Making a Case for Reparations
Recently I learned my great-grandmother, along with her uncle were forced to leave their homes in South Carolina. Though she was a teacher in South Carolina, when she moved, she had to take work as a kitchen worker. Blacks weren't permitted to teach in Detroit in 1919. Until just recently, I'd assumed that my great-grandmother was part of the Great Migration. In textbooks we're told that many moved of their own volition in order to seek better opportunities. My family members left in order to save their own lives and the lives of their children.
When we consider issues of economic loss, lost opportunities, and family separation that such dislocations created, it becomes evident that reparations are not a hand-out to people who haven't worked hard and earned equitable access to opportunities. Rather, it's the chance for our country to more fully own our past and reconcile the harms and damage done to generations of Black people who were first treated like property, then once liberated from chattel slavery, had one impediment after another placed in their way to self-sufficiency and full access to the American Dream.
Resources:
1910-1919 Wages in South Carolina
Black-White Wealth Gap Getting Worse, 160 Years of US Data Show
Mark Hughee Gassaway Induction into Anderson County Hall of Fame
