IN A REFERENDUM HELD IN 2021, the city of Greenbelt voted in favor of reparations for the descendants of slaves and for Native Americans whose lands were stolen – an initiative strongly supported by members of DSA in Prince George’s County. The step that represented was an acknowledgement of the realities of racial exclusion at the town’s birth; more broadly it was a recognition of the continual impact of that legacy in income and living standards and, equally, important, in the sense of belonging. A local movement, it is very much a part of a wider set of initiatives which includes the establishment of DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – programs nationally.
By contrast, the Trump Administration has launched a war against DEI programs since assuming office in January. Opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion by definition means supporting exclusion, upholding inequity, and denying the rights, liberties, freedom of all those who don’t conform to a certain appearance, religion, way of life, i.e., to the overwhelming majority. It is thus fundamentally an assertion of hierarchical power asserting white supremacy, male supremacy, religious intolerance; it is anti-democratic to the core. As such, it is also an assault on the rights of working people, for the working-class in its diversity gains its strength through mutual understanding rooted in equality. Without equity, it will be impossible to assert public control over capital, assert the rights of people over profit. That is the core of unionism and the heart of socialism.
For too many people, however, a misconceived triumphalist understanding of our history provided the backdrop of Trump’s MAGA appeal – blaming those asserting their rights for the decline in quality of life and standard of living that is a reality for working people across the board. “Greatness” is thereby found where freedom means the right to oppress, where democracy consists of some choosing, others obeying. The legacy of racism drives a wedge through our understanding of who we are and where we are going, threatening the rights of all – for it is based on the pretense that our lives are not intertwined.
An alternative notion, rooted as deeply in our history, was expressed by Martin Luther King, when he stated a truism we neglect to our cost, to the world’s cost:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Last year, on Juneteenth, my wife Lisa and I attended an event at the African American Civil War Memorial in Northwest DC. Frank Smith – SNCC activist and former DC Council member (when a member of DSA) – opened the ceremony commenting that this event was a tribute to the 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the US army and navy during the Civil War in a battle to end Southern slavery as part of a struggle to enhance democracy nationwide for all. The democracy being fought for was not conceived of as an abstraction, but rather as a means for the majority to protect their interests and improve their quality of life against the minority of wealthy plantation owners in the South or industrialists in the North.
The desire for freedom was concretized in the demand for “40 acres and a mule” – that is for sufficient means to lead a life of economic independence, the land being compensation for generations of unpaid labor. One might say today: reparations. Beyond that, there was a demand for voting rights, civic rights, public education (for African Americans and people of European heritage alike). Former slaves working in crafts, trades, on the waterfront, began to unionize. That was the promise of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Though it was a promise not fulfilled, it is a promise central to our national heritage, central to Juneteenth’s commemoration and celebration.
Paying tribute to that living history, a Baptist Choir sang patriotic songs celebrating our country as a land where people have always fought for freedom. Following the communal singing, everyone present was given a list of names of the African American Civil War soldiers inscribed on the memorial. Saying their names aloud was a way of recognizing the individual contribution of each, a means of remembrance of personal identity that slave owners tried to erase in the human beings who were their “property.” Striking back against enforced anonymity serves to give back a sense of history to people whose history had been brutally suppressed.
Breaking free from anonymity is critical to the meaning and substance of the labor movement. Working people are not just “hands,” a term once common amongst factory owners, but human beings with thoughts and ideas and dreams of their own. Thus it was wholly appropriate that the program concluded with the DC Black Workers Center Chorus singing songs about justice and worker rights, labor songs and civil rights songs merging in voice. And bringing the program full circle, it ended with both choruses singing the spiritual, labor and civil rights anthem – “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Throughout the day, we saw and heard linkages that reminded us that the nature of our society is defined by how we act, how we work to change what needs to be changed, for therein lies the only valid definition of patriotism.
The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are crucial to our national heritage. Every attempt to fill the gap between what is promised in those documents and the refusal to do so becomes a defining characteristic of our national history. Similarly, the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speech and the 13th–15th Reconstruction Amendments, are markers of the Second American Revolution, completing what the compromises made at our country’s founding left undone. And, as with the first American Revolution, the struggle to fulfill the promises then made is a thread that runs through political division in the years since and is especially marked today.
Juneteenth is a critical part of that heritage. The commemoration of the public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas – the last state where news of slavery’s end was publicly announced – on June 19, 1865 reinforces the centrality of equality to the vision of what our country could be. The brief ceremony at the African American Civil War Memorial, was also an assertion that our country belongs to all who live in it, contrary to those who by wealth, race, gender seek to proclaim that it belongs to some and not others.
On June 19th 1838, one of the innumerable tragedies inherent in the system of racial slavery took place – for on that day, Jesuits sold 272 slaves working on their plantations in order to raise money needed to save Georgetown University from bankruptcy.
That coincidence was noted in the documentary The Cost of Inheritance (directed by Yoruba Richen) at last August’s screening sponsored by the Greenbelt Interfaith Leadership Association (GILA) Reparations Education Task Force. The Task Force was established to determine how best to implement the city’s reparations commitment. Nearly 100 people viewed the film either in-person or via Zoom as part of an effort to broaden discussion about the need and possible forms reparations could take.
The film itself gave a human picture of what reconciliation might mean. One woman spoke of her need to do something, to give back after discovering that her grandmother had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan who had saved much of the memorabilia from the years of her membership (which only came to light after her death). Another woman talked of how she had always known her ancestors had been slave owners – but when she first saw the names of some of those who had been enslaved, their lives became real in a way they had never been to her before – and that too prompted her to look for ways to give back.
Giving back, however, is not about charity, not about those with resources telling those without what they need. True equality is about people jointly deciding, people working together, people transforming personal relationships and understandings – an individual process that speaks to a more fundamental way of approaching social change. That is the approach taken by Coming to the Table – a national racial justice organization featured in the film. Their definitions of reparations, as “a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights,” was central to the documentary.
The need for a shared response to past injustices, that remain as injustices today, was highlighted in the film by the example of Georgetown University, which is still run by the Jesuits. Under pressure from advocates, students, and community members, the University established a Board and hired consultants to determine how they could atone for having profited off slavery and the selling of slaves. Descendants of those slaves sold in 1838 contested that process at a public forum. Their intervention was successful, and those descendants became part of the decision-making committee. After years of meetings, the Jesuits, in 2021, committed to hundreds of millions of dollars to be disbursed through the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation with three goals: invest in descendants’ education over the course of their lives, fund programs that support individuals already engaged in anti-racist advocacy, and support elderly descendants. This was not a project to provide for individual payments, it is a project designed as part of a process to overcome the legacy of slavery and structural racism.
Briayna Cuffie, an Annapolis resident and founder of Reparations4Slavery, spoke and answered questions after the film (in which she was featured). She stressed that reparations can take numerous forms, including conversation and advice, noting as a personal example her being mentored on home-buying, becoming thereby the first in her family to own a home. Lois Rosado, chair of the Greenbelt Reparations Committee, followed with a presentation about the Commission’s work and goals. She too stressed that reparations shouldn’t be seen as cash payment, but as equity in resources. Systemic change begins when businesses, churches, and our federal government address their history of profiting from racial slavery and Native dispossession.
Addressing the inequalities that flow from that history is central if we are to find a democratic solution to the social and economic crises of our country. It is a long and difficult path. After all, not everyone – in Greenbelt or elsewhere – appreciates the topic of reparations even being discussed.
An instance of this was expressed in a letter to our community newspaper – Greenbelt News Review. Voicing opposition to reparations, the writer cited the sacrifice of his German-American abolitionist forbearers, some of whom paid with their lives because of their opposition to slavery, as reason to oppose reparations for descendants of slaves. Arguing that suffering and hard times were the lot of his family, but through hard work they were able to make a better life for themselves, he contrasted his heritage to that of people asking for reparations today (falsely assuming they are asking for handouts).
Although no doubt sincere, I question whether anyone or any family succeeds by themselves or that those whose forebearers were in chains, who were denied equal rights and subject to lynching after freedom, and who still face systemic discrimination, are asking for handouts to avoid hard work. Truth be told, if African Americans hadn’t labored long and hard through the years, the community would not exist as it does, and our country would be the poorer.
I grew up in a culture well aware of the legacy of German-Americans who took part in the abolition struggle before and during the Civil War and drew different conclusions from that past. Many were themselves refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, and they took seriously their conviction that democracy and equality are inextricably linked as the pathway for individual dignity and well-being for working people. Amongst them was Carl Schurz, a Republican and advisor to Lincoln, a general in the Union army during the Civil War and supporter of Reconstruction, another was Joseph Wedemeyer, a friend of Karl Marx, an abolitionist, trade unionist and socialist who also served as a Civil War general for the North.
To this, we can add Adolf Cluss, the German-American architect who designed Washington DC’s Eastern Market, an acquaintance of Schurz, a friend of Wedemeyer and a correspondent of Marx. He designed numerous schools in DC, including the still standing Sumner School (named for the abolitionist Senator), built a school for Black students based on the same principles as his buildings for white students. And at Cluss’ insistence, Black craftsmen did the building over the objections of white building-trades workers, who were then in the process of forcing African Americans out of skilled trades.
My parents were both refugees from Germany, my mother arriving here in 1934 at age 10 – her parents were already in the US, having come to escape repression following a defeated miners strike. They had planned to return to Germany but when Hitler came to power that proved impossible. My father arrived in New York in 1938 at age 18, having already been a refugee from Germany, first in Poland and then in Czechoslovakia. They met at Camp Midvale in Ringwood, New Jersey, through Nature Friends, a working-class hiking organization founded before World War I by German-American Socialists – as a branch of "Die Naturfreunde," which had been formed earlier by socialists in Vienna.
Camp Midvale was built in the late 1920s and early 30s by the voluntary work of German immigrant laborers, most socialists or communists – including my grandparents – who would come on weekends or after work to put up the buildings and cabins (and eventually an outdoor swimming pool carved by hand out of the hillside and fed by a mountain stream). The camp they built created a space for people trapped in cities to spend time out in the country, to enable children to swim and hike away from the concrete and crowded streets of urban landscapes. That included myself in the 1950s and 60s. We frequently left our Bronx neighborhood on weekends and over the summer to head to camp where we would run free to our heart’s content on the grounds.
But learning to appreciate nature also meant learning to respect all people. Camp Midvale welcomed refugees from fascism such as my parents, welcomed all who stood against hatred wherever it raised its face, and opposed the anti-Semitism then rampant in Germany and a reality in the United States. Folk songs and folk dances from around the world reinforced that sense of oneness with all people. Solidarity with organized labor and those who organize and strike was in its DNA, as was a firm and unwavering opposition to racism rooted in the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Camp Midvale was the first – and for many years – the only integrated camp in New Jersey, the only public swimming pool that permitted Blacks and whites together. What gave that extra meaning is that Ringwood was a “closed Christian community” – i.e., Jews and Catholics were not permitted to buy homes in the town. African Americans, those descendants of slaves, were not only prohibited from buying a home: They were not welcome to set foot in town. The presence of Blacks at Midvale was viewed with great hostility by many in the surrounding community. For those of us fortunate to be there, on the other hand, it opened us up to the world we lived in. We also saw that the parents of our Black friends worked just as hard as our parents but found greater obstacles to getting by, to getting ahead.
My parents also took part in every year’s Steuben Day parade and picnic as part of the Workmen Benefit Fund's contingent. Like many other immigrant communities, German immigrants created the WBF as a cooperative to provide health and life insurance at low cost as well as old age services to members who lacked resources, who had little to show after a lifetime of work due to bouts of unemployment or low wages. That mutual support, however, did not prevent the fund from advocating for national health insurance or improved Social Security benefits for all people. Helping each other in the community was not exclusive from helping all.
Similarly, my brother and I attended a turnverein in Yorkville (in Manhattan) to learn conversational German – there too, the values imparted were that of a democratic ethos. Those democratic values stood against the militarist and stratified German imperial ethos which laid the groundwork for fascism in the 1930s and is raising its ugly head again today in Germany and in the United States. Reflecting that outlook, in 2017, the Milwaukee Turners (one of the few still remaining) unanimously called for an end to the Muslim ban the Trump Administration had then announced, recognizing in their plight the circumstances that brought many impoverished or politically persecuted Germans to our country in previous times.
We all pick and choose which heritage has meaning to us – like with every culture and community, there are alternative ways of understanding that past, always a choice to be made as to how to see the world. During the 1880s and 1890s (and our first "Red Scare"), German-American communities were targeted by police and vigilantes, following the Haymarket riot. Anti-German sentiment was manifested on a greater scale during World War I, when it was merged into a frenzy of violence directed at any who questioned US participation in the war. Organizations like the Nature Friends were attacked during the years of McCarthyism when the society was put on the list of subversive organizations. Many of those at the camp – including my father – were blacklisted for many years simply because of their Communist convictions.
Camp Midvale was burned down in 1965 by militia style vigilantes stemming from anti-Communist hysteria and hatred of that afore-mentioned “race-mixing.” (Midvale’s legacy is not wholly lost, however, today the grounds are the home of the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts & Recreation). Undergoing those experiences only strengthened a feeling of solidarity with African Americans who have been in this country longer than us but who faced and still face discrimination in jobs, housing and education. Solidarity is another word for mutual support to solve the common problems that our country will only overcome when equality for all is made real in public policy, rather than existing only as an aspiration.
That is how I view my heritage. I’m well aware that others look at the past from a different lens, far too many (even one is one too many) embracing the militarist and chauvinist side of their German roots. For many others, their German culture is embodied by food or drink, or a reference to anecdotal instances of the past that are important pieces of family history. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that, I only question when upholding one’s particular roots is used to pass judgement on other people’s experience and present.
Speaking only for myself, my German-American heritage leads me to uphold the dignity of labor, respect for all and the value of unionism, socialism, cooperation – and hence to value the cooperatives in Greenbelt where we now live. And a wonderful expression of that value can be found in the discussion now taking place in our community about reparations – for without genuine equality for all, the rights of no one is secure. The Nature Friends old socialist motto: Berg Frei, Mensch Frei, Welt Frei – free mountains, free people, free world – still rings true.
Reparations are not a one-size fits all fix. German reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust is a prime example of the wrong approach – based as it was on isolating one source of oppression while ignoring all others. That especially incensed my father, a German Jew (but no less German for that, no matter what anti-Semites might say) – for those who were victimized as working-class opponents of Hitler, such as my mother’s family, were ignored, reparations were not paid to the people of Poland, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and other countries whose lands were bombed and people killed, and yet whose pain and whose needs were unaddressed. It is a blindness now seen in the racism directed toward Palestinians in Germany, the United States and Israel, a racism akin to still present anti-Semitism, to the racism which still denies African Americans equal protection under the law. We act on the principle of “one for all, all for one,” or we act to divide – that choice remains to each of us.
On the afternoon of last year’s election day, when it was unclear what the outcome would be, Lisa and I went to the national mall to visit the Martin Luther King Memorial and from there walked to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial to reinforce for ourselves where we stand when it comes to our country’s heritage. The quote from King with which we began was inscribed on one of the panels. So too was this basic injunction:
"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits."
And at Roosevelt’s Memorial was the quote below which speaks to the vision of the New Deal, reflecting values we are sorely in need of today:
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
Taken together we can see a definition of what “greatness” in our country, in any and every country, entails. They are part of our national heritage which we need to embrace now more than ever.
