Unpaid Debts

By William Street

For the first 100 or so years, the wealth of our nation was created disproportionately from slave labor. From cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the US South to Wall St. insurance companies and banks underwriting and insuring the property of white slave holders, the foundational wealth of our country came disproportionately from the lashed backs of black slaves.

It took more than a century of organizing and education to create a political base, primarily in the US North, since they were not as directly threatened by emancipation after their original wealth had been accrued. A political base that recognized that admitting additional slave states to the union posed a political threat to their own Northern white economic self-interest. Thus, a coalition of Western and Northern states were able to elect Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.

Following Appomattox, for a decade, this country understood that reconstruction required some form of reparations and that the basis of this was to obtain the goal of economic justice. Without undoing a century of exploitation, it would not be possible to move forward. Special Field Orders No. 15 in 1865 were to provide 40 acres and a mule to compensate new freemen. A mere 11 years later, social justice was abandoned on the altar of political expediency.

The rise of the KKK (very active in Oregon) and other white supremacist groups replaced the hope for economic justice with the fear for survival. Jim Crow exploited loopholes in the 13th and 14th Amendments, which permitted bonded servitude to continue. Oregon just last November finally addressed this leftover heritage in our own state constitution.

It took almost another hundred years for civil rights to again become the focus of a majority of white Americans. But when it did, it became foundational for social and cultural advancement as well as significant movement toward a just society.

Conversations in the 60s about “de facto” and “de jure” racism lead to examinations of other social structures with similar dichotomies and contradictions. Acknowledging the power advantage for the rich (Viet Nam), men (choice, et al.), and whites (from redlining to complete domination in all aspects of society) fueled the struggle for social and environmental justice.

Most recognize the role Black Americans played in saving democracy in 2020. They died from police violence covered on the nightly news. They died in mass shootings by white supremacists, bombings of their places of worship, and they died from Covid, economically forced into the category of “essential” workers. Yet they turned out to vote in the face of targeted harassment. They stood in line for hours. They marched in Ferguson, Charlotte and Portland, among other places.

Their struggle and moral strength again saved our democracy and again created additional debts in the ledger of national accounting, much as prior generations did in the 1940s.

In an effort to destroy the New Deal, reactionary white Congressional leaders formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938. Its goal was to brand progressives and New Dealers as communists and socialists and to invalidate their goals and actions.

Any action for civil rights was branded: “Un-american.”

The zenith of their power of repression was symbolized by the election in 1947 of Joseph McCarthy to the US Senate. Simply to be asked the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” ended jobs, terminated careers and destroyed families across the country. It is impossible to separate Jim Crow from the Red Scare. They were all part of the same threat to our country. In 1946, members of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, began their campaign to reduce discrimination on the city’s bus system.

The NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and others were foundational to the civil rights movement and the eventual destruction of McCarthyism and early America First fascist movements. CORE launched one of its first sit-ins in Chicago in 1942, followed by St. Louis (1949) and Baltimore (1952). CORE and Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) commenced “freedom rides” in 1947. This struggle reached its turning point on December 1,1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white customer.

The Montgomery bus boycott and eventual SCOTUS court ruling became the model for mass civil disobedience that was foundational for the 1960s social action including: the anti-war, environmental, women’s and LGBTQ movements. The coalition of Black and white progressives that fought these struggles in the 1940s and ‘50s expanded the realm of the politically possible.

The sacrifice by Black Americans resulted in civil rights legislation, the beginning of a “Great Society,” the passage of Medicare, Brown v. Board of Education and the ending of a war in Southeast Asia, to list a few of the outcomes. Yet, economic justice remained elusive. Then the rich and powerful fought back.

What was not politically possible between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall was a discussion about the basic flaws in the economic system that perpetuate these and other injustices to this day. With the fall of the USSR and the evolution of China toward a market-based economy, the ground became fertile to discuss what economic and social justice look like without the existence of a marketable “communist threat.” By textbook definitions most OECD countries today are more socialist than capitalist.

Until the roots of economic injustice are severed, “equal opportunity” is a chimera used to justify ongoing institutional racial and economic discrimination.

To avoid past strategic errors it seems necessary to tackle issues like reparations and structural economic racism head on. Political expediency ended Reconstruction, and it always will, until we all realize that what looks like “political expediency” today is actually political suicide in the longterm. Every environmentalist should understand this intuitively.

We white Americans have a debt to pay. We hold IOU’s to our populations of color, to most of the global south and to our own next generations. Every day these debts go unpaid and interest accrues, making the ultimate cost of justice higher and more difficult to attain.

As Democrats we must see the big picture. By failing to tackle the hard economic injustice issues in an attempt to placate either Wall St. donors or the mythical silent majority, we have lost the New Deal coalition. We can not tackle white supremacists by placating them. We can not save the planet through tax credits or oil depletion allowances. We are denying half the population medical care and the right to choose how their own bodies are used (and abused) because political expediency was our guide, rather than political courage.

Every day the debt we owe grows. With bold visions and political courage we can yet attain that day when on that debt may be stamped: “Paid in Full.”