LogFAQs > #972204330

TurtleInFreedom posted...

I'm not American, but I always thought that Americans dying to free the slaves was something that was a kind of payment for slavery, itself. Union soliders literally gave their lives to free the slaves. Why people are asking for reparations now seems like they're not taking in account of the sacrifice the Union soliders did all those years ago.

Lincoln was trying to preserve the union, he was not fond of black people and freeing the enslaved was a byproduct of the war. There were a lot of freed blacks and enslaved blacks fighting for their freedom as well.

The US never gave Black Americans recompense for slavery, 250 years that institution lasted. There was a brief, very brief period of Reconstruction where the country could have done the right thing but no that didn't happen. President Jackson and the Supreme Court axed the 1st Civil Rights legislation and left the Black population in the South at the mercy of the KKK and Jim Crow laws that would last another century. 250 years of slavery, 100 of Jim Crow, Black Codes, redlining, exclusion from GI Bill, destruction of Black townships and neighborhoods in targeted racial violence, deliberately tearing down black neighborhoods for the interstate highways, War on Drugs, racial terrorism so bad that it caused millions of Black Americans to move to the North and out West to escape the violence as refugees in their own country. The government at the Federal, state, and local levels have a lot to answer for.