NC board supports reparations, apologizes for county role in slavery, discrimination
Orange County’s commissioners apologized Monday for the county’s role in slavery, segregation and systemic discrimination against Black residents.
The commissioners approved a resolution supporting reparations in a 6-1 vote, following in the footsteps of other cities in North Carolina that have resolved to address racism and reparations, including Asheville, Durham and Carrboro.
In addition to fighting racism, the resolution calls on the county to work with public and private partners to invest in Black students and families, Black-owned farms and businesses, and Black workers and communities of color “as first steps in providing long overdue reparations for the centuries of suffering, loss, anguish, injustice and trauma.”
The resolution is a beginning and not a plan, which will take more discussion, said board Chair Renee Price, who led the effort. It also marks the 155th anniversary of the 13th Amendment being ratified and abolishing slavery, she said.
It could have gone further, she said, but only marks the time when “we were freed from slavery and supposedly given 40 acres and a mule, and then, of course, that was snatched right away and then the system just perpetuated itself.”
Annette Moore, director of the county’s Human Rights and Relations Department, recounted a brief history of that oppression, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which invalidated “Black Codes” used by Confederate states “to limit the freedom of Black people and to ensure their availability for cheap labor after slavery” after the Civil War.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that the 13th Amendment promised “universal civil and political freedom” to formerly enslaved people, historians have noted that Jim Crow laws and unfairly run federal programs perpetuated vestiges of slavery until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That laid the groundwork for generations of disenfranchisement, semi-servitude, segregation and financial, emotional and social oppression, experts have said.
“Blacks do not have to make a case for reparations,” Moore said. “It is a promise from the amendment of the Constitution. We ask that you help fulfill this promise, which will include a review of existing policies and practices and procedures within Orange County government that create systemic and institutional inequities against Black people and other people of color.”
Commissioner Sally Greene, in a last-minute addition, amended the resolution to call for the federal government to help eliminate racial disparities in wealth, by providing a universal basic income and universal income for all citizens, guaranteeing a federal living-wage job for all, requiring a minimum wage of $15 or higher with regular cost-of-living increases, and passing House Bill 40, which calls for a federal reparations commission.
Without raising the average net worth of all Americans, Greene said, “the descendants of the enslaved and white Americans are never going to be on the same economic par.” The plan’s proponents have advocated for paying only proven descendants of formerly enslaved people who have identified as African-American for many years, she said.
Commissioner Earl McKee said it was that addition, particularly the call for universal income, federal jobs and a $15 minimum wage, that stopped him from supporting the resolution. He also noted concerns about how much those steps would cost, who would pay and how they would pay.
Otherwise, McKee said, the resolution speaks “to a need to address history, it speaks to a need to address the present, and it speaks to a need to address the future.
“And if we don’t address the future at some point and time, then we’re not going to move from where we are today, which is a divided country,” said McKee, who is white.
Commissioner Jean Hamilton, who is Black, acknowledged McKee’s concerns. She also hesitated to support the addition, Hamilton said.
“I think it actually takes away from the focus of what we can do as Orange County and our responsibilities to look at how our institutions perpetuate systemic racism,” Hamilton said.
However, it is a good first step, she said, and an important reminder of how America “was built on the exploitation of people, especially African American people, people of African descent, and that this exploitation … is really embedded in many of our institutions and has led to serious disparities in African-American outcomes.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
