“Black lives matter.” What should we make of it?

Well, it’s about slavery. What do we know about that?

Chattel slavery, capturing humans, forcing them to labor without compensation, breeding and trading them like livestock, is older than Greece and Rome and has been common in most cultures. Robert Burns called it “man’s oldest inhumanity to man.”

In 1776, slavery was legal in much of western Europe, and a substantial commercial enterprise of several countries there. It was legal in all the American colonies. By the early 19th century, when European countries began to restrict, and some to abolish slavery, slavers had kidnapped and transported over 4 million black Africans to North America, most to labor in the south.

Slaves were denied freedom, the rights to own property, be educated, raise a family, to vote, to be protected by the law and most every other right or privilege other colonists enjoyed.

Labor under the lash created much wealth not just in the southern states but in the emerging industrial north as well. Cotton is one example of how unpaid slave labor contributed to fortunes, not just on the plantations of the south, but in the merchant, shipping and textile industries mostly in the north, and in Britain and Europe as well. The slaves contributed to the prosperity created by cotton, tobacco and other southern crops, but shared none of that prosperity. This forced contribution continued for eight generations.

On July 4, 1776, the colonies declared their independence, justifying violent rebellion with the famous words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Starting with the revolutionary idea that just government draws its authority from the consent of the governed, our patriotic forbears killed British soldiers to wrest control of their lives from the monarch who denied them freedom.

By the time the colonists won the War of Independence and adopted the Constitution, many of the former colonies (the northern ones), as well as many European countries, had outlawed slavery. Slaves comprised one-fifth of the population of the new nation, 40% of the south, where they provided unpaid labor to farm tobacco, indigo, rice and eventually cotton.

The “men” who the founders deemed created equal didn’t include black slaves  — or women, or native Americans , or immigrants from places other than western Europe, either. Two of the three authors of the Declaration of Independence and a third of the signers — of the north and south — were slave owners. Quakers owned slaves in Pennsylvania. Jesuits owned them in Virginia. Brown University was endowed with money made in the North Atlantic slave trade.

Over centuries of exploitation of chattel slaves there arose a culture of white superiority; a culture which fueled and supported the myth of superiority to justify the exploitation. White superiority was sold by self justifying polemic, religious cant, and later debunked science. Sort of like the long respected idea that tobacco smoke is harmless.

The Constitution did nothing to change the status of slaves, or slavery, except to count slaves as three-fifths persons for determining the number of representatives in Congress — but not for voting. Ten of the first 12 American presidents were slave owners.

Increasingly bitter political bickering over slavery continued, most particularly over whether there would be slavery in new states and territories,. The US Supreme Court confirmed the property rights of slave owners in 1857 (Dred Scott case). Increasing polarization of north and south on this issue led to the bloodiest war in our history.

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate States. In 1865 the adoption of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery throughout the country.

Did abolition fix the problem, make black Americans equal? Not so much.

The expectation of economic, political and social freedoms promised by emancipation, Civil War victory and abolition faded into black codes, Jim Crow laws, exploitative sharecropping, bombings, lynching, poll taxes and literacy tests for voting as Reconstruction failed, leaving freedmen free but marooned in a land of bitter oppression and poverty.

In 1896, the Supreme Court decided Plessey vs. Ferguson, validating Jim Crow, upholding segregation laws, anointing the idea that separate can be equal, an idea that persisted in our law for 70 years.

Blacks left the south in ever increasing numbers, fleeing life little different than slavery and drawn by the prospects of fair employment, economic opportunity, education, and social freedom in the north.

Many found employment; but found they had traded the exploitive agricultural landlords of the south for the gouging slum landlords of the north. Segregation created enormous ghettos in the great cities of the north and the west; where housing and education were substandard and expensive, crime rampant. Restrictive covenants, mortgage redlining and violence prevented blacks from settling where their kids could go to good schools, their homes be safe from crime.

Violence directed at Black people was endemic, and for the most part unpunished. The KKK flourished north and south; more than 3,000 Black people were lynched in the 100 years after the Civil War. And don’t forget the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.

The ghettos got worse. The best job for kids was peddling drugs. Incarceration became the norm for young Black males.

A hundred years after Appomattox and abolition, black Americans had life, some liberty and were still pursuing happiness. They were segregated, ghettoized, undereducated, underpaid; they were the official American underclass.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement began to get traction. Strong, bipartisan federal leadership overcame the 100 year Dixiecrat control of the Congress to pass and enforce legislation to desegregate schools, and promote voting rights and fair housing. Resistance in the deep south, and in northern cities with large, Black populations was determined, but progress was made.

The “color line” was broken — not eliminated — in public accomodations, schools, professional sports, entertainment and some companies, but not in private clubs, neighborhoods, schools and even churches. So, are we done? Plainly no.

Today, African Americans are free and enjoy the same rights as others, in theory. Legal segregation is gone. Social and economic segregation is not. Black Americans have made progress, progress all the more impressive because they generally eschew violence to get justice. Education, earnings, business access and success are better, but demonstrably less well enjoyed than by their white peers.

What about violence? It is prominent in every civil conversation about civil rights. The riots in Watts, Washington D.C., Portland and Minneapolis are offered to impeach the bona fides of black americans. What about this argument? Consider the context. When Great Britain taxed our forebears without representation we declared war, and killed British soldiers until they gave up enforcing the King’s oppression. Would the founding fathers have reacted with less violence to being kidnapped, pressed into unpaid labor, and traded like cattle? It’s ironic and remarkable that American blacks have not resorted to full scale violent rebellion. Watts and the rest are mild indeed, given the provocation.

So how does one make up for slavery, Jim Crow, and all the rest? How do we make it right, and perhaps move on?

Good people thought about this even before abolition. When Union General Sherman took Savannah in January 1865, he and Secretary of War John Stanton met with local black ministers to discuss what might be done to aid emancipated slaves. The advice was to give them land, so they could become self sufficient and enjoy the fruits of their labor. After consulting with the White House Sherman issued his Order Number 15, setting aside a huge tract of coastal land from Charleston, South Carolina to northern Florida to provide 40 acres of tillable land to each emancipated family. The oft mentioned mule was loaned to the black settlers by the occupying Union Army, on Sherman’s authorization.

Tens of thousands of freedmen moved to the reserved land by the summer of 1865.

President Andrew Johnson — one of those 13 slave owning presidents —  rescinded Sherman’s order in the fall of 1865. The land reverted to its prior owners.

If the illiterate, penniless emancipated slaves had been given a stake, given the capital to have a go at becoming self sufficient, certainly some, perhaps many would have succeeded. Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery” chronicles the resilience, the persistence, the good heartedness of former slaves given a chance, to educate and improve themselves, and become productive citizens.

Much of the damage done by slavery and its aftermath can be measured economically. How much did the unpaid labors of slaves contribute to the wealth and prosperity of what became the world’s richest nation in four or five generations? What is the value of the wages they weren’t paid? Much of the damage is harder to measure; what price for 250 years under the lash, followed by 150 years of grinding poverty, second rate education, domestic terrorism, social and economic exclusion, mass imprisonment, police misconduct, and just plain mean treatment?

One hundred and fifty years after our country reneged on the promise of 40 acres and a mule, we struggle not with the concept of reparation, but the mere idea of talking about it.

H.R. 40, is the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. Its title is a nod to Sherman’s 40 acres, the broken promise. This law would establish a commission to study slavery and its impact on living African Americans, and recommend appropriate remedies; it would give African Americans nothing of value other than a commission to study their situation. It has been introduced in every congress since 1989. The latest version is pending now in the 117th Congress. The bill has never progressed further than referral to a subcommittee. It has never had a vote on the floor of the House.

Congress has created hundreds of commissions to study and make recommendations on issues, some important, some not. Why are our elected representatives so unwilling to talk about slavery; perhaps the most profound issue in American politics? Is it denial, guilt, selfish concern over losing some advantage gained under the banner of white superiority; or is it something else? Whatever the reason, not talking about it hasn’t solved the problem for 400 years.

Reparation is the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.

Reparation by governments is not uncommon, but not evenly applied.

Germany gave billions to Israel for resettlement and to individual victims of the Holocaust. South Africa paid millions to victims of Apartheid. The United States paid millions to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II; millions to Native Americans for seizure of their land.; homesteads to Hawaiians for seizure of historic native lands, and $10 million to the survivors of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

The State of Florida paid millions to survivors of the Rosewood Massacre in which a black town was overrun by a racist mob. Chicago paid $5,5 million to survivors of police brutality to blacks in the 1970s and 80s. The federal government and over half the states have laws for payment of reparation to persons wrongly imprisoned. The federal law provides for payment of not more than $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment , $100,000 if the prisoner is sentenced to death.

Most of the language that describes these issues today is charged with bias, politics; perhaps guilt? Are we unable to confront the fact our forebears and we, by succession if not continued self interested action, have taken advantage of black Americans? Is it racism, or is it denial?

How about recent immigrants, descendants of non-slave owners, folks who “earned every penny” they’ve got? Should their taxes be applied to reparations? Some say the problem is so central to what America is, and how it has prospered, that America must fix it. It’s not about blame, but reconciliation.

The Declaration of Independence speaks, however insincerely, to the Golden Rule, doing unto others as we would have them do to us. The treatment of former slaves and their progeny is not the only inequity in our society, but it sure is the biggest. It’s time we did something about it, before it eats us up.

There have been a lot of efforts to redress the effects of slavery, in bits and pieces; affirmative action, housing subsidies, minority owned business preferences, school bussing. Almost all are presented as aid to all in need, though most of the people in need are black. It’s time the Congress stood on its hind legs and addressed the problem directly, by officially talking about it, by passing HR 40.

Peter Garcia is an attorney with Skelton, Taintor & Abbott in Auburn.