“Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.” — Georges Erasmus, Canadian Aboriginal Leader

Beginning on January 10, several members of the Reparations Study Team will offer you the opportunity to sign your name on a petition for UCE to express support for legislation introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. John Conyers, Jr., HR 40, entitled: “The Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.” If such a resolution is approved at a Congregational meeting, we will inform elected representatives and others, and seek follow-up actions with the UUA.

• The legislation would establish a study of the economic deprivation and physical and emotional suffering of the descendants of slaves, including through Federal Government policies.
• A key component is education–to help Americans move toward a “common memory.”
• If reparations are enacted, the form they could take might not involve payments to individuals but rather programs such as job training linked to public works that include racial justice in their mission.

Many of us at UCE have become more aware of parts of our country’s history that are often downplayed, for example the enormous impact of slave labor in creating our nation’s wealth. There is a plausible case that slave labor and the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 precipitated the industrial revolution. The first recognizable factories were built to mass produce textiles with the cheap cotton made possible by slave labor. As late as 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing and railroads put together.

In “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson, we read first-hand accounts of life in the Jim Crow South, a euphemism for terrorism.

And we learned about systemic economic obstacles for blacks through at least the 1970’s that whites did not face. One example: New Deal housing and mortgage programs enabled a tremendous increase in home ownership in the U.S. But these Federal agencies instituted redlining and supported restrictive covenants, generating self-fulfilling prophesies for black neighborhoods to lose value over time while white neighborhoods gained value, and where homes could become family nest eggs. Meanwhile black home buyers were driven into the arms of unscrupulous contract sellers; such homes became money pits with debt creation instead of wealth creation.

Yes, there are people who have their minds closed. But if we have an orthodoxy, it is that opinions and attitudes can change enough to make a difference. Facing this question of reparations would, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” Only then can our country exorcize these terrible demons of its past.

Tom Hempfling