Alabama's Senator Tuberville says Black folks want to get paid reparations for committing crimes

Here we go again! Some spoilsports will kill a wet dream! It seems that White folks will never learn to do their homework before opening their mouths. African Americans always gives them reason for pause and confusion.  Ask a White person if Black folks are discriminated against they will flip the script and say “they” are being discriminated against by Black folks! “They” are the ones being treated unfairly.

Treated “unfairly” is how former football coach Tommy Tuberville feels. A senator who represents Alabama, was cheered by an all White crowd at a Trump rally in rural Minden, Nevada, Oct. 10, 2022. They assured Tuberville that he was on the right track. Like throwing a football, he threw a metaphorical brick to get approval from the crowd. And then he went into hiding. He did not want the media asking him about the controversial remarks he made.

But! Alas! Tuberville, a hope-to-die Donald Trump supporter, had to come out of hiding. The media demanded an explanation regarding his remarks at the rally. He said he was talking about crime does not race. He also threw Black Lives Matter and Antifia into his explanation. In earlier years he was a birther who believed that presidential candidate Barack Obama is not an American, and his birth certificate would tell who he is, and where he was actually born.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R)

Tuberville was a coach at Auburn University for 11 years. He personally recruited Blacks to attend the university because of their potential to play football. In his job as a coach, he asked Black parents and their sons to follow him down the Yellow Brick Road that would lead to success, and a future career in sports.

To enhance his performance at the rally Tuberville raised his voice as if he was angry. “The Democratic Party, they have a majority. They could stop this crime today. They could say, some people say, well, they are soft on crime; they’re pro-crime because they want to take over what you got! They want to control what you got! The want reparations because they think people that do crime are owed that. Bullshit! They’re not owed that!" Tuberville wowed the rural crowd when he said “Bullshit” to reparations for Black folks.

In his speech Tuberville implied that African Americans commit the most crimes, and they expect to get paid for committing crimes! He gave the impression that White folks, none of whom commit crimes, are expected to pay reparations to Black folks.

Often overstated by the media, actual data gets lost or deliberately overlooked. The media asserts that Black folks commit more crimes than Whites so it must be true. On the subject of reparations, the same media cannot make up its mind to backoff or sensationalize it.

Websters Dictionary defines “reparations” (a) the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury; (b) something done or given as amended or satisfaction.

White folks swear they know nothing about this chapter in America’s history. Some say Black folks are only looking for a free hand out, they say. Besides, no Black person today was ever a slave. Black folks should get on with their lives and stop thinking about the past.

To the contrary, issuance of reparations are not new. On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved Africans in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slave owners pain, in the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300.00 for every enslaved African freed.

Enslaved Africans received nothing for their centuries of hard labor. “Lincoln appointed aboard of commissioners to oversee the process of compensation, headed by the North Carolina abolitionist and New Times reporter Daniel Reaves Goodloe. The board reviewed more than  1,000 slaveholders’ petitions to claim more than 3,000 Africans,  close to the entirety of the dwindling population.

“Most of the petitioners received the full amount allowed. The largest individual payout was $418,000 for 69 slaves. Although the District of Columbia Emancipation Act marked the only time the federal government would compensate slaveowners, there is a longer history of slaveowners requesting and receiving indemnification for the loss of their chattel”. (Department of African American Studies, Princeton University.)

Jeremy Ellis, president of Clotilda Descendants Association said, “I think it would suit Sen. Tuberville to visit Africatown. It’s an area he is extremely familiar with since he recruited a number of his players there when he was head football coach”.

Located in Mobile, Alabama, Africatown was founded by descendants of Africans smuggled to the United States aboard a vessel called the Clotilda in 1860. Located three miles north of downtown Mobile, Africatown was formed by 32 descendants of West Africans. It was designated a Historic District and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

Smithsonian Magazine: “Even though the U. S. banned the importation of the enslaved from Africa in 1808, the high demand for slave labor from the booming cotton trade encouraged Alabama plantation owners like Timothy Meaher to risk illegal slave runs to Africa.

“In 1860, his schooner sailed from Mobile to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey under Captain William Foster. He brought Africans captured by warring tribes back to Alabama, skulking into Mobile Bay under the cover of night, then up the Mobile River. Some of the transported enslaved were divided between Foster and Meaher, and other were sold. Foster then ordered the Clotilda taken upstream, burned and sunk to conceal the evidence of their illegal activity”.

Tuberville might have been faintly familiar with the Africatown but not with its history. Black football players from Africatown are the reason he earned millions of dollars and trophies, neither of which he shared with the players. But that is normal in college sports. Steal the talents and health of athletes and drop them when they get injured or graduate. Still, Tuberville did not bother to discover the players’ ancestry.

“Many of the thousands of lynchings were directed at Black 

farmers in order to terrorize all Blacks and make them leave”

At the rally Tuberville did not mention plantation owners wanting to own Black Africans. Ownership of imported Africans was money in the bank. Tuberville talked about Blacks wanting what Whites have, but he did not talk about how White terrorists and slanted legalities stole land from free Blacks, who owned land wrestled from them by force, the law and violence.

Tommy Tuberville continued to skip history during his rally rant, leaving out hundreds of stories about Whites wanting what Blacks had. Steve Hochstadt wrote an article in the Black Agenda Report, August 14, 2019, describing facts in that Tubberville was not aware of.  His research took him to a history he was not cognizant of about Black farmers and Black landowners.

“Despite obstacles, many Black families had acquired farmland by World War I. There were nearly 1 million Black farms in 1920, about one-seventh of all American farms, mostly in the South. During the 20th century, nearly all of this land was taken or destroyed by Whites. Sometimes this happened by violent mob action, as in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, or the lesser known pogrom in Pierce City, Missouri, in 1901, when the entire Black community of 300 was driven from town. A map shows many of the hundreds of these incidents of White collective violence, concentrated in the South. Many of the thousands of lynchings were directed at Black farmers in order to terrorize all Blacks and make them leave.

“Other methods had a more legal appearance. Over 75 years, the Black community of Harris Neck, Georgia, developed a thriving economy from fishing, hunting and gathering oysters, on land deeded to a former slave by a plantation owner in 1865. In 1942, the federal government gave residents two weeks notice to leave. Their houses were destroyed, and an Air Force base was created. That site was chosen by the local white politicians. Black families were paid two-thirds of what White families got per acre. Now the former African American community is the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge”.

White terrorists wasted no time taking land from Black farmers and landowners. They took whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, fully knowing that the famers had no legal recourse. Tuberville intentionally hurled a touchy word at the folks attending the rally. He knew he would get a roar of approval from White folks.

Once again Tubberville failed to do his homework. Paying reparations have been dispensed in the past, long before African Americans began entertaining the idea.  Just to list a few:

February 19, 1942, World War ll, an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent 125,000 Japanese citizens to interment camps. They were paid $20,000 each in 1990; 80,000 made claims totally $1.6 billion.

About 881 Aleuts, indigenous people from the Aleutian Islands, were deported to camps in Juneau Alaska. In 1988 around 450 of those who survived the ordeal received $121,000 each. The U.S. government admitted that the Aleutians were held on the camps longer than they should have been.

Reparations were paid to victims of forced sterilization and eugenic programs to rid American society of citizens deemed as misfits and degenerates. In 2013 North Carolina agreed to pay $10 million to victims. The payment was to be divided among the victims. Virginia in 2015, initiated a compensation program for victims who had the same government crime committed against them.

The noted “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” lasted for 40 years, drawing in hundreds of Black men used as guinea pigs. Some of the men were not offered a cure despite a cure for syphilis was discovered. After getting exposed by an Associated Press reporter, the victims filed a class action lawsuit. Ten million dollars was paid to the survivors, their widows and offspring. In 1955 the Tuskegee victims were guaranteed a lifetime of medical care for themselves and their families.

The year was 1923 when Rosewood, located in Florida, in Rural Levy County, was leveled by a mob angry, racist males. Rosewood was a small all Black community. The mob burned down home and churches after a White woman accused a Black man of trying to rape her. The man was lynched. The rebel rousing mob then killed a number of Rosewood residents and burned and set fire to structures. In 1994 Florida agreed to pay $2.1 million to residents that survived the Rosewood massacre.

By the hands of White police in Chicago, Black prisoners were subjected to torture, extracting confession to crimes they did not commit. Chicago awarded 57 survivors cash payments totaling $5.5 million. Rather than admit the payment was for crimes committed against these 57 prisoners, the payment labeled “Reparations.” Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel apologized for the torture of the prisoners, and mandated that “torture” be studied in public schools.

No one is paying African Americans to commit crimes in an attempt to take what White folks have, as suggested by Alabama’s Senator Tommy Tuberville, the Republican multi-millionaire. Not one Black person, who might agree with Tuberville and Republicans, would agree to contribute a dime to pay wanton criminals, no matter who they are.

Reparations are still a giant thumb in the eyes of White folks. It is their Achilles heel. As matter of fact, everything relating to Black folks is their Archilles heel. Reparations today would mean admitting to, and giving truth to America’s dark past; the willful participation in the slave trade; deliberately buying and owning human beings solely for the purpose of using them as free labor, and to acquire financial wealth.

To add on this rejection of reparations to Black folks, the wanna-be dictator governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, wants to erase the real history of African American in his state. He said in January that the high school Advance Placement course on African Americans studies is not factual. He said, “We believe in teaching kid's facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them”. He said the classes amounts to “indoctrination.”

On January 12, Florida’s Department of Education penned a letter it sent to Florida’s College Board. The letter stated that the AP class is “inexplicably contrary to Florida’s law and significantly lacks educational value”. All related European subjects are just fine as is and can be taught in AP classes.

Like his counterpart in Texas, Greg Abbott, has copied DeSantis dissimilation of Black folks and their history because neither wants White kids to feel guilty and responsible the actions of their forefathers. If slavery is not discussed, the Emancipation, how Africans ended up in the Americas, then students cannot ask about reparations and slavery. The “offended” can freely discuss how first president George Washington never told a lie. In rewriting history, text book authors can delete the fact that Washington owned slaves.