Way back in 1994 the gatekeepers of governmental avarice at the Internal Revenue Service caught sight of something new: more than twenty thousand African Americans refused to pay any income tax, writing “EXEMPT” on their tax forms and declaring that, as descendants of slaves, they should receive cash from the government rather than pay taxes.
Hundreds of organizations now exist to promote reparations for slavery. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations (N’Cobra) declares that all blacks should be exempt from all income taxes forever. Black nationalist Haki Madhubuti believes that “The amount we are owed is in the trillions of dollars.” The concept of reparations for slavery is supported by the Nation of Islam, by Afrocentric scholars, by celebrities such as the rap group Public Enemy, by members of the Black Caucus, and, naturally, by Jesse Jackson.
Now, in the second year of the Twenty-first Century, the IRS reports that more than 100,000 African Americans filed tax returns seeking nonexistent slavery-tax credits. In response to these bogus requests, the Internal Revenue Service paid out more than thirty million dollars in undeserved refunds in 2000 and 2001.
Many of these fraudulent payouts, including one to a former IRS employee, were for $43,209. This is the exact amount that Essence magazine estimated would be the updated value of forty acres of land and one mule, which Thaddeus Stevens had proposed as compensation to freed slaves during Reconstruction and which two Union army generals had briefly dispensed to some former slaves,before being ordered to stop. In the year 2001 alone, the requests of American blacks for a so-called reparation credit totalled $2.7 billion dollars. The once-again embarrassed tax agency is now scrambling to recover our squandered earnings. Officials would not disclose how much of our tax money had been recovered. IRS spokesman Terry Lemons lamely commented: “You’ve got to look at the big picture. . . things happen, and a check goes through.” Well, that’s comforting.
There is no law that supports paying compensation for slavery to contemporary African Americans, none of whom were ever involuntary servants. The IRS conceded that it had lavished cash on some undeserving individuals, but an investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded that the dollar amount of fraudulent payouts was much higher than reported by the IRS. Many of the bogus tax returns sought exactly the amount cited in the 1993 Essence magazine article: $43,209. The IRS caught most of these black tax cheats simply by programming IRS computers to red-flag any returns that sought a credit of around $43,000.
Pamela Gardiner, deputy inspector general, said the IRS had seen a huge jump in tax filings claiming the bogus slavery-tax credit. She believes that a primary reason is that so many black taxpayers received these refunds or witnessed other blacks receiving a slavery-tax refund. “Schemes all tend to jump as word begins to get out,” she said. In some cases couples who both claimed the nonexistent credit received more than $80,000.
Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said of her fellow black Americans: “People are easily fooled because sometimes someone gets something.” Johnson added that the involvement of IRS employees in the slavery-tax scam “makes you wonder who they are hiring. You’d think that of all people they’d know better.” Indeed.
The largest known bogus claim was for $500,000, which was paid to Crystal Foster of Richmond, Virginia. The Justice Department sued Crystal and recovered most of our money, in part by forcing the sale of Crystal’s Mercedes Benz automobile.
These fraudulent payments are not going to the black underclass, they are eagerly sought by educated black middle-class individuals seeking to enlarge themselves at the taxpayer’s expense. The Washington Post reported that improper payments totaled $18 million in 2000 and another $12 million in 2001. Twelve of those who filed for the fraudulent tax credits were present or former IRS employees.
One crooked tax-scam promoter, named Andrew L. Wiley of Durant, Mississippi, helped 3,910 black Americans file returns seeking $168 million. Robert L. Foster of Richmond, Virginia helped prepare $2 million in bogus claims.
Clearly, the growing movement seeking reparations for slavery, which is heavily promoted in black-oriented publications, has encouraged a sense of entitlement among American blacks and an expectation that they should righteously cash-in at the expense of their fellow Americans. The pro-reparations argument asserts that if slaves in America had been given fitful severance pay at the time of their emancipation, then the great population of contemporary black Americans would, by now, have risen to a much higher social and economic level. Reparation payment is imagined to be compensation for the difference in social and economic stature that blacks now experience, as compared to some more elevated stature that they imagine they would now be enjoying if only their great-great-great-great-grand daddies had been given a mule and a patch of land. Undermining this argument is the very nature of the originally proposed compensation. A contemporary mule that is well fed and is blessed with modern veterinary care, can live for 40 years, but Nineteenth Century mule left in the care of a poor uneducated hardscrabble farmer would live a hard short life; few blacks who employed their mules in farming would have had a mule to pass along to their heirs. Also, farmers in the late 1860s tended to harvest crops until their soil was Depleted; the exhausted farmland would not have been much of an inheritance. None of this mattered to the original proponents of the 40-acres-and-a-mule proposal; their purpose was to compensate the actual first-hand victims of the slave system, and no one else. It is unlikely that former slaves who had known no other useful employment other that farming would have sold their mules and land and moved on to some other pursuit. Their mules and their land would have been worked to exhaustion, leaving little for future generations to inherit.
In any case, the 40-acres-and-a-mule argument itself is something of a scam. During his ruinous “March to the Sea” General Sherman issued Special Field Order Number Fifteen on January 16, 1865, setting aside the Sea Islands and a thirty-mile tract of land along the southern coast of Charleston for the exclusive use of blacks. Each family (not each individual) was to receive 40 acres of land and a surplus army mule to work the land. This land and other land, both confiscated and abandoned, fell under the jurisdiction of the Freedman’s Bureau, headed by General Oliver Otis Howard. The entire project was a sentimental favorite of the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, “The Great Commoner,” who boldly advocated treating the states of the South “as conquered provinces.” Stevens supported an unsuccessful plan to confiscate plantations and redistribute the land to freedman.
In the summer and fall of 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued pardons and returned confiscated property to its deeded owners. General Howard then tried to undermine President Johnson’s intent by issuing Circular 13 and attempting to dispense 40-acre lots to freedmen as quickly as possible. When the president caught wind of what General Howard was doing, the president ordered the general to issue Circular 15, which returned the land to the deed holders. In other words, the whims of two generals who granted a few parcels of land to a few former slaves spawned a totally false myth among black Americans that the United States government had promised all former slaves forty acres of land and a mule. Congress never authorized such compensation and the president never approved of such compensation. Nonetheless, this myth is now a cornerstone of the current reparations-for-slavery campaign.
It is mute testimony to the sorry state of history education in America that groundless grievances over nonexistent entitlements, such as 40-acres-and-a-mule, can persist for so long and can be so easily exploited by racial arsonists who are eager to fan the flames of hate or to turn a fast buck at the taxpayer’s expense. The leftist hagiography that passes for history in American classrooms is as bogus as a socialist campfire song. A well-educated American public would laugh in the face of those who attempted to enrich themselves by offering arguments that have no foundation in historical fact. At the very least, an honest telling of America’s history in the classroom might immunize the shrunken heads at the Internal Revenue Service against loony claims for slave reparations by sly African Americans on a treasure hunt.
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Copyright 2002
Thomas Clough