There is no linear solution to any of our problems, for our problems are not merely technical in nature. The issue here is not whether or not we can, or will, win reparations. The value of their labor went into others pockets plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government. There is a debt here. I know of no statute of limitations either legally or morally that would extinguish it.
Financial quantities are nearly as indestructible as matter.
Take away here, add there, interest compounding annually, over the years, over the whole of the twentieth century. Clearly, how blacks respond to the challenge surrounding the simple demand for restitution will say a lot more about us and do a lot more for us than the demand itself would suggest. We would show ourselves to be responding as any normal people would to victimization were we to assert collectively in our demands for restitution that, for 246 years and with the complicity of the United States government, hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties kidnapping, sale as livestock, deaths in the millions during terror-filled sea voyages, backbreaking toil, beatings, rapes, castrations, maimings, murders. We would begin a healing of our psyches were the most public case made that whole peoples lost religions, languages, customs, histories, cultures, children, mothers, fathers. And they were never made whole.