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Duke Panel Addresses Reparation Issues

Two-hour conversation focuses on violence, memory and redress in relation to ancient Athens, Korean "comfort women," Native Americans and African Americans

For the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, the issue of reparations is not just theoretical. In 1921, his family lost all its property -- including his father's law office and the home the family was supposed to move into -- in a race riot in Tulsa, Okla.

"From that day to the present one, I have known personally what reparations meant," Franklin, James B. Duke emeritus professor of history, told about 150 people Monday evening at a panel discussion on the global and historical context of reparations.

Franklin's remarks opened "Reparations in Perspective," a two-hour conversation in the Bryan Center in which five panelists talked about violence, memory and redress in relation to ancient Athens, Korean "comfort women," Native Americans and African Americans. The event was followed by a videoconference Wednesday with scholars from Harvard University and Spelman College.

But none spoke as poignantly as Franklin, who recalled the day when he was six years old, waiting for his father with all the family's belongings packed up. They were supposed to move from tiny Rentiesville, Okla., to their new home in Tulsa.

 

"He didn't come that day, the next day or the next," Franklin said. Finally his mother read in the newspaper that there had been a race riot. "She did not know for several days if he were living or dead."

Last month, Franklin and other victims and descendants of victims of the riot sued the state of Oklahoma and city of Tulsa, seeking reparations for lost loved ones and destroyed businesses and homes.

"We have waited more than 70 years from that time ! Will we get reparations? I don't know," he said.

The idea of paying reparations to the descendants of African-American slaves has been around since the Civil War, when General Sherman promised 40 acres of land to freed slaves. But it has been drawing more serious attention recently. The Reparations Coordinating Committee, which includes such high-profile people as lawyer Johnnie Cochran and Harvard legal theorist Charles Ogletree, has been at the forefront of the movement to target corporations, rather than the federal government, for compensation.

"When I graduated from law school about 10 years ago, if you talked about reparations in polite society, people thought you were a quack," said panelist Adrienne Davis, professor at the law school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We've come a long way by bringing it into public debate."

The debate on Monday night was wide-ranging. Duke classics professor Grant Parker talked about ancient Athens and the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. He noted that the root of the word "amnesty" refers to memory. "It's about the politics of remembering or not remembering," said Parker, introducing a theme other speakers expanded upon during the conversation.

Healing -- as well as reparation -- is part of the process of addressing past violence, said Chungmoo Choi, professor of East Asian Languages & Literature at the University of California at Irvine.

Of the 200,000 Korean "comfort women" who were forced into prostitution during World War II, only a few hundred survive, and few of them had children, she said. The victims in this case are the only evidence, and many are dead or have been silenced, she said. "The only evidence is the memory of pain and shame," she said.

Davis noted that in cases of injury, restitution is a basic premise of Western law. And, she argued, "a horrible, horrible wrong has been committed against generations of enslaved Africans.

"Why not reparations? Why not at slavery's end? Why not at the end of Jim Crow? Why not now?" she said.

Duke anthropologist Orin Starn suggested that Native Americans' experience indicates that, in spite of parallels in different societies, each case is unique.

Although Native Americans have not had large amounts of land returned to them, their cause has been infused with a sense of romantic justice, he said. This romantic notion of Native Americans contributed to "an alchemy of white guilt and Native American activism," he said.

Duke literature professor Wahneema Lubiano said the debate about reparations in the U.S. isn't only useful as an end in itself, but it also could open a national discussion about labor relations and social justice. "Reparations discussion takes us deep into the heart of our political economy and what could be an enlightened discussion of that political economy," she said.

During the question-and-answer session, several audience members touched more directly on the issue of how reparations might be made to African Americans.

Burgess Foster, a history student at North Carolina Central University, suggested that a national education fund would help narrow the gap in achievement and wealth between blacks and whites by improving educational opportunities. "If America would do this, it would actually be investing in itself," he said.

Kwabena Ashanti said that monetary reparations aren't the only issue. He said that, in his work as an Afrocentric psychologist, he has seen psychological and spiritual damage that hasn't been addressed in the legal arena.

"Only we can heal ourselves," he said.