Seven Billion Reasons for Reparations

Abstract

This article recounts the origins and history of the Freedmen's Bank (1865–1874), providing an important reminder of the lingering injustices we must address lest they continue to repeat themselves. Rooted in documented and recorded Black financial losses, I suggest that the Freedmen's Bank offers a necessary platform for Black reparations. Shifting the reparations focus to the Freedmen's Bank, I conclude my discussion by outlining the fruitful reparations platform this historical episode affords.

Keywords:

• economics
• Frederick Douglass
• Freedmen's Bank
• racism
• reparations
• W.E.B. Du Bois

Acknowledgments

The author thanks and acknowledges Aldon Morris, Mary Pattillo, Charles Camic, Cathy J. Cohen, Jean Beaman, Johnathan Holloway, Elizabeth Alexander, Rashida Z. Shaw, Mikaela Rabinowitz, Zandria Robinson, Christopher Wildeman, Gary Alan Fine, Dant’e Taylor, Elijah Anderson, Gerald Jaynes, and Courtney Patterson for their encouraging and constructive feedback.

About the Author

Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences, Professor in sociology, and Chair of the department of African American Studies at UCLA. He is author of Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (2013, Oxford University Press) and coauthor with Zandria F. Robinson of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2018, University of California Press), and editor of The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2018, Routledge).

Notes

1 W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899).

2 All figures reported according to current standards are based on the 2018 Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI is especially useful because I focus on Black Americans as consumers. Using CPI, I have produced estimates for all figures to facilitate an idea of how much money was involved in the Freedmen's Bank and its branches. For more see, Samuel H. Williamson, "Seven Ways to Compute the relative Values of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present," (Measuring Worth, 2011), http://measuringworth.com/uscompare/.

3 See Arnett G. Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking,” Journal of Negro History 14, no. 2 (1929): 172; for further discussion on Black banks, see also Lila Ammons, “The Evolution of Black-Owned Banks in the United States between the 1880s and 1990s," Journal of Black Studies 26, no. 4 (1996): 467–89; Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist (New York: Negro Universities Press, [1936] 1969); Edward D. Irons, “Black Banking—Problems and Prospects,” Journal of Finance 26, no. 2 (1971): 407–25; and Andrew F. Brimmer, “The Black Banks: An Assessment of Performance and Prospects, Journal of Finance 26, no. 2 (1971): 379–405; DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro; Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman's Savings Bank (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976); and Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

4 Walter L. Fleming, The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 19; see also Ira Berlin, et al., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992); Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two America Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas, 1998).

5 U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440; U.S. Senate, The Freedman’s Bank Bill, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., 1881; U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1912, Rep. 759, 4; Walter L. Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1927); Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud.

6 Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking,” 163; U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440.

7 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 26; see, e.g. Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd sess., 1865, pt. I & pt. II.

8 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 35.

9 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 44; Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud.

10 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 44; Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud; Hunter 2013; U.S. Senate, 46^th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440; U.S. Senate, The Freedman’s Bank Bill, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., 1881; U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1912, Rep. 759, 4.

11 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 45.

12 Viviana Zelizer, “The Special Meaning of Money: ‘Special Monies,’” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 2 (1989): 342–47. Further explaining this concept, Zelizer asserts, “For instance, a housewife’s pin money or her allowance is treated differently from a wage or a salary, and each surely differs from a child’s allowance. Or a lottery winning is marked as a different kind of money from an ordinary paycheck. The money we obtain as compensation for an accident is not quite the same as the royalties from a book” (343). Further discussion in this regard includes: Viviana Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in 19th-Century America,” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 3 (1978): 591–610; Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Viviana Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York: Columbia University); Thomas Crump, The Phenomenon of Money (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society (New York: Viking, 1986); and Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1900). See also Bruce Carruthers and Wendy Espeland, “Money, Meaning, and Morality,” American Behavioral Science 41 (1998): 1384–88; Frederick F. Wherry, "The Social Characterizations of Price: The Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal," Sociological Theory 26, no. 4 (2008): 363–79; and Lisa A. Keister, “Financial Markets, Money, and Banking,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002), 39–61.

13 Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, 82.

14 U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440; U.S. Senate, The Freedman’s Bank Bill, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., 1881; U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1912, Rep. 759, 4; Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking”; Harris, The Negro as Capitalist.

15 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 42.

16 U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440; U.S. Senate, The Freedman’s Bank Bill, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., 1881; U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1912, Rep. 759, 4; Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd sess., 1865, pt. I & pt. II; Lindsay, “The Negro in Banking”; Harris, The Negro as Capitalist.

17 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank.

18 Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd sess., 1865, pt. I & pt. II; Frederick Douglass and Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Courier Corporation, [1881] 2003).

19 Douglass and Logan, The Life and Times; Harris, The Negro as Capitalist.

20 Douglass and Logan, The Life and Times, 413–14.

21 Ibid., 410–11

22 Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999): 680–681

23 Douglass and Logan, The Life and Times, 414.

24 Ibid.

25 U.S. Senate, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., 1880, Rep. 440; U.S. Senate, The Freedman’s Bank Bill, 46th Cong., 3rd sess., 1881; U.S. Senate, 62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1912, Rep. 759, 4; Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank; Harris, The Negro as Capitalist; Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud; Interview with the Senate Committee on Finance, April 24, 1888, Frederick Douglass Papers, “Speech, Article and Book Files,” Library of Congress, U.S. Govt.

26 Foner, Frederick Douglass, 680–81.

27 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black folk (New York: Penguin Press 1982, emphasis added), 32; Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro.

28 Fleming, The Freedmen's Savings Bank, 1.

29 Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr., "Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?" The Review of Black Political Economy 37, no. 3–4 (2010), 207–216; see also Mariame Kaba, “Reparations NOW,” http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/tag/reparations/ (accessed April 7, 2016).

30 This dialog has produced a robust and dynamic number of platforms for reparations claims-making. For further thoughtful analysis see Manning Marable, “In Defense of Black Reparations,” The Freedom and Justice Courier 9 (2002), 2002–10; Manning Marable, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” Newsweek, 138, no. 9 (2001), 22; Manning Marable, “The Political and Theoretical Contexts of the Changing Racial Terrain,” Souls 4, no. 3 (2002), 1–16; Alfred L. Brophy, “The Cultural War over Reparations for Slavery,” DePaul Law Review 53 (2003), 1181; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic 5, no. 5 (2014): 1–62.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this article benefited from the generous financial support of the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, the National Science Foundation (Grant ID #0902399), the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

Notes on contributors

Marcus Anthony Hunter

Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences, Professor in sociology, and Chair of the department of African American Studies at UCLA. He is author of Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (2013, Oxford University Press) and coauthor with Zandria F. Robinson of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (2018, University of California Press), and editor of The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2018, Routledge).