Should the Democratic Party Apologize for Jim Crow/Slavery?
He makes a good case. The Democrats certainly have a lot to apologize for. No party did more to defend slavery, create Jim Crow, fight lynching legislation, and promote disfranchisement.
In an interview yesterday, Perryman said he asked Howard Dean to support a formal apology from the party. He said that Dean spurned the suggestion without explanation. Not surprisingly, Dean and many fellow Democrats (who are normally enthusiastic about apologies of this type) don't want to draw attention to the dark past of their party.
As an alternative to such an apology, I suggest that the Democrats seize the opportunity to emphasize substance rather symbolism. There are two actions that they can take right now which will accomplish far more than more flowery words to better the lives of ordinary blacks.
First, the Democrats can come out strongly against continuation of the drug war. For nearly a century, this war has fostered disorder, death, and decay in countless urban black neighborhoods. It has also ruined the lives of thousands of black men by confining them to prison.
A second way for the Democrats to show that are sincere in their desire to help blacks is to condemn the Supreme Court's Kelo decision in no uncertain terms. Better yet, they can support state laws to ban the use of eminent to subsidize"development." As in the drug war, the primary victims of eminent domain are urban dwellers, many of them black, who lack political clout. Update:
Interestingly, Clarence Thomas's dissent in Kelo cogently stresses how eminent domain projects since the 1950s have disproportionately harmed blacks:
Those incentives have made the legacy of this Courts public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this Court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; [i]n cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this Court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.