I always remember April 16. It’s my sister Michelle’s birthday. It was also the day Abraham Lincoln signed (in 1862) a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slaveowners’ pain, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed. That’s right, slaveowners got reparations. Enslaved African-Americans got nothing for their generations of stolen bodies, snatched children and expropriated labor other than their mere release from legal bondage… [S]laveowners, far more than enslaved people, were always the primary beneficiaries of public largess.”
“If compensation is to be given at all,” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, “it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”
Moderate antislavery advocates like Lincoln did not agree. To the contrary, they believed that any manumission plan had to placate property rights that were buttressed by the Fifth Amendment, which required “just compensation” for government seizure of private assets.
…[T]here is a longer history of slaveowners requesting and receiving indemnification for the loss of their chattel.
…In a break from tradition in the 1850s, the abolitionist Elihu Burritt organized the National Compensated Emancipation Convention in Cleveland to advocate payments to slaveowners, as well as smaller sums to be paid to the people they had enslaved. Nothing came of his dual proposal, however.
And now, far right Republican kook, crypto-fraudster and Senate candidate Bernie Moreno is back to pick up, more or less, where Elihu Burritt left off. Moreno is a fascist from Colombia whose wealthy family moved to the U.S. when he was five. He stayed and made a fortune as an unscrupulous used car dealer. He tried self-funding ($3.75 million) a Senate campaign in 2020 but found no support and dropped out before the primary after Trump told him, a self-described MAGAt, to. Now he’s trying again and made a splash by whining about compensation for descendants of white people who fought in the Civil War.
Moreno is very secretive about his background and has no wikipedia page and no one even know when he was born or his real age (approximately 56). His net worth is estimated to be around $100 million… but everything about him is shrouded in mystery.
Also running is 2020 loser and heir Matt Dolan and probably MAGAt congressman Warren Davidson— who has taken immense amounts of stolen funds from Sam Bankman Fried in return for pushing the FTX agenda— and neo-fascist Secretary of State Frank LaRose, currently busy trying to disassemble democracy in Ohio.
Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that Moreno made a pitch to GOP racism at a campaign rally: “We stand at the shoulders of giants, don’t we? We stand on shoulders of people like John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. That this group of people took on the largest empire in history. They said no, we will not stand for this. And won. That same group of people later, white people, died to free black people. It’s never happened in human history before, but it happened here in America. That’s not taught a lot in schools much is it? They make it sound like America is a racist, broken country. You name a country that did that: that freed slaves, died to do that. You know, they talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people in the North who died to save the lives of black people?” He majored in marketing and doesn’t know anything about history.
The Howard Zinn Education Project:
The long and insistent coupling of compensation for slaveowners with emancipation is useful for consideration in current debates about reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Critics and skeptics are fond of saying that enslaved people should have asked for recompense back then. African-Americans did precisely that, going back to the colonial era. They petitioned for “freedom dues,” they sued the estates of former masters for their unrequited toil, and they asked for land to restart their lives as free men and women. Relatively few of those efforts were successful.
An overwhelming majority of white people believed that slaveowners, not enslaved African-Americans, deserved recompense for the benevolence of manumission. The only “reward” that was widely supported was colonization: a trip “back to Africa.” The act allocated $100,000 for the voluntary removal of the newly freed people (at $100 per person) to go to Liberia or Haiti, which rarely happened.
Preserving sacred property rights and moving the Negro problem offshore meant that there was no justice for enslaved African-Americans. All of the candidates running for president must support the federal government’s issuing of reparations to African-Americans who were economically affected by slavery. Justice requires this.
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