North Carolina lawmakers must have too much time on their hands.
That’s the only explanation why the House State Government Committee ignored more serious matters and approved a bill that advances the absurd agenda of the slave reparations movement.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, and Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, would require companies seeking state contracts to determine whether they profited from slavery 150 years ago. Like similar disclosure laws in Chicago and Los Angeles, the bill would not prohibit companies that trafficked in slavery from getting contracts.
Presumably, the purpose is just to set the historical record straight. However, this bill has disaster written all over it. In addition to stoking racial bitterness, the measure will likely spark a barrage of costly lawsuits and hurt North Carolina’s ability to attract business.
Shaking down corporations through lawsuits or threats of lawsuits is a major source of money for reparations activists. Disclosure laws are critical to the shakedown campaigns. Indeed, the justification for the Chicago disclosure law is to get “information as a preliminary form of discovery in an upcoming lawsuit.” Reparations suits can possibly bankrupt businesses; a 2004 lawsuit seeking damages from 19 corporations puts the value of slave labor at $1.4 trillion.
But slave reparations are without legal merit. It is simply ridiculous to hold modern corporations accountable for business transactions that occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries. Few companies have records from that period because they are not legally required to do so. Many of the companies being sued have at best a tenuous connection to the firms involved in the slave trade. Reparations are also unconstitutional. Tragic as it was, slavery was legal in the United States between 1789 and 1865. The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws that criminalize conduct that was legal when originally performed. Despite the illogic of demanding payment for work performed by long-dead generations, the reparations movement grows because politicians and lawyers stand to profit from it.
Corporations contribute to the problem by paying off activists out of the foolish belief that that will protect them from litigation. Earlier this year, Chicago-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced the creation of a $5 million college scholarship fund for African-Americans in Louisiana. In compliance with the city law, JPMorgan disclosed that two of its predecessor banks allowed slaves to be used as collateral on loans to Louisiana plantation owners. Never mind that the banks in question ceased to exist as independent companies decades ago.
Although JPMorgan was not tied to these slave-related dealings, it thought the scholarship fund would appease the reparations lobby. It thought wrong. Reparations advocates immediately denounced the donation as “insulting” and a “joke.” Lionel Jean Baptiste, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in a reparations suit, said, “To give back $5 million does not begin to make up for the tremendous amount of wealth that JPMorgan Chase extracted from the enslaved Africans.”
Expect similar headaches if a disclosure bill goes through in North Carolina. Disclosure laws should also be rejected because they legitimize the broader agenda of the slave reparations movement. Reparations activists are busy lobbying Congress to establish a hugely expensive entitlement program for 35 million African Americans. The more victories they score in corporate boardrooms, the more credibility they build with politicians.
Besides not making sense economically, forcing taxpayers to fund reparations is morally wrong. Since only one-quarter of whites in the antebellum South owned slaves, a very small number of Americans have an ancestor who was a slaveowner. It would be a gross injustice, moreover, to make someone pay for what one’s ancestor did a century-and-a-half ago. It is equally unjust to force payments out of those whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery. The large majority of Americans, it should not be forgotten, are descendants of immigrants who came to America after the abolition of slavery.
Reparations advocate Randall Robinson insists that America cannot solve its racial problems without reparations. But he has it backward. Forcing innocents to pay nonvictims would exacerbate racial division and animosity.
The slave reparations movement will gain momentum if North Carolina approves the disclosure bill. Lawyers will descend on the state, saddling it with lawsuits and shakedown campaigns for years to come. Litigation, not racial reconciliation, will be the end result.
There are many pressing challenges facing state lawmakers. They need not create more problems for themselves by worrying about what happened on Southern plantations 200 years ago.
John Carlisle is the director of policy at the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonpartisan foundation based in Falls Church, Va.