Slave owners not only made money off the chattel enslavement of Black Americans, but they then made money multiple times over off the land that the formerly enslaved had no choice but to work.
In the s, the United States was reeling from the stock market crash and was firmly engulfed in the Great Depression. Bill and Social Security. While the G. Bill was mandated federally, it was implemented locally. The presence of racial housing covenants and redlining among local municipalities prohibited Blacks from utilizing federal benefits.
White soldiers were afforded the opportunity to build wealth by sending themselves and their children to college and by obtaining housing and small business grants.
Regarding Social Security, two key professions that would have improved equity in America were excluded from the legislation—domestic and farm workers.
These omissions effectively excluded 60 percent of Blacks across the U. Roosevelt bargained these exclusionary provisions in the legislation on the backs of Black veterans and workers in order to propel mostly white America out of the Great Depression. There are other policies and practices that contributed to racial wealth gap. Government-sanctioned discrimination related to the Homestead Act, redlining, restrictive covenants, and convict leasing blocked Blacks from the ability to gain wealth at similar rates as whites.
Separate from slavery, damages should be awarded to Black people who were harmed by these policies and practices. We know the monetary value that was placed on enslaved Blacks and the productivity of their labor, as well as the amount of the racial wealth gap.
This package should include individual and collective public benefits that simultaneously builds wealth and eliminates debt among Black citizens. We assert that it should be similar to the Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act, which was recently heard before the Maryland General Assembly where Ray testified on its behalf.
The Harriet Tubman Community Investment Act aims to atone for slavery and its legacy by addressing education, homeownership, and business ownership barriers.
The U. In addition to the lost wages, the accumulative amount of restitution for individuals should eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently exists. College tuition to 4-year or 2-year colleges and universities for descendants of enslaved Black Americans. Tuition should be available for public or private universities.
Considering the racial gap in the ability to obtain degrees at private schools, this part of the package will further help to reduce racial disparities by affording more social network access and opportunity structures. Student loan debt continues to be a significant barrier to wealth creation for Black college graduates.
Among year olds, about 40 percent of Blacks compared to 30 percent of whites have student loan debt. Recent research finds that Blacks are more likely to be allocated unsubsidized loans.
Furthermore, graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, compared to Predominately White Institutions, are more likely to receive subprime loans with higher interest rates. Universities including Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary, which is the second-oldest seminary in the country, are aiming to atone for the fact that the sale of slaves helped to fortify their university endowments and establish them as elite institutions of higher education on a global scale.
Descendants of the slaves sold by Georgetown and Princeton Theological Seminary are now entitled to full rights and benefits bestowed by those universities to obtain degrees across the higher education pipeline. The Virginia state legislature voted for some of its state universities to atone for slavery with reparations. Other universities, along with state legislatures and the federal government, should follow suit. Down payment grants and housing revitalization grants for descendants of enslaved Black Americans.
Down payment grants will provide Black Americans with some initial equity in their homes relative to mortgage insurance loans. Housing revitalization grants will help Black Americans to refurbish existing homes in neighborhoods that have been neglected due to a lack of government and corporate investments in predominately Black communities. Given recent settlements for predatory lending , low and fixed interest rates as well as property tax caps in areas in which housing prices are significantly devalued should be part of the package.
As gentrification occurs, Blacks are typically priced out of neighborhoods they helped to maintain, while the historical and current remnants of redlining and restrictive covenants inhibited investments. Some Black Americans are being forced from their family home of decades because of tax increases as neighborhoods are gentrified. Woodson was a strange and driven man whose only passion was history, and he expected everyone to share his passion.
This impatience led Woodson to create Negro History Week in , to ensure that school children be exposed to black history. Woodson chose the second week of February in order to celebrate the birthday of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is important to realize that Negro History Week was not born in a vacuum. The s saw the rise in interest in African American culture that was represented by the Harlem Renaissance where writers like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Claude McKay—wrote about the joys and sorrows of blackness, and musicians like Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Lunceford captured the new rhythms of the cities created in part by the thousands of southern blacks who migrated to urban centers like Chicago.
And artists like Aaron Douglass, Richard Barthe, and Lois Jones created images that celebrated blackness and provided more positive images of the African American experience.
Woodson hoped to build upon this creativity and further stimulate interest through Negro History Week. Woodson had two goals. One was to use history to prove to white America that blacks had played important roles in the creation of America and thereby deserve to be treated equally as citizens. In essence, Woodson—by celebrating heroic black figures—be they inventors, entertainers, or soldiers—hoped to prove our worth, and by proving our worth—he believed that equality would soon follow.
His other goal was to increase the visibility of black life and history, at a time when few newspapers, books, and universities took notice of the black community, except to dwell upon the negative. Ultimately Woodson believed Negro History Week—which became Black History Month in —would be a vehicle for racial transformation forever. The question that faces us today is whether or not Black History Month is still relevant?
Is it still a vehicle for change? Or has it simply become one more school assignment that has limited meaning for children. Has Black History Month become a time when television and the media stack their black material? Or is it a useful concept whose goals have been achieved? And America has changed dramatically since —Is not it time to retire Black History Month as we have eliminated white and colored signs on drinking fountains?
I would like to suggest that despite the profound change in race relations that has occurred in our lives, Carter G. African American history month, with a bit of tweaking, is still a beacon of change and hope that is still surely needed in this world.
The chains of slavery are gone—but we are all not yet free. The great diversity within the black community needs the glue of the African American past to remind us of not just how far we have traveled but lo, how far there is to go. While there are many reasons and examples that I could point towards, let me raise five concerns or challenges that African Americans — in fact — all Americans — face that black history can help address:. You can tell a great deal about a country and a people by what they deem important enough to remember, to create moments for — what they put in their museum and what they celebrate.
In Scandinavia — there are monuments to the Vikings as a symbol of freedom and the spirit of exploration. In Germany during the s and s, the Nazis celebrated their supposed Aryan supremacy through monument and song. While America traditionally revels in either Civil War battles or founding fathers. Yet I would suggest that we learn even more about a country by what it chooses to forget — its mistakes, its disappointments, and its embarrassments.
But my blackness is the overarching umbrella of those different flavors of my identity. LaBeach's experience is just one example of the complexities of black identities, especially in the United States. Some people originally from other countries who live in the U. These layers of racial identity can be extremely personal and nuanced. There are some Americans who identify as both, and some who prefer black over African American because they can't actually trace their lineage. The recognition of a larger community of black people is also part of the rationale given for capitalizing the word.
But Watkins-Hayes adds that if someone wants to know for sure how a black person identifies, it's best to simply ask what their preference is. She is also a digital producer focusing on culture and social issues.
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