Beyond The Pulpit Ministries

Molly Faison Maples Robinson was born into slavery in 1847 or 1854 in Giles, County TN. She worked as a midwife before moving to Alabama with her second husband, Mack Robinson after freedom came. One of their daughters, Susie Robinson, married my great-grandfather, Isaiah Tibbs, and the rest as they say is history.

Ma Molly, my second great grandmother, is our family’s lone known claim to reparations for slavery – the long overdue payment to Black people in America for the damage done to us by federal and state governments starting as far back as 1619.  Immediately after the Civil War there had been a proposal in Congress to offer recently freed African Americans 40 acres of land, and a mule to help work it.  That proposal never came to fruition.

There is a Biblical precedent for reparations in the Book of Exodus where the enslaved children of Israel were given the spoils of Egypt — silver, gold and fine linen — as they were being delivered from bondage. In fact, God said to Moses that He would show favor to the enslaved and that they “should not come out empty.”

Since 1989 a bill has been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives to establish a commission to study reparations and the damage done by slavery – both economic and emotional – and to make recommendations on a plan to repair that damage.  Like 40 acres and a mule, that bill never came to pass either. 

Meanwhile, they keep spending our money.

Recently, the federal government guaranteed the solvency of two failed major banks, one of which had deposits totaling nearly $190 billion – with a ‘B.”  That’s one-thousand million dollars multiplied by 190. The second failed bank had assets totaling $110 billion.

They’re spending our money.

In one case, the major depositors of the bank were not mom and pop depositors like you and me. No.  The Silicon Valley Bank by its own design appealed primarily to tech billionaires and venture capitalists, who already were eating high off the hog, as Ma Molly might have said.  They’re spending our money.

Just 15 years ago even the Obama administration used our money to bail out the wolves of Wall Street to the tune of about $700 billion after deeming mortgage brokers and other predatory lenders as being too big to fail during the housing crisis they themselves created. Well, what about us?

They keep spending our money.

Can anyone ever forget the stimulus money twice given to every American taxpayer during the pandemic?  While many of us were glad to receive the checks, the stimulus payments alone cost the government $814 billion of our money.  That money could have gone a long way toward the purchase of 40 acre plots and enough mules for every Black person in America.

Add to the reparations deficit the Trump tax cuts — $2.3 trillion; pending student loan forgiveness – another $400 billion; the Payroll Protection Plan — $800 billion, and America could have paid her debt to Black people several times over.

And this math doesn’t even account for the hundreds of billions of dollars made on the backs of enslaved Black people in the cotton, tobacco and rice industries of the south, and the textile factories in the north who built untold fortunes with stolen labor.  A few decades ago, when the tobacco companies were forced to pay for damages done by their products – $206 billion — that was our money.

Companies like Burlington Industries, Riceland Rice and Philip Morris have been spending our money for years.  Any first-year business student will tell you that the greatest cost associated with doing business — almost any business — is labor.  What couldn’t a tobacco farmer in Virginia, or a rice grower in South Carolina, or a cotton planter in MIssissippi accomplish with 246 years of stolen labor?

Look what the Native Americans did with their land reservations – casino gambling has made millions for them.  The Japanese Americans who were paid reparations after being interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II; they’ve done well for themselves also.  Why not descendants of kidnapped and enslaved Africans?

Cities like San Francisco and Evanston, Illinois already have begun seriously considering repairing the damage done to Black people by slavery.  In Evanston they’ve proposed offering direct descendants of enslaved African Americans $25,000 to pay down a mortgage, make home repairs, or use toward the down payment on a house.

San Francisco is considering, among other things, a one-time lump sum payment of $5 million to every eligible person, not just for reparations for chattel slavery, but as payment for all forms of discrimination that denied Blacks access to property, education, and the chance to build generational wealth.

White families, on average, have accrued 87.3% more in wealth than the typical Black family, and wealth for Blacks is harder to secure because of systemic racism in housing, employment, access to credit, among other factors.

So, before President Biden goes bailing out more wealthy investors, I want to introduce him to my great-great grandmother, Ma Molly. She should not have come to empty.