Reparations for African-Americans
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is an old idea gaining new currency amidst the latest Black Lives Matter protests. Should billions of dollars in damages now be paid to descendents of African-American slaves for the sins of the past. How would this happen? Why? And would modern white America ever agree to it? One man who's long thought so is Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and RLJ technologies and who became the first US African-American billionaire in the 1990s. Ed Butler also speaks to Professor William Darity, an economist of Public Policy at Duke University. He's written a book on the reparations idea, "From Here to Equality". He also hears from Caitlin Rosenthal, an historian at the University of Berkeley who has studied this era, and the enormous economic boon that slavery brought to the emerging industrial superpower, the United States of America. (Photo credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, how a cotton trade founded on slavery helped to build the American dream. |
| 0:10.7 | It would be incredibly but misleading to argue that American capitalism emerged without slavery. It's hard to find an industry or a sector of the economy where slavery isn't closely linked. |
| 0:23.6 | So is it time for a multi-billion dollar payout to be made as reparations for slavery? |
| 0:29.9 | If someone broke into your home, took everything that you held dear, |
| 0:34.5 | the government would restore all of the things that would deprive you. |
| 0:38.2 | That's what African Americans would do with what is owed to them for past sins. |
| 0:43.9 | The case for reparations for slavery, that's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.6 | I'll be so glad when the sun go down, I'll be so glad when the United States and brought to the United States, |
| 1:11.0 | mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries, to work in cotton and sugar plantations. |
| 1:16.0 | In the words of one current senator, it's not a legacy just inked in bloodshed, |
| 1:21.6 | but in policies that have disadvantaged African Americans for generations. |
| 1:26.6 | Well, we're going to look at that argument in a second, |
| 1:29.2 | but first, let's hear from some of the voices that lived that experience. |
| 1:34.3 | We were slaves. We belong to people. |
| 1:37.3 | They sell us, like they sell horses and cows. |
| 1:40.4 | Bid on you, they're sitting as you're bitten on the cat, you know. |
| 1:43.8 | Several women and sell them in. |
| 1:47.5 | And then if they had any bad ones, they'd sell them to the sailors. |
| 1:50.4 | And they're shipping down the south. |
| 1:52.1 | A rare recording there from the Library of Congress archive, dating back to the 1940s. |
| 1:57.7 | Fountain Hughes was this man's name. |
| 2:00.3 | Aged 101, he was one of the last survivors of the |
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