Congress Is Taking On Reparations. At the First Hearing, Academic Historians Were Absent.

For years, colleges have faced growing pressure to redress their historical entanglements with slavery. That pressure ratcheted up another notch on Wednesday as lawmakers gaveled open the first congressional hearing on reparations in more than a decade.

At stake was a House bill that would create a commission to study slavery and subsequent discrimination, and would make recommendations for repairing those racial injustices. It’s an old idea, and the fresh attention it’s getting reflects how reparations have recently moved from the fringes to the center of political debate.

Wednesday’s televised hearing displayed the cultural and political forces driving that change. Celebrities, scholars, pundits — plus one presidential candidate — debated why America needs, or doesn’t need, a historical reckoning. The forum drew a vast crowd, and many were unable to get into the small, wood-paneled hearing room. Those who did interjected boos, gasps, applause, and calls of “You lie!”

For such a prominent historical discussion, one group was notably absent: historians of slavery.

“I’m extremely frustrated as this is many of our lives’ work, and none of us have been invited or asked to testify,” Daina Ramey Berry, a slavery historian at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an email to The Chronicle. “We have rarely been called to the table.”

It fell in part to the hearing’s star witness, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to channel their scholarship. Coates, famous for his Atlantic essay making the case for reparations, directed much of his testimony to rebutting remarks by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky Republican said on Tuesday that reparations were a bad idea because no one alive today is responsible for “something that happened 150 years ago.” Coates emphasized the continuity of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. He urged lawmakers to face the full breadth of American history.

“If Thomas Jefferson matters,” he said, “so does Sally Hemings.”

Julianne Malveaux, an economist and former president of Bennett College, in North Carolina, presented evidence for reparations based on postslavery abuses. How African-Americans were prevented from securing public lands, or had their own land expropriated. How lynchings deprived them of the opportunity to accumulate wealth. How federal housing policies buttressed redlining and segregation.

“Economic structure has generated an inequality that makes it difficult for people to live their lives,” she said. “When ZIP code determines what kind of school that you go to, when ZIP code determines what kind of food you can eat, these are the vestiges of enslavement.”

The discussion in Congress matters to academe for two key reasons.

The first concerns many colleges’ status as beneficiaries of slavery and segregation. Dozens of universities have studied their ties to slavery. They face growing calls to do more. In April, for example, Georgetown University students backed a referendum calling for reparations to help descendants of a group of enslaved people whose 1838 sale rescued the university from debt. Other activists want colleges to atone for their ties to slavery by supporting historically black colleges and universities.

The proposed bill would explicitly target colleges. The commission’s reparations proposals would deal with, among other things, “the direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, religious and associational.”

‘Massive Political Undertaking’

The second reason this matters is intellectual. The commission’s members would be charged with documenting slavery’s role in American history. They would also report on racial injustice since 1868, “including redlining, educational-funding discrepancies, and predatory financial practices.” They could hold hearings. The process of gathering evidence could involve lawyers, historians, economists, sociologists, and political theorists, said Eric J. Miller, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, who testified on Wednesday.

“This is a massive political undertaking, but it’s also a massive and interdisciplinary academic undertaking because the wrongs of discrimination are so diffuse,” Miller said in an interview.

Academe, though, is also a source of intellectual arguments against reparations. At Wednesday’s hearing, Coleman Hughes, a philosophy student at Columbia University and an opinion writer for Quillette, called the proposed reparations bill “a moral and political mistake.”

Hughes supports limited reparations for people who actually grew up under Jim Crow, rather than all descendants of slaves. He warned that focusing on slavery would compromise America’s ability to deal with contemporary problems facing the black community, such as homicide and mass incarceration. That’s in part because reparations are so divisive, making it hard to build political coalitions needed to solve those problems.

Opponents also raised logistical objections. As McConnell said on Tuesday, “it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate.”

But some scholars countered that such information exists if Congress cared to look. They also cited the long history of compensating slaveowners. Those owners got money when their slaves were killed, Berry said, such as when the state put slaves to death for alleged crimes. They were compensated for slaves who ran away or were taken by the British during the War of 1812. Some were promised that an enslaved woman would give birth within five years of purchase. If she did not, they successfully took the seller to court to get their money back. The federal government compensated slaveowners in Washington, D.C., when their slaves were freed.

“The reparations conversation is much more layered and much more nuanced than people realize,” Berry said.

Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work they do. Follow him on Twitter @marcparry or email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com.