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NEW YORK It has been more than a century since General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that the coastlands confiscated in the Civil War be divided into 40-acre plots and distributed to thousands of former slaves. . After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and took back the land that had been distributed. Since then, the idea of compensating African-Americans for the sins of two and a half centuries of slavery has hovered in the background, far from reality. But now the movement for reparations is gaining steam. As a political matter, reparations has been a nonstarter: Every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has introduced legislation calling for a comprehensive study of reparations, and every year the legislation has stalled. . But as a social and legal movement, the call for reparations has taken on substantial force this year. Black professionals and scholars are taking up a cause that used to engage mostly working-class blacks. And beyond the longstanding efforts to seek government restitution, there is a new focus on winning reparations from corporations that once profited from slavery. . The new momentum is apparent on many fronts: . .A California law that took effect this year requires every insurance company licensed in the state to research its past business, and that of its predecessor companies, and report to the state whether it ever sold policies insuring slave owners against the loss of their slave property, and if so to whom. . .A team of prominent African-American lawyers has announced plans to file lawsuits early next year seeking damages from the federal government and companies that profited from slavery. The team is part of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, led by Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica, a lobbying group. . .In March, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Race Riots of 1921 recommended that survivors and their descendants be paid reparations for the uprising in which thousands of whites stormed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa, destroying homes and businesses and killing at least 40 people. . .Aetna formally apologized in March 2000 for having written policies for slave owners on the lives of their slaves. Three months later The Hartford Courant, which had run a front-page article about Aetna's apology, made a front-page apology of its own, for having run advertisements for the sale and capture of slaves. . .Advocates of reparations are fighting to make compensation for slavery an official theme of the UN World Conference Against Racism in August, and hoping to win a declaration that slavery is a crime against humanity for which reparations should be paid. . .Last month, The Philadelphia Inquirer published two full-page editorials urging the creation of a national reparations commission. . The idea of reparations raises tangled questions about who should pay the money and who should receive it - and, more profoundly, about the relative merits of affirmative action and restitution. . THE REPARATIONS Coordinating Committee's litigation is unlikely to get into such particulars. The first task, lawyers say, is to establish a legal wrong that must be remedied. . "The history of slavery in America has never been fully addressed in a public forum," Mr. Ogletree said. "Litigation will show what slavery meant, how it was profitable and how the issue of white privilege is still with us. Litigation is a place to start, because it focuses attention on the issue." . Some blacks dismiss the reparations movement as a digression from the issues that matter. "If the government got the money from the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, that'd be great," said Walter Williams, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University. "But the government has to take the money from citizens, and there are no citizens alive today who were responsible for slavery. The problems that black people face are not going to be solved by white people, and they're not going to be solved by money. The resources that are going into the fight for reparations would be far more valuably spent making sure that black kids have a credible education." . Reparations remain a divisive idea, opposed by the vast majority of whites but widely supported by African-Americans. "There is now no major black organization that does not support reparations," said Mr. Robinson, whose book "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks" is a steady seller in black bookstores. . The legal argument, he said, is compelling: "When government participates in a crime against humanity, and benefits from it, then that government is under the law obliged to make the victims whole. That's recognized as a principle of law." . Certainly, reparations payments have become an increasingly familiar concept. The U.S. government has paid reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in World War II, and to several Indian tribes. Holocaust survivors who were used as forced laborers have won reparations from European countries. Mexican braceros who worked in the United States during World War II have filed a class-action lawsuit for reparations. . Stuart Eizenstat, who as a senior official in the Clinton administration negotiated settlements under which Holocaust victims would receive $8 billion in reparations from the governments of Germany, France and Austria and from Swiss banks, said that he viewed those cases as different from the African-American claims, because Holocaust reparations are going largely to surviving victims, while slavery reparations would go to descendants generations removed. "For slavery qua slavery, I think the appropriate remedy is affirmative government action in general, rather than reparations," said Mr. Eizenstat, who is now in private life. "And if 100 years from now the great-great-grandson of a Holocaust laborer asked for reparations, I don't think that would be appropriate, unless there was some specific property that had been confiscated that they wanted to recover." . Those campaigning for reparations say that they are prepared to prove that African-Americans today continue to suffer from the legacy of slavery - and, after slavery, another century of legal discrimination. . "We are not raising claims that you should pay us because you did something to us 150 years ago," said Adjoa Aiyetoro, a legal consultant to the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, which is preparing its own lawsuit against the federal government and working with the coordinating committee. "We are saying that we are injured today by the vestiges of slavery, which took away income and property that was rightfully ours."
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