Krispy Kreme

Though I would be equally happy to see the day those contributions are simply acknowledged and society stops glamorizing how horrid slavery was.

That is awesome! Thanks for sharing.

www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-slavery-reparations-reform-judaism-20191210-bg4gaiun6rf65i2sfndwg6q2j4-story.html

Americans in general and faith groups in particular increasingly find ourselves reckoning with our nation’s bigoted history and struggling with how to dismantle the racist systems and structures that persist to this day. As the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, it’s time for the Reform movement to join this conversation. It’s time for us to talk reparations.
When I first read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ groundbreaking article “The Case for Reparations,” I thought of a blessing that I, like many Jews, have said so many times throughout my life, including to my own children: the Birkat Kohanim, or the priestly blessing, which begins with the line, “May God bless you and keep you.” Its simplicity is eloquent and profound, and while it is about protection, the reference to “bless you” in the biblical text particularly refers to abundance and prosperity.

African slaves and their descendants had their freedom, self-determination, bodies, communities, ability to inherit and pass down wealth to their loved ones, possessions and, most important, their humanity, systematically stolen from them; reparations are an attempt to offer a restoration of their rightful blessings. This week, thousands of Reform Jews will come together at the Union for Reform Judaism Biennial in Chicago to make decisions directing the social justice work of our movement and, we hope, the nation. We will consider a resolution that would make it our policy to support the exploration of reparations for American slavery. To reach that goal, Reform Jews and our institutions must start participating in the dialogue around what a just reparations system looks like and calling on our elected officials to do the same.

With a few notable exceptions, the Jewish community, which is so often proudly on the front lines of social justice causes, has remained quiet on the subject of reparations. Our silence is an implicit claim that we have no role to play or no responsibility to act. But we must engage with the continued legacy of slavery.


We find ourselves in an era of reckoning, of cultural shifts, the rejection of a racist history and of ongoing racist systems and structures. Confederate statues are coming down, grandchildren are educating their elders about white privilege and universities are moving to atone for their roles in perpetuating our democracy’s original sins of slavery and colonization. As the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, it’s time for the Reform movement to accelerate our work for racial justice.

Some in our community may not think this is our responsibility. A tiny number of American Jews owned slaves, with most white American Jews immigrating long after slavery was abolished. We are proud that decades later, many Jews were allies to African American organizers during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.


Our Jewish community is tremendously diverse, including Jews of color who are descendants of enslaved African people, but many of us have white Jewish grandparents who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s with very little. They overcame anti-Semitism, poverty and displacement to achieve stability and, in many cases, success. And without diminishing their sacrifices or the challenges they faced, we can now understand that they and many of us also benefited from, and continue to benefit from, the same white privilege that allows for the continued discrimination against black Americans. From how we gained entry into this country to the places we were allowed to live and work, to access to education and financial capital, white Jews have reaped the rewards of racism.
In other words, this is complex. But our tradition teaches us that we can — and often must — hold in our hands two opposing truths in order to understand the complexity of the world.
It is not only atonement that we seek, but also justice. What do we as white Jews do when we realize that so many of us have benefited from whiteness — even as we still have faced discrimination of our own? How do we hold these two truths in our hands?
We are responsible because our texts are laced with stories and commandments of reparations, of the impossibility of justice without reconciliation. True freedom from Egypt required the Israelites to be compensated for their unpaid labor and oppression — compensation they used to build our holy place for worship in the desert, the Mishkan. After the Holocaust, the German government sought to reclaim its place in the global community partly through payments that have been critical to the financial stability of families devastated by the Holocaust.*



*not the end

people.howstuffworks.com/slavery-reparations.htm

2019 marks 400 years since the first African slaves arrived in America, but the trauma of slavery didn't end 154 years ago with the end of the Civil War. Many scholars and activists argue that slavery and the racist policies of Jim Crow combined to rob black Americans of generations of wealth and progress, the effects of which are still being felt today.

If the United States owes a financial and moral debt to the modern-day descendants of slaves, then the solution, some say, is reparations. A "reparation" is a legal term for making amends for a past wrong, usually involving financial restitution. Reparation comes from the Latin word for "to restore."


The core argument of the reparations movement is that America's wealth was built on the backs of slave labor and that black Americans have been systematically denied access to that wealth.

Black slaves were the engine of the American cotton industry, the most profitable enterprise of the 19th century. According to Yale University historian David Blight, cotton constituted 59 percent of all goods exported from the United States in 1836. Massive profits from cotton allowed the U.S. to invest in transportation and other industries that spread the wealth of Southern plantation owners to the North and West.

By 1860, writes Blight, "the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined."

Even after Emancipation, former slaves received no compensation for their centuries of free labor. The short-lived Reconstruction era gave former slaves a brief glimpse of the rights to vote and own land in the South, but those rights were cruelly stripped away in the Jim Crow era.

"After the fall of Reconstruction, black people were subjected to a regime of racial terror in the South and were systematically disenfranchised," says Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and author of the essay "The Long History of American Slavery Reparations" in The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to horrific acts of violence committed against black businesses and prosperous black communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the Red Summer of 1919, for example, and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — the U.S. government supported policies that excluded black Americans from acquiring property and accruing intergenerational wealth.

Home ownership, for example, is one of the most direct paths to wealth creation in America. But the cards have been stacked against black homeowners since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal created the Home Owners Loan Corporation to bail out failing home mortgages during the Depression. The government graded neighborhoods by their level of credit risk and black neighborhoods were circled in red for "hazardous" and denied low-interest loans.

This practice, known as "redlining," persisted through the 1960s, keeping home ownership out of reach of most black Americans. Even black World War II veterans were denied the promise of the G.I. Bill, which was supposed to provide mortgages with no down payment to vets and their families. Since the banks backing the mortgages still employed racist redlining policies, black vets were often rejected.

Today, the legacy of slavery and generations of racist economic policies can be seen most clearly in the wealth gap between black and white families in America. The median family wealth for white households is $171,000 compared to $17,600 for black households, according to a 2019 New York Times article.

Proponents of reparations, particularly cash reparations, believe that the tremendous economic debt owed to slaves and their descendants needs to be repaid. Other reparations supporters believe the greater debt owed to black Americans is a moral one, and that the United States government needs to make a full moral accounting (in addition to a financial accounting) for its complicity in the crime of slavery.

Thanks for sharing! I hadn’t heard of this project!

This past Veterans Day I heard a man speak whose great great grandfather (Waverly?? Woodson Jr) died on D-day in Normandy. There was a million black soldiers who served in segregated armed forces during WWII, and not one was awarded a Medal of Honor. The Woodson family would like his to be donated to the Smithsonian since he died in 2005. My heart breaks for the men who served this country returning to Jim Crow, lynchings and not being able to wear their uniforms in public, then died without recognition from the country they served

I disagree with you. Lots of people who have researched this more than either of us have would agree that reparations isn’t only the right thing to do but it’s not as impossible as many Americans would like to believe.

I think even giving H.R. 40 a quick glance will answer some of the basic questions people have about reparations and what it would look like.

The economic impact of racism and slavery is tremendous. There is no reason why something shouldn’t be done to make this right.


Do you think a group like *black veterans* should just go uncompensated on the off chance someone you deem underserving might be compensated?


* www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits

www.militarytimes.com/military-honor/salute-veterans/2019/11/10/the-gi-bill-shouldve-been-race-neutral-politicos-made-sure-it-wasnt/

www.cnn.com/2019/12/14/us/111-year-old-willie-mae-hardy-obit-granddaughter-interview/index.html


Willie Mae Hardy was born the grandchild of a slave in 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt was president.

She lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, Jim Crow and the civil rights era. She endured to vote for a black president and even meet his history-making wife. Hardy died in her sleep Wednesday at 111, one of the oldest people in the country. She enjoyed a "wonderful life," her caretaker and granddaughter, Veronica Edwards told CNN from their metro Atlanta home.
"She didn't want for anything," Edwards said. "She was involved in the community until her health declined. She was caring and had a loving heart."


Hardy was born on March 11, 1908, on a former slave plantation in Junction City, Georgia. She remembered the stories her grandmother Nancy told her about life as a slave -- working from sun up to sun down, picking cotton, and having no freedom.
Edwards said living in the Jim Crow rural south was not easy for her grandmother. After third grade, Hardy left school and worked in the fields to help her family. She moved to Atlanta in the late 1930s with her soon-to-be husband and daughter, working as a maid for wealthy families.
This year she had the opportunity to meet former first lady Michelle Obama, who visited Atlanta on her book tour.

"She was overwhelmed," Edwards said of Hardy's reaction. "She was happy. She asked, 'She wants to meet me?'"
Back in 2008, Hardy had been elated to vote for then-Sen. Barack Obama as he became the first African-American president.
"She never thought she would live to see that," Edwards told CNN. "It was a thrill and joy for her."

Edwards said Hardy instilled the importance of voting in all her relatives and participated in every election since she was allowed the right to vote, even local races.
Hardy is survived by five grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, 31 great-great children and four great-great-great-grandchildren.


May her soul rest.