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Charles P Henry, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, Journal of American History, Volume 108, Issue 2, September 2021, Page 399, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaab185
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Extract
Recently I have compared the instability and polarization around the recent presidential election to the 1968 election contest between Hubert Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon as the most intense in my lifetime. Yet William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen in From Here to Equality remind us that in the first election in which Black Texans could vote in 1868 at least 227 freedmen and Union white men were killed outright and sixty-eight wounded. In Arkansas, Congressman James M. Hinds became the first U.S. congressman assassinated in office along with three members of the South Carolina legislature and several men who served in the constitutional convention. These examples illustrate the authors' central theme of the persistence of white supremacy.
Darity and Mullen also point to several key points at which the nation could have chosen as different path. For example, in 1790, the same year as the passage of the Compromise of 1790 that effectively removed Black people from citizenship, Benjamin Franklin's petition to the First Congress to outlaw slavery and the slave trade in 1790 failed to pass. Another failure was Abraham Lincoln's proposed “compensated emancipation” that was unable to find even one state to serve as a demonstration site. The authors' report that the total financial cost of the war to the Union has been estimated at $6.1 billion and to the Confederacy another $2.1 billion apart from the appalling human cost. Compensating slave owners $750 for each enslaved African would have totaled only $3 billion.
