Beyond the Reckoning
New York Has a New Committee on Slavery and Reparations. Could Maryland Be Next?
Reparations are a program of acknowledgement, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice. — William A. Darity, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century.
An important question arose again and again during our September meeting, “Baltimore’s Hard Histories.” “What comes after the reckoning?” many of us wanted to understand. We made note of the many terms used to characterize the future: Repair, healing, restitution, redress, compensation, and reconciliation. One term — reparations — surfaced again and again. It has organic meanings rooted in the history of slavery and abolition. More recently, it has organized the work of activists, analysts, and scholars in our own time. Today, reparations is animating the deliberations of state lawmakers.
We noted that just this week, as The New York Times reports, New York Governor, Kathy Hochul, signed into law a bill which establishes a statewide “community commission on reparations remedies” that will study “not only the history of slavery, which was outlawed in New York in 1827, but also its subsequent effects on housing discrimination, biased policing, income inequality and mass incarceration of African Americans.” The commission is charged with recommending “remedies and reparations” to the state legislature. As the paper notes, this undertaking in New York follows similar efforts in California and Illinois.
Framing our present day discussions about reparations in historical terms has generated varied approaches. Take, for example, this “Historical Timeline of Reparations” published by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Libraries which sets reparations to Black Americans for slavery alongside those extended to Native Americans. Other studies have set this story in a transnational context, reminding us that early calls for reparations were double-edged, emanating both from former enslaver as well as from people formerly enslaved.1 In November 2022, a team at The New York Times examined how, long after the Haitian Revolution, the reparations or indemnity paid to one-time French colonial enslavers continues to burden the nation of Haiti until today.2 Legal Historian Mary Frances Berry chronicled the story of an early movement among former slaves in the U.S. to win old-age pensions for their years of uncompensated labor, only to be prosecuted by federal official as fraudsters.3
What about slavery and reparations here in Maryland? Over at the Baltimore Banner, John-John Williams IV updated this story back in November, “Advocates Mount Push for Reparations in Maryland Amid National Debate.” Back in July, it appeared that state-wide efforts in Maryland might have stalled. One commentary suggested that success might come from more local efforts such as the successful reparations campaign waged in Evanston, Illinois.4 The Banner quotes State Delegate Aletheia McCaskill as intending to reintroduce Maryland HB 875, which would establish a Maryland Reparations Commission.
The work of hard histories, we know, can generate, fuel, and even promote our best thinking about reparations, providing a historical foundation for debates about the force of the past in the present and about what form justice can and should take. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (a native Baltimorean, we must note,) terms this a “dilemma of inheritance.” We’ll leave you with Coates’s 2019 Juneteenth remarks before a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on H.R. 40, a bill that would establish the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for Black Americans.
— MSJ
Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2023).
Catherine Porter, Constant Méheut, Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan, “The Roots of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers,” The New York Times, November 16, 2022.
Mary Frances Berry, My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Random House, 2006.)
Rik Hutzell, “The Idea of Slavery Reparations Has Stalled in Maryland. Local Campaigns Could Change That,” Baltimore Banner, July 11, 2023.