‘A collective moral failing.’ My family owned slaves. It’s time to look at reparations.

My family owned slaves.

Until I saw birth dates and names for three slave children born between 1821 and 1829 recorded in a family Bible, it had never occurred to me that slavery was part of my personal history. I know nothing more than those three names written in beautiful calligraphy by a family historian as there are no family members left to answer my questions or assuage my associated guilt. I don’t know what happened to those children or their families. I will never know if my ancestors voluntarily freed their slaves or held on to them until the bitter end, forced to release them following the Civil War.

Slavery existed when we were mere colonies, and it continued after we became a nation. Our founding fathers owned slaves. Even puritanical New Englanders and other Northerners owned slaves — both Native American and African — and were active participants in the slave trade. However, that ancient history had nothing to do with me. My complacency shattered when slave ownership became personal.

This family history of slave ownership forced me to re-examine my part in the once accepted social practice that we now recognize as a collective moral failing, along with the subsequent institutional and legal discrimination that has resulted in continued disparities in education, health, and employment for African Americans. While I am not personally responsible for the past, ultimately, I have benefited from the labor of slaves owned by my family.

All of this leads me to seriously consider the possible use of reparations to address continued racial disparities resulting from our collective past.

After the Civil War, proposed reparations focused on financial compensation, either through the distribution of lands confiscated from the Confederacy to former slaves or through military-type pensions for former slaves. Ultimately, at that time when reparations made both moral and economic sense, Congress failed to address the issue, setting up a powder keg for a future generation. Obviously, pensions and the redistribution of land to former slaves are now impossible.

One hundred and fifty years later, reparations are the subject of hostile debate, ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ well-written, albeit inflammatory, support of them to David Horowitz’s opposite, although equally one-sided, conclusions that reparations are both morally questionable and racially incendiary. Even more moderate positions on compensation for this historical wrong, such as those expressed by former President Obama and writer Coleman Hughes, seem to cause explosive reactions.

There are numerous questions about reparations. What do we mean now when we talk of reparations for slavery? How much compensation, if any, is owed? In what form and to whom is it owed? Do we provide compensation only to descendants of former slaves or to other ethnic groups — such as Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics — who suffered from discrimination, as well? Once we decide what reparations are, if they are to be made, in what form and to whom, how do we accomplish raising and distributing such compensation?

To assist us in answering those questions I support the passage of H.R. 40 (the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act), the goal of which is to research the impact of slavery on black America and develop possible solutions to remedy the disparate impact felt by generations of post-slavery discrimination, because we simply don’t have the data to answer those questions.

I urge Senator McConnell, our senior Kentucky senator and an acknowledged student of history who has come out against H.R. 40, to study the reparations attempts of the mid to late 1800s and assume the mantle of 19th-Century Republicans by finding a way to finally address the institutional wrongs of slavery and the legalized discrimination of “separate but equal laws” and their lingering inequalities.

It is time to prove to every citizen that we are all equal under the law.

Kathryn Hendrickson of Maysville is a writer, lawyer, nurse and former bookstore owner. Email her at kbhendrickson@gmail.com.