After a resounding defeat, Vice President Kamala Harris is exploring ways to remain politically relevant. Although it is unlikely that Democrats will nominate her again for president, she is in a good position to continue to advance the promise of racial opportunity that her campaign symbolized. Harris can use her fund-raising skills to establish a development bank for the descendants of slavery and Jim Crow.
Joe Biden just became the first American president to visit Angola, whose role in supplying the U.S. with slaves he recalled. More Africans were sold into bondage from Angola than from any other part of the continent. Biden called for that history to be remembered and corrected, saying in a speech that slavery was our nation’s original sin, “one that haunted America and cast a long shadow ever since.”
I don’t presume to give the vice president advice, but according to news reports, she is exploring future options, including the prospect of running for office again, and has asked people to offer ideas for the future. Even with the election over, her campaign has continued to solicit funds. Yet the history of presidential candidates whose campaigns ended in defeat suggests a different approach.
Several former presidential candidates have found ways to address national problems outside of raising money for yet another election. The best model is Jimmy Carter, who turned to building homes for the needy — and monitoring elections overseas — after a stinging defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Then there is former Vice President Al Gore, who became a global advocate for the environment after losing to George Bush in 2000.
Whatever the qualms about her campaign, Harris proved to be a prodigious fundraiser — and that talent can be used to address the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Her team raised $1.5 billion for the three-month sprint for the presidency. And as vice president, she helped to attract $5 billion in public-private commitments for development projects in Central America.
Moreover, she owes a debt of gratitude to her base of Black women — and Black men, who were given a lot of guff for low enthusiasm but who turned out on her behalf when others did not. A development bank would be essential in helping to address the glaring racial wealth gap created by the structural forces of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination.
While Democrats tend to promote broad-based economic policies that “lift all boats,” the Black community needs targeted programs to make up for lost ground, according to a 2018 report by Center for American Progress.
Harris could, for example, help raise seed money for a community development financial institution that would pool restitution awards from corporations and governments, like her home state of California. The current piecemeal approach may fail to address the totality of the wrong; namely, that Black Americans suffered the injustice of slavery and Jim Crow as a people and reparations should seek to build institutional wealth for the folk.
Such a financial institution would network with Black-owned banks and credit unions and other financial entities that provide loans, grants, and planning assistance. It could pool deposits from restitution settlements and donations, and seek savings deposits from interested private parties, companies and governments. The capital would support lending for projects of sound purpose through microfinancing, long-term loans and planning grants, among others. Critical areas of investment might be cooperative housing, primary and intermediate education, community healthcare and nutrition, occupational training and diversification, and entrepreneurship to mainstream markets.
Since the Civil War, Black Americans have made demands for restitution for the unjust enrichment from slavery without reward. Today, about 90 percent of the population of 45 million Black Americans are descended from the original 500,000 Africans brought here as commodities of slave labor. They were assets of national wealth development valued for their labor, sale, rent and breeding for over 250 years.
Their labor and bodies helped to establish the modern industries of agriculture, shipping, manufacturing, railroads, publishing, finance and insurance, turning America into a world economic powerhouse long before the surge of European immigration in the late 19th century.
Early claims for reparations included demands for ownership of the 400,000 acres of coastal rice plantations in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. In January 1865, when the land was under Union Army occupation, it was awarded to freedmen by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman through Special Field Order No. 15.
However, this effort was reversed after the assassination of President Lincoln in April 1865, and Black settlers were evicted or reduced to peonage with the return of white supremacist governments. Other early claims for restitution in the form of state and federal pensions were denied, such as the 1899 request to Congress by the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association to allocate pensions to aging freedmen.
America’s enrichment from slavery was followed by the unjust enrichment from Jim Crow, the laws and practices of racial subjugation erected after the Civil War. Under such laws, the Black community suffered the loss of wages, farms, loans, neighborhoods and businesses, which were prevented from competing in mainstream markets well into the 1960s. Most Black workers were even excluded from participation in Social Security.
In 1972, Yale Law Professor Boris Bittker estimated the cost of reparations for slavery alone at about $1 trillion in “The Case for Black Reparations.” A recent House study has estimated the debt to be about $14 trillion. Today, individuals and families seek to wrest back stolen wealth in piecemeal fashion, as documented by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his famous Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations.”
Harris, after leaving office, could be instrumental in shifting attention to the merits of building Black institutional wealth in a development bank. Beyond the question of financial equity, the creation of a reparations fund would have cultural benefits as well. As the late political thinker Randall Robinson argued in “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” the demand for restitution has roots in the dignity of Black America.
Roger House is professor emeritus of American Studies at Emerson College and the author of “Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy” and “South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age.” His forthcoming book is “Five Hundred Years of Black Self-Governance: A Call to Conscience.”
