Has the US government apologized for African-American slavery?

Answer

"Apology/Acknowledgement Is Imperative" by Theodore M. Shaw

November/December 1994 issue of Poverty & Race

One hundred and thirty years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves is a subject of discussion in some quarters. Some argue that the United States' failure to compensate African Americans for the wrongs of slavery leaves unfinished business on the national agenda. Others maintain that the issue lacks legitimacy because of the passage of time and the fact that those who were part of the system of slavery are now long dead. Congressman John Conyers of Michigan has introduced a bill that would establish a commission to study the issue of reparations for slavery; the bill did not reach the floor of the House of Representatives. (The October 20, 1994New York Times reported that the IRS received over 20,000 claims from African Americans for tax rebates for reparations. Recently, thousands of African Americans have been encouraged to file for tax refunds as reparations, at the urging of unidentified individuals circulating application forms in black churches and other community organizations, supposedly on behalf of a group calling itself "the Legal Defense Fund." The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has warned people not to act in reliance on this information.)

The virtue of the reparations discussion does not have anything to do with the question of whether African-American descendants of slaves ever receive money from the federal government. Following the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson vetoed civil rights legislation that would have facilitated land ownership by former slaves. It was the debate on this proposal that coined the expression "forty acres and a mule."

Compensation for those who had actually been held in bondage and whose labor had been exploited may have made a significant difference in the lives of former slaves. Moreover, property wealth is transferred intergenerationally; the descendants of slaves may have had significant family resources that would have produced a vastly different scenario from the black-white gap in household financial worth that exists today. In other words, the legacy of slavery continues to have present-day effects. Whatever the merits of this matter, however, it is probably unrealistic to think that African American descendants of slaves will be compensated in 1994 for the wrongs of slavery when former slaves were denied compensation in 1866. Besides, the practical problem of administering such an effort is mind-boggling.

Is the issue of reparations, then, a useless discussion? It is not. Its value may be in the light it sheds on the way we as a nation have dealt with the issue of race, and how we continue to deal with it. When a wrong has been committed, the first step in "righting" it is acknowledgement. Only then can those involved move to heal the effects of the injury. This is no less true for groups than it is for individuals. Thus, after the Holocaust, Germany compensated Jewish survivors. The United States recently compensated Japanese Americans wrongfully interned in prison camps during the Second World War. The money was not significant beyond its symbolic value; mere money could not heal the scars of those experiences. The true value of reparations is in the acknowledgement of the wrong.

The United States government and the state governments that sanctioned the practice of slavery have never formally apologized to African Americans for slavery or acknowledged that it was wrong. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were enacted to put black Americans on equal footing with white citizens; however, nowhere do they acknowledge the wrongs of slavery. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century civil rights legislation aimed to enforce the Civil War Amendments and eliminate continuing racial discrimination, but nowhere do these statutes contain an official apology. While individual legislators and government officials have acknowledged the wrongs of the past, there has been no official recognition or apology. Thus, a great psychological wound remains unhealed, haunting our national psyche.

Our history is open to ambiguous interpretation. We had slavery and de jure discrimination; we ended it. Currently, a number of books and articles on the black-white I.Q. gap suggest that genetically based intelligence difference should dictate a change in public policies, such as abandonment of affirmative action and early childhood education. In a nation that has never officially apologized for the wrong of slavery and repudiated its philosophical and pseudo-scientific underpinnings, this discourse on black intellectual inferiority has a peculiar resonance.

The reparations discussion is valuable not because of any expectation it creates with respect to monetary compensation. Its real value is that it places America's discourse about race in a different context-one in which affirmative action is a modest remedy and in which the a historical disconnection of present-day disparities in black and white achievement, wealth and status from America's undeniable history of racial discrimination will be impossible to maintain.

LAME APOLOGIES FROM CLINTON & BUSH ACKNOWLEDGE SLAVERY, BUT REFUSED TO APOLOGIZE.

Bush's African Visit Sidesteps Apology for Slavery

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet. Posted July 9, 2003.

During Bush's visit to the old slave fort on Goree Island, he called slavery "one of the greatest crimes in history." But we already knew that.

During his extended Africa visit in 1998, President Clinton's kind of, sort of, apology for slavery satisfied no one. Though it was not a formal apology, conservatives said it went too far. Though it was the first time a sitting American president forthrightly acknowledged the colossal and continuing damage of slavery, black activists said he didn't go far enough.

Now it was President Bush's turn. In his visit to the old slave fort on Goree Island off Africa's west coast, he called slavery "one of the greatest crimes in history." But we already knew that. Bush refused to do what Clinton did and express his personal sense of shame and disgust over slavery. Worse, he refused to formally apologize for slavery.

A Bush apology and a call for Congress to fund education programs to study slavery's effects, establish a national slavery museum, and most importantly set up a commission to study the feasibility of reparations would have forced many Americans to face bitter truths about slavery and its hideous legacy.

The U.S. government, business, and the majority of whites, not just a handful of Southern planters, profited and benefited from slavery. The U.S. government encoded slavery in the Constitution, and protected and nourished it for a century. Traders, insurance companies, bankers, shippers, and landowners, made billions off of it. Their ill-gotten profits fueled America's industrial might.

Meanwhile, for decades after slavery white labor groups excluded blacks from unions and the trades and confined them to the dirtiest, poorest paying jobs. While many whites and non-white immigrants did come to America after the Civil War they were not subjected to the decades of relentless racial terror and legal segregation, as were blacks. Through the decades of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, African-Americans were transformed into the poster group for racial dysfunctionality. The image of blacks as lazy, prone to crime and violence, irresponsible, and sexual predators has stoked white fears and hostility and has served as the standard rationale for lynchings, racial assaults, hate crimes and police violence.

The fact that some blacks earn more and live better than ever today, and have gotten boosts from welfare, social and education programs, civil rights legislation, and affirmative action programs, does not mean that America has shaken the gruesome legacy of slavery. Countless polls, surveys, and reports on race relations during the past decade have found that blacks are still overwhelmingly the victims of racial discrimination, and that young blacks are far likelier than whites to be imprisoned, to have the highest or near highest rates of poverty and infant mortality, to be victims of violence, and to suffer HIV/AID affliction than any other group in America.

They are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods, be refused business loans, and attend decrepit, failed public schools than non-whites. The police beatings of black motorists Rodney King and Donavon Jackson, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, and unarmed young blacks in Cincinnati and other cities, the torture of Abner Louima, and the racial profiling of young black males by the police are ample proof that blacks are still at mortal risk from police violence.

Bush also almost certainly knows that there is nothing new about state and federal governments issuing apologies and payments for past wrongs committed against African-Americans. In 1997 the U.S. government admitted it was legally liable to the survivors and family members of the two decade long syphilis experiment, begun in the 1930's by the U.S. Public Health Service, that turned black patients into human guinea pigs. The victims of a blatant medical atrocity conducted with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. government, they received $10 million from the government and an apology from Clinton.

The state legislature in Florida in 1994 agreed to make payments to the survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives and property when a white mob destroyed the all-black town of Rosewood in 1923. This was a specific act of mob carnage that was tacitly condoned by some public officials and law enforcement officers. Florida was liable for the violence and was duty bound to pay and apologize. The Oklahoma state legislature is now considering reparations payments to the survivors of the Tulsa massacre of 1921. And city councils in several cities including Chicago and Dallas have backed a congressional bill by Michigan Congressman John Conyers to bankroll a commission to study the feasibility of paying reparations for slavery.

The brutal reality is that America's great curse continues to be its enduring mistreatment of blacks. This can be directly traced to the monstrous legacy of slavery. A Bush apology would not have erased that legacy. But it would have formally acknowledged the U.S. government's responsibility for creating and perpetuating it.

NOTE: The Canadian Government has had to pay for dearly for broken Treaties amongst the Indigenous people and now has given an apology to the Chinese when they brought them over in the 1900s to build railways and were treated less than dogs. The Chinese people are just now getting paid "Head Tax" with a formal apology.

Answer

Some would say that America, having declared slavery illegal through the enactment of the 13th Amendment, and having fought a civil war which nearly tore this nascent nation asunder, a war which resulted in over 500,000 killed or wounded, has apologized quite adequately in its own blood.

However, it would be well to remember that historically, slavery was introduced into North America by colonists during the period of British colonization in the 1600 and 1700s. Therefore, in point of fact, slavery in North America preceded the establishment of the United States of America as an independent country by over 100 years. For those who are looking for someone to blame, Britain, not America, must be considered primarily responsible for slavery becoming established and so deeply rooted in the Colonies’ culture and economy. Ultimately, it was the independent United States of America that took it upon itself, at great cost as noted above, to abolish slavery and recognize all men as being equal in the eyes of the law. It took nearly 100 years to do so, but the United States of America finally rejected literally thousands of years of slaving history worldwide and did it.

Now America is being asked to apologize?

Those who would single America out, among all the nations throughout history that have engaged in slavery, and demand additional apologies often have other agendas.