“I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a 1967 interview, less than a year before his assassination. “But it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps, and many Negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all these years of oppression ...”
The video of that interview made the rounds last week as a Congressional sub-committee held hearings on H.R.40, loosely referred to as the “Reparations” bill. The proposal is quite modest. It does not call for the federal government to write a big check to black Americans by way of atonement for slavery. Rather, “This bill establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans. The commission shall examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.”
