When Richard E. Barber Sr. filed a class-action lawsuit this spring against companies that benefited from slavery, he was trying to collect a debt dating back more than a century. "This represents a debt unpaid to our ancestors," he said from his home in Somerset, N.J. "Slaves worked for 240 years without a pay day." There is no statute of limitations on equity," said Barber, a former deputy executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "If my great-grandfather helped create wealth, don't you think that I, in 2002, am entitled to part of it?" Barber's argument is not new. Since emancipation, former slaves and their descendants have pressed the United States to honor a promise of 40 acres and a mule. Today, the issue still resonates in our community. In a series of Essence.com polls, nearly 80 percent of visitors said African-Americans are entitled to reparations for slavery. Will we ever be repaid? "Never," said nearly 73 percent of 1,680 respondents. Here's a brief timeline of the reparations struggle: - September 1863: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, which frees slaves living in Confederate states. Freedom for all slaves doesn't come until the end of the Civil War ends when Congress ends slavery.
- January 1865: Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issues a field order that distributes land from plantations abandoned by fleeing slaveowners on the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to former slaves who had deserted their former masters and followed in his march across Georgia. The land was divided into 40-acre tracts. They also received mules discarded by the military. Roughly 400,000 acres were distributed to 40,000 families.
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