Education Best Form of Reparation, Says Black Scholar

Lonnie G. Bunch, director, National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“I am not interested in getting 50 dollars in my pocket,” a black scholar protested. What he does earnestly desire is for an American president to stand up and say “we were wrong” for 250 years of slavery in the U.S.

Delivering a thought-provoking talk as key-note speaker at the Annual Carter G. Woodson Lecture at the Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary’s Hall, at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Lonnie Bunch III said social uplift of the black community as a whole, rather than reparations on an individual basis, would help end the crippling effect of slavery.

Professor and CEO of Historic St. Mary’s City, Martin Sullivan, introduced Bunch, who is founding director of the National Museum for African American History and Culture, in the nation’s capital.

Bunch recalled President Clinton during an African tour had acknowledged that the United States was wrong to benefit from slavery, but backed off from an apology under intense pressure from both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Bunch suspects the reason why an American president has not apologized over slavery is that the next step would naturally be reparation.

Bunch pointed out the black slaves in America accounted for 90 percent of the world’s cotton production during the heyday of slavery. But as far as reparations went, he said it could take the form of creating opportunities for the black community in the field of education and greater spending on inner city schools.

The topic of reparations remains one of the most divisive black-white issues in the country. A 2002 survey commissioned by the CNN and USA Today showed a question of reparations from U.S. corporations that benefited from slavery, 68 percent of African Americans responded affirmatively, with 23 percent opposed, while 62 percent of all whites rejected the call for that form of an apology, with only 34 percent supporting it.

Bunch made it clear he did not agree to the telling the black history outside the American mainstream, saying black culture was not only a part and parcel of American life but also its very identity.

Bunch described the Civil War as the most devastating war in American history, but he regretted that during a lecture at a university in Texas, he heard a student say “The Civil War was meant to protect our way of life.”

Bunch said founder of freed South Africa, Nelson Mandela, had said he learned from the black freedom experience in the United States to pave the way for freedom for black in South Africa.

In spite of creating vast riches by their labor, the freed slaves started their lives with zero dollars in their pockets or, in many instances, got into debt to buy their freedom, and that has left their descendants under-privileged to this day, wallowing in drugs and crime.

“I am not ashamed of my slave ancestry,” Bunch asserted, as he affirmed the need for forgiveness.

Even today a black family makes only two-thirds of what a white family earns, Maryland Lt-Gov. Anthony Brown said at the Martin Luther King breakfast at St. Mary’s College last month.

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