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The US government owes the descendants of former slaves for years of unfair laws and practices aimed at their ancestors. Slavery was an institution that oppressed African Americans and earned trillions for the government and major corporations. The federal, state and local laws and policies passed after slavery was abolished prevented slaves from getting a proper education or earning a viable source of income to build a solid financial base. After slavery was abolished, freedmen were promised various means of support and restitution such as forty acres and a mule, and the Freedman’s Bureau. However, each of these institutions was greedily snatched away by a government who felt that “Negroes” were inferior to whites. At a minimum if the government had followed through with the promise given by General Sherman of giving “forty acres and a mule” to freedmen, the opportunity to break the sharecropping cycle of poverty would have been the spark to impact their livelihood. The cycle of poverty was created when freed slaves were unable to buy and work their own farms and had to revert to sharecropping. This country has a long history of paying different ethnic groups reparations for previous wrongdoings. In the early 1970’s the Japanese-Americans were paid $20,000 for the time that they spent in internment camps.* After WWII, the United States, Germany and the United Nations paid the families of Jewish victims, affected during the Holocaust, hefty amounts (some totaling over $100,000).
Approximate Word count = 823
Approximate Pages = 3.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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