Slaves to Fashion

When Martin Luther King spoke about having been to the mountain top, he didn't mention finding any trial lawyers up there.

But the filing of a federal class-action lawsuit seeking reparations from three U.S. companies accused of having "unjustly enriched" themselves from slave labor has changed all that. As Bob Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise notes, the reparations movement has "no agenda for the future that doesn't put victimology at the center. They're only interested in profiteering off the past."

Filed in Brooklyn federal court by the great-granddaughter of slaves, the suit names CSX railroad, Aetna insurance and FleetBoston Financial. Though you never know what a federal judge might do, our bet is that the plaintiffs don't really expect to win in court. They don't need to. All they need to do is cause enough trouble and embarrassment to force a settlement, which is precisely why they have targeted corporate America.

Usually our instincts here would be to follow the money trail. But even the (unlikely) recovery of the full $1.4 trillion sought would be less costly to America than the damage done by the loser ideology that the suit enshrines. The latest Census figures show that three-quarters of African-Americans do not live in poverty and that average incomes for African-American families increased dramatically in the general prosperity of the 1990s. Yet the insidious message of the reparations movement is that salvation lies in wealth expropriation rather than wealth creation.

Not that there aren't real problems. A report from the Black Alliance for Educational Options shows that nearly half of African-American children in America's largest 50 school districts will never earn a high-school diploma. Mr. Woodson cites figures showing that 84% of black children are born to single-parent families. In terms of violence, blacks have more reason to fear young black males than any latter-day Bull Connor.

Today's bitter irony is that black progressives have nothing to say about these problems--apart from demands for more money for the failed Great Society programs that led these dismal social indicators to explode in the first place. By contrast, it is the conservatives who preach the potential of African-Americans and point the way toward the Promised Land while the reparationists pick at the antagonisms of the past.

"These people haven't had an idea in 30 years," says award-winning author Shelby Steele. "They say they have faith in the capabilities of black Americans, but really they are disbelievers in their own people. Their real faith is in what the larger white society can bring them."

And so, at a moment when a $2,000 voucher would change the lives of tens of thousands of black boys and girls now trapped in rotten, inner-city public schools, the reparationist answer is to milk Aetna for its millions. Only a decade ago a New York Times editorialist wrote in the Public Interest that what our inner cities need is a new John Wesley, the Methodist divine who led Britain's antislavery movement in the late 18th century. Instead we've got Johnnie Cochran.