The Case For Reparations

On January 27 and 28, 1944, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. This moment had been a long time coming. Blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution. More than 68,000 died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

On the morning of January 27, a patrol of sixteen P-40 Warhawks led by Lieutenant Clarence Jamison flew at five thousand feet, just north of Anzio, just as fifteen German FW-190's pulled out of an attack on the Allied anchorage at Peter Beach. The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half-dozen .50-caliber machine guns.

"I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail. I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot," reported Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr. Flames spurted from the enemy's fuselage, then from another and still another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops only to clip the ground in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one flaming wing.

"The whole show lasted less then five minutes. We poured hell into them," Major Spanky Roberts later said.

The squadron returned to Naples to refuel, and returned to the Anzio beachhead. In two days the squadron tallied twelve enemy planes destroyed, three probable kills, and four damaged. But the implications of the combat prowess of the Tuskegee Airmen, as they were informally known, would reverberate for long afterwards. An unnamed black soldier later said that men like him were "doing their bit here, their supreme bit, not for glory, not for honor, but for, I think, the generation that will come."***

These men, and the generation that followed, were betrayed by their country. My Jewish uncle served in the same theatre of war, but when he came home, there were federal programs in place to assist him. The Veteran's Administration loaned him money to buy his first home. It was assistance like this that helped millions of veterans buy homes, and begin creating generational wealth.

The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) insured federal mortgage loans that were made by the VA. But the very covenants of the FHA were discriminatory. One underwriting standard warned that "if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties should continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes."

Between 1945 and 1959, African Americans received only 2 percent of all federally insured home loans. FHA established guidelines to steer private mortgage investors away from minority areas, known as redlining. Therefore, not only were blacks excluded from new developments like Levittown, insurance for minority-dominated neighborhoods was discouraged.

The FHA isn't the only Democratic Party program designed to disenfranchise blacks. It isn't even the only New Deal-era program to do so. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1934 required that construction firms contracting for the federal government must pay their workers "locally prevailing wages." This was explicitly designed to keep lower-skilled African-Americans out of federal construction projects.

The New Deal wasn't the only bad deal for blacks engineered by Democrats. Part of the impetus for this essay is the current mob rage over the confederate flag. The truth is that the confederate flag is the property of the Democratic Party. The states that seceded from the Union in 1861 were all Democratic Party states. The party that held that one person can own another is the Democratic Party.

The party that enforced segregation and Jim Crow apartheid policies for a century after the Civil War was the Democratic Party. When Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Senator Robert Byrd died, President Barack Obama delivered his eulogy. Because he was a Democrat.

I only have one condition for supporting reparations to the descendants of those brought here in chains. A full, official, and unconditional apology by the Democratic Party. I want to see Debbie Wasserman-Shultz tell a bank of cameras that the Republican Party was founded to oppose and abolish slavery. I want Harry Reid to say that the G.O.P. supported the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights act in spite of Democratic Party filibustering. I want President Obama to admit that the Democratic Party is still subjugating blacks today, by telling them that the only way they can feed themselves is by taking food from a government official.


***Rick Atkinson, The Day Of Battle, Picador 2007, pp. 381-385