With state legislatures in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina offering apologies for slavery in quick succession, it seems that America may finally be ready to atone for its treatment of Blacks. Last week, the University of Virginia’s board marked founder Thomas Jefferson’s 264th birthday — April 13 — with an apology resolution for the school’s use of slave labor between 1819 and 1865.
But scholars are asking, so now what?
Compensatory measures are necessary as a follow-up to the apology, says Dr. William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr., a research professor of public policy studies, African-American studies and economics at Duke University. He recommends the formation of a national commission of the type proposed by U.S. Congressman John Conyers, D-Mich., to examine the long-term effects of slavery, Jim Crow and ongoing discrimination in American society.
“The apologies would be strengthened by acknowledgment of the damage and harm engendered by ongoing racial discrimination in employment, education, political participation and access to wealth,” he says.
Alfred L. Brophy is a professor of law at the University of Alabama, where an apology resolution was passed in 2004. Although he says he was shocked to learn about UVa’s decision to apologize, he welcomed it as a positive sign and a step in the right direction.
“Now we are right on the fulcrum where schools are beginning to do this, and now others are going to have to increasingly examine the past,” says Brophy. “We’ll see a discussion of slavery and Jim Crow all over the place, and this is important for universities because these are places where we expect to talk about ideas.”
However, Dr. Peter Carmichael, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion, says he fails to understand how the resolutions connect to the complexities of slavery and to the diversity of the school itself.
