Fredrick Douglass, Malcolm X and the Vision of Reparations for Black Americans: An Ethical Conversation

By Darvon Adams

Where this is no vision, the people perish; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he (Proverbs 29:18, KJV).

Then the LORD answered me and said: “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it (Habakkuk 2:2, NKJV).

The conversation of reparations for slavery and the improvement of Black communities in the United States is one of supreme importance. Monetary reparations owed to Black Americans for their ancestors' labors in making the United States a rich and powerful country is one of few genuine conversations that includes the liberating reflections of Fredrick Douglass and Minister Malcolm X. Often referenced as two of the most influential leaders in American history, what Douglass and Malcolm X have in common is that they both grew up in poverty. Both endured a rough life as children within families that knew what it meant to be deprived of material goods and economic resources. Both valued the communal sacredness of being formally educated—particularly with reading, writing and interpretation. Both Douglass and X were keenly aware of the denial of Black educational opportunity in the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. Both were outstanding public orators and great critical thinkers. Both witnessed firsthand the blatant killing and lynching of Black bodies as economic acts. Most important, both Douglass and X are considered to be experts on how racism and discrimination have denied Black folk any form of economic self-sufficiency. Put in another factual way:          

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African-Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered  dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of   land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth, the average black household possesses a mere ten cents.He who can say to his fellow-man, “You shall serve me or starve,” is a master and his subject is   a slave. This was seen and felt by Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and leading Republicans stalwarts; and had their counsels prevailed the terrible evils from which we now suffer would have been averted. The negro today would not be on his knees, as he is, abjectly supplicating the old master class to give him leave to toil. Nor would he be leaving the South as from a doomed city, and seeking a home in the uncongenial North, but tilling his native soil in comparative independence.He [Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam] says that in this section [of the United States] that will be set aside for Black people, that the government should give us everything we need to start our own civilization. They should give us everything we need to exist for the next twenty-five years. And when you stop and consider the—you shouldn't be shocked, you give Latin America   $20 billion and they never fought for this country. You send billions of dollars to Poland and to         Hungary, they're Communist countries, they never contributed anything here.This is what you should realize. The greatest contribution to this country was contributed by the Black man. If I take the wages, just a moment, if I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would   make me wealthy. And if I collect it for a year, I'd be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and    then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of Black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you'll see how this country got so rich so fast. And what made the economy as strong as it is today. And all that, and all of that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due someone today. And you are not giving us anything.If you are a son of a man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate, you have   to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in a position of economic strength…is because their fathers worked  our fathers for over 400 years with no pay…We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat….All that money…is what gives the present generation of American Whites the ability to walk around the earth with their chest out…like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn't here to pay. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect and you're here to pay.

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxt24.html. Darity Jr. and Mullen: “We thank Howard Machtinger for alerting us to this speech.”