Sunday, March 25, 2001

Chicago Tribune | Opinion -- THE AD WAS WRONG
In an 1860s Boston speech, the white abolitionist Wendell Phillips made the case for major reparations, saying, "There is not wealth enough in all the North to compensate this [African-American] generation--much less the claim it has as heir to those who have gone before."

He added, "Agriculture, cities, roads, factories, funded capital--all were made by and belong to the Negro." The great black leader Frederick Douglass made a similar case.

At an 1865 Republican convention, Rep.resentative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania called for taking hundreds of millions of acres from former slaveholders to provide compensation to those enslaved. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts called for land grants to those enslaved because legal equality did not eradicate disparities in wealth-generating assets.

Notions of liberal control of the media notwithstanding, details about the price African-Americans have paid for nearly 400 years of oppression have rarely been published. That price remains high. Today, on the average, black Americans live 6 or 7 years less than white Americans, and black families average about 10 percent of the wealth of white families.

Such inequalities are substantially the result of centuries of racism. In a major book, "The Wealth of Races" (1990), economic experts estimate the current value of labor stolen from African-Americans. Two scholars estimate the current worth of the slave labor expropriated from 1620 onward as at least $1 trillion.

For part of the segregation period, 1929-1969, another scholar estimates the cost of labor discrimination against black Americans at $1.6 trillion.

Another researcher estimates the loss from post-segregation discrimination in employment as at least $94 billion for just one year in the 1970s. The accumulated economic loss for African-Americans since the 1600s is likely in the trillions of current dollars, and such calculation does not include the non-monetary costs.

The federal government is heavily implicated in giveaways to whites.
http://chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/article/0,2669,SAV-0103250290,FF.html

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