An example from Jacksonville shows the fatal fallacy of the liberal proposal to pay reparations to descendants of slaves.
Without question, all former slave owners should pay reparations to all former slaves.
But all of those people are dead.
For people who never have owned slaves to pay people who never have been slaves is reprehensible and unjust.
Consider Anna Jai Kingsley.
She was born in Africa. She was captured by other Africans and sold as a slave, winding up in Cuba where she was purchased by Zephaniah Kingsley.
Kingsley brought her to Spanish Florida, where he owned land. He was 41 and she was 13 when she became pregnant with his child and he said he then married her. They lived with three other slave women who were his common-law wives.
At the age of 18, when she had three children, he freed her. She helped him run his plantation on Fort George Island and continued to run it after his death in 1843 – and to own and manage their 60 slaves. She later moved into the Arlington area of Jacksonville where she lived until her death in 1870.
With reparations, any descendants of this former black slave owner would be paid – solely because of the color of their skin – by the descendants of many people with white skin whose ancestors never owned a single slave. Only an estimated 1 percent of Americans owned slaves, and hundreds of those slave owners had black skin.
From any perspective it is a ridiculous and shameful proposition, which is why it is supported only by radical Democrats. Recently, a reparations bill was filed again in Congress, now controlled by Democrats heavily influenced by the racist, divisive critical race theory.
The irony is that it was Democrats who supported slavery and oppressed black Americans after slavery ended. If anyone owes black Americans money it is the Democrat Party.
Democrat Barack Obama said recently that because slaves helped build America, the nation owes something to today’s black Americans. That is illogical and the exact opposite of what he said when running for office in 2008.
Kingsley once said about his wife, “She was very capable, and could carry on all the affairs of the plantation in my absence as well as I could myself. She was affectionate and faithful, and I could trust her.” In his will, he said “she has always been respected as my wife and as such I acknowledge her, nor do I think that her truth, honor, integrity, moral conduct or good sense will lose in comparison with anyone.”
It sounds very much like he judged her on the content of her character rather than the color of her skin. Radical Democrats might want to consider trying that approach.
