State lawmakers don’t want Shelby County leaders — or any local government in Tennessee — to study giving reparations “to individuals who are the descendants of persons who were enslaved.”
Shelby County Commissioners approved a $5 million study of reparations in February 2023. A new committee was established to study the impact of giving local money to local African Americans. The committee would focus on the potential impact on access to housing and homeownership, healthcare, the criminal justice system, career opportunities, financial literacy, and generational wealth.
Bills to stop this were filed by Sen. Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) and state Rep. John Ragan (R-Oak Ridge). Ragan told House members Tuesday that “unfortunately” Shelby County was already at work on this. He said the county does not have legal authority to do it, nor is the move on solid constitutional footing.
“Despite any good … intentions of such actions, [reparations] have not fostered and can never enhance community healing and unity,” Ragan said. “Rather the real impact divides us and generates more bitterness. Ill-founded accusations of collective guilt and group punishment for wrongs no one in the group could have ever committed creates resentment, always.”
Ragan explained slavery is among the most unconscionable human evils. “This is true where the enslavers were an African monarchy or a Mexican cartel,” he added.
His speech was cut short here as Black House members called out from their desks, seeking to correct Ragan. State Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis) called Ragan’s assertion that Africans were partially responsible for American slavery “mean-spirited” and “insulting.”
“There was no shipping across the Atlantic of slaves until the Europeans went to Africa — at the behest, sometimes, of their government entities and privateers — to exploit Africans on the continent of Africa, and cruelly — for 400 years — bring them back to America, only to be mistreated,” Parkinson said.
Kings in what is now the African country of Benin sold slaves to European merchants for more than 200 years, according to a 2018 story in The Washington Post. Those sold were usually members of rival tribes, the story says.
“The overwhelming majority of slaves sold to Europeans had not been slaves in Africa,” reads a blog post from Digital History on the University of Houston website. “They were free people who were captured in war or were victims of banditry or were enslaved as punishment for certain crimes.”
“While there had been a slave trade within Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, the massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed West and Central African society.”
Debate on the reparations bill did not make it back to the House floor Tuesday as lawmakers moved on to other business to untangle rules on who could speak on the bill and when.
Before the bill stalled, though, Rep. Larry Miller (D-Memphis) offered a series of amendments to the bill to slow its momentum this year. Those were tabled or voted down.
However, introducing them allowed Miller to speak his mind about the legislation. He argued for the right of a local government to make its own decision in the matter of spending its own, local tax dollars. He, then, took aim at Ragan’s motives.
“What’s inside of you to make you want to further say, ‘Look, you can’t study our history. You can’t even talk about our history. You can’t even spend your local tax dollars to talk about it, to study it’?” Miller asked. “That is so antiquated.
“It’s a cruel intent, in my opinion, to say to people in this state, especially African-American people in this state, ‘We don’t want to talk about it anymore.’”
The Senate was set to take up its version of the bill Wednesday afternoon.
