- Ligne n°1564 : reporter’s notebook
- Ligne n°1565 : The Auschwitz All Around Us
- Ligne n°1566 : “It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by
- Ligne n°1567 : actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary
- Ligne n°1568 : bout of insanity.”
- Ligne n°1569 : Read more
- Ligne n°1570 :
- Ligne n°1571 : “The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar,
- Ligne n°1572 : “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who
- Ligne n°1573 : thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were
- Ligne n°1574 : responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that
- Ligne n°1575 : the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them
- Ligne n°1576 : during the Third Reich.’ ”
- Ligne n°1577 :
- Ligne n°1578 : Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls.
- Ligne n°1579 : Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust
- Ligne n°1580 : beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and
- Ligne n°1581 : honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing
- Ligne n°1582 : the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West
- Ligne n°1583 : German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in
- Ligne n°1584 : which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and
- Ligne n°1585 : properly punished.”
- Ligne n°1586 :
- Ligne n°1587 : Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of
- Ligne n°1588 : reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an
- Ligne n°1589 : agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic
- Ligne n°1590 : opposition.
- Ligne n°1591 : “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for
- Ligne n°1592 : even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David
- Ligne n°1593 : Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.”
- Ligne n°1594 :
- Ligne n°1595 : Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous
- Ligne n°1596 : reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January
- Ligne n°1597 : 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the
- Ligne n°1598 : prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin,
- Ligne n°1599 : the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd,
- Ligne n°1600 : inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and
- Ligne n°1601 : property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and
- Ligne n°1602 : guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state.
- Ligne n°1603 : He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent
- Ligne n°1604 : Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept
- Ligne n°1605 : reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police
- Ligne n°1606 : watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German
- Ligne n°1607 : manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our
- Ligne n°1608 : parents!”
- Ligne n°1609 :
- Ligne n°1610 : Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the
- Ligne n°1611 : Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to
- Ligne n°1612 : the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the
- Ligne n°1613 : Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and
- Ligne n°1614 : smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the
- Ligne n°1615 : Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos,
- Ligne n°1616 : Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two
- Ligne n°1617 : hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400
- Ligne n°1618 : people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.
- Ligne n°1619 :
- Ligne n°1620 : Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the
- Ligne n°1621 : actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested
- Ligne n°1622 : hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they
- Ligne n°1623 : will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If
- Ligne n°1624 : necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no
- Ligne n°1625 : ‘reparations’ from Germany.”
- Ligne n°1626 : Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center),
- Ligne n°1627 : signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two
- Ligne n°1628 : delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was
- Ligne n°1629 : carried out in silence. (Associated Press)
- Ligne n°1630 :
- Ligne n°1631 : Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany
- Ligne n°1632 : with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there
- Ligne n°1633 : was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there
- Ligne n°1634 : would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir
- Ligne n°1635 : Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia.
- Ligne n°1636 :
- Ligne n°1637 : Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but
- Ligne n°1638 : with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting
- Ligne n°1639 : down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns
- Ligne n°1640 : to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had
- Ligne n°1641 : the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But
- Ligne n°1642 : we can’t do that.”
- Ligne n°1643 :
- Ligne n°1644 : The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli
- Ligne n°1645 : militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another
- Ligne n°1646 : was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port
- Ligne n°1647 : of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving.
- Ligne n°1648 : West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche
- Ligne n°1649 : marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual
- Ligne n°1650 : reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to
- Ligne n°1651 : Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time
- Ligne n°1652 : spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward
- Ligne n°1653 : purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels
- Ligne n°1654 : constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the
- Ligne n°1655 : Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953
- Ligne n°1656 : to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total
- Ligne n°1657 : investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity,
- Ligne n°1658 : and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
- Ligne n°1659 :
- Ligne n°1660 : Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of
- Ligne n°1661 : Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to
- Ligne n°1662 : investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the
- Ligne n°1663 : impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable
- Ligne n°1664 : psychological and political importance,” he writes.
- Ligne n°1665 :
- Ligne n°1666 : Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis.
- Ligne n°1667 : But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps
- Ligne n°1668 : provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself
- Ligne n°1669 : worthy of the name.
- Ligne n°1670 :
- Ligne n°1671 : Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
- Ligne n°1672 :
- Ligne n°1673 : For the first time in the history of relations between people, a
- Ligne n°1674 : precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of
- Ligne n°1675 : moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to
- Ligne n°1676 : the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time
- Ligne n°1677 : in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed,
- Ligne n°1678 : plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of
- Ligne n°1679 : Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part
- Ligne n°1680 : of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation
- Ligne n°1681 : as partial compensation for material losses.
- Ligne n°1682 :
- Ligne n°1683 : Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We
- Ligne n°1684 : cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems
- Ligne n°1685 : of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are
- Ligne n°1686 : troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far
- Ligne n°1687 : behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of
- Ligne n°1688 : then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to
- Ligne n°1689 : meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated
- Ligne n°1690 : “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing
- Ligne n°1691 : seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in
- Ligne n°1692 : wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why
- Ligne n°1693 : they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this
- Ligne n°1694 : lawsuit.’ ”
- Ligne n°1695 : In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in
- Ligne n°1696 : Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during
- Ligne n°1697 : the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the
- Ligne n°1698 : race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
- Ligne n°1699 :
- Ligne n°1700 : A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report
- Ligne n°1701 : affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for
- Ligne n°1702 : years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004.
- Ligne n°1703 : Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured
- Ligne n°1704 : slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also
- Ligne n°1705 : have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with
- Ligne n°1706 : which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than
- Ligne n°1707 : just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people
- Ligne n°1708 : themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime
- Ligne n°1709 : that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the
- Ligne n°1710 : legislative body that represents them.
- Ligne n°1711 :
- Ligne n°1712 : John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know
- Ligne n°1713 : what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully
- Ligne n°1714 : capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps
- Ligne n°1715 : the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated
- Ligne n°1716 : and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these
- Ligne n°1717 : questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that
- Ligne n°1718 : might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most
- Ligne n°1719 : vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away
- Ligne n°1720 : is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present
- Ligne n°1721 : and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single
- Ligne n°1722 : check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would
- Ligne n°1723 : represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its
- Ligne n°1724 : innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
- Ligne n°1725 :
- Ligne n°1726 : In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the
- Ligne n°1727 : sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent
- Ligne n°1728 : foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe:
- Ligne n°1729 : segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like
- Ligne n°1730 : creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be
- Ligne n°1731 : steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by
- Ligne n°1732 : the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices
- Ligne n°1733 : by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans
- Ligne n°1734 : in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier,
- Ligne n°1735 : these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from
- Ligne n°1736 : mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking
- Ligne n°1737 : for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
- Ligne n°1738 : “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically
- Ligne n°1739 : targeted black churches.”
- Ligne n°1740 :
- Ligne n°1741 : “High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime
- Ligne n°1742 : lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus
- Ligne n°1743 : foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated
- Ligne n°1744 : cities’ minority neighborhoods.”
- Ligne n°1745 :
- Ligne n°1746 : Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of
- Ligne n°1747 : America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of
- Ligne n°1748 : Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s
- Ligne n°1749 : leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the
- Ligne n°1750 : bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate
- Ligne n°1751 : blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building”
- Ligne n°1752 : seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department
- Ligne n°1753 : filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank
- Ligne n°1754 : had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their
- Ligne n°1755 : creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It
- Ligne n°1756 : was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits
- Ligne n°1757 : found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people”
- Ligne n°1758 : and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
- Ligne n°1759 :
- Ligne n°1760 : “We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo
- Ligne n°1761 : loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an
- Ligne n°1762 : emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because
- Ligne n°1763 : it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince
- Ligne n°1764 : congregants to take out subprime loans.”
- Ligne n°1765 :
- Ligne n°1766 : In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges
- Ligne n°1767 : of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year,
- Ligne n°1768 : Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million.
- Ligne n°1769 : But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore
- Ligne n°1770 : whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and
- Ligne n°1771 : 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly
- Ligne n°1772 : black neighborhoods.
- Ligne n°1773 :
- Ligne n°1774 :
- Ligne n°1775 :
- Ligne n°1776 :
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- Ligne n°1787 : Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where
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