Summary
The article begins with three epigraphs. The first is from the Bible, specifically Deuteronomy 15, in which God instructs the people of Israel to free Hebrew slaves after they have served them six years, and to support them financially upon their emancipation, in remembrance of when they were slaves in Egypt. Second comes a quote from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, which talks about how after someone is done wrong by another, they have the right to “seek reparation.” Finally, Coates closes the section on epigraphs with a quote from an enslaved person, who says that their labor and suffering has given them the right to American soil, and that they are determined to have it.
Part One begins with the story of Clyde Ross, an African-American man born near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1923. Early on in his childhood, his family was fairly well-off, owning a decently-sized farm, and wanting for almost nothing—except the full protection of the law. Jim Crow Mississippi, however, did not provide that, lynching more Black people than any other state between 1882 and 1968 and systemically denying African-Americans access to basic sociopolitical rights. The Ross family was no exception, as Mississippi authorities accused the family of having back taxes while the Ross family had no effective way to respond. The state seized their assets, and forced them to turn to sharecropping.
This was not uncommon practice, and like many other Black children at the time, Ross lost the opportunity for a better education because of the family's lack of funds. When he was ten, a group of white men forced him to sell his horse, an exertion of power that was among the first of many losses the Rosses would see in the coming years. Sharecropping was a fundamentally dishonest practice, where landowners would often make bales of cotton disappear, or suddenly change the landowner/worker profit split, leaving families almost destitute. Ross was shaped by this deep injustice as he grew older, and left as soon as he could by way of the military draft. When he returned home from service, he decided to become one of six million African-Americans that left the South over the course of the 20th century in what is called the Great Migration. He moved to Chicago and was enjoying his time there, relative to Mississippi.
In 1961, he and his wife bought a home in a community in North Lawndale, which was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood at the time. It seemed promising, but soon the Ross family found out that to be untrue. The boiler burst, which normally would be a straightforward issue for a homeowner. Only Ross was not a homeowner, having bought the home “on contract,” a predatory scheme where sellers would buy houses, sell them to people far in excess of their worth, but keep the deed until the contract is paid in full, rather than turning the deed over to the “homeowner” and being paid by the bank (who is then paid by the homeowner). Not only did Ross not own the house, but he could not acquire equity and would have to forfeit the house, the down payment, and the monthly payments if he missed a single payment.
This practice targeted Black families specifically, and financing an actual mortgage was near impossible for African-American families at the time. The government also furthered housing inaccessibility for the Black community, particularly through the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages based on a grading scale, one which rated neighborhoods with Black people, regardless of social class or percentage, as a “D,” making them ineligible for FHA support in a process referred to as redlining.
This process resulted in the ruin of countless Black families and made predatory lenders millions. In the wake of this, neighborhoods like North Lawndale became worse and worse. Despite feeling embarrassed about being taken advantage of, Ross nevertheless joined the Contract Buyers League in 1968, an organization designed to fight back against contract sellers.
The group used a variety of strategies, like spreading information and going to court, to fight against the unfair contract system. But notably, their fight wasn’t only for equality: they were “charging society with a crime against their community….They were seeking reparations.”
Analysis
All three of the epigraphs Coates includes have a deep connection to the African American population. The first, a quote from Deuteronomy, is important with the context that many African American slaves drew parallels between their experience and that of Hebrew slaves living in Egypt— Harriet Tubman, for example, was also referred to as "Moses" and several sorrow songs (songs written in slavery) refer to Egypt as a comparable place of bondage. John Locke's Two Treatises on Government is one of the foundational political theories of the United States, and Locke is probably the political theorist with the biggest influence on the founding fathers. Finally, the last quote is from a formerly enslaved person. Taken together, it is striking that all three of these influential sources have explicitly mentioned reparations in some form.
Clyde Ross's childhood in the Jim Crow South is unfortunately not very unique. Living in Mississippi at the time, Black families were constantly subject to all different forms of legal and social harassment and subjugation. Though Coates does not say so explicitly, it's extremely likely that the back taxes claimed by the government were a false charge by the government. Important to understanding this is to understand that this action was not a one-off: the government was deeply, deeply corrupt as well as invested in preventing Black people from advancing. Ross's father's lack of literacy itself is a symptom of a society that purposefully made it harder for certain people to succeed because of their race. Ross tries to escape this injustice by moving to the North, only to find that Northern racism simply takes a different shape.
Contract selling was a manifestation of this other form of racism. While lynching, for instance, was extremely rare in the North, policies like contract selling, which intentionally targeted Black people, were pervasive. Because the FHA made it almost impossible for Black people to get mortgages, countless Black families were forced to rely on speculators, and the majority of people who bought homes on contract had to take on additional debt and still lost the homes the majority of the time. This dynamic was made possible by the public and the private sector working together. As seen in the illustrations in Coates' article, redlining still has profound effects on the demographics of Chicago in the present day.
The Contract Buyers League's choice to seek restitution for damages puts them squarely in the reparations conversation. Although reparations remain extremely controversial, at their heart is the simple belief that society owes a community something material, beyond just an apology, for injustices committed.
