Florida Apologizes for Slavery, Gov. Mulls Reparations

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By Yoji Cole

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The Florida State Legislature passed a resolution Wednesday that expressed "profound regret" for the state's role "in sanctioning and perpetuating involuntary servitude upon generations of African slaves," prompting the state's governor to say it might be time for reparations.

Florida has paid reparations in the past when it allocated $2.1 million to the surviving victims of the Rosewood massacre of 1923, when white mobs attacked and killed many Black residents, reports The New York Times.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, following the resolution's passage, said it might be time to investigate whether the state should pursue further reparations for slavery, a comment few politicians are willing to make.

"All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing," Crist told the Times, quoting philosopher Edmund Burke. "I think we are reminded of that today because it takes courage to do the right thing, and it's not always easy."

"The apology is symbolic, but to think about a remedy is to go beyond symbol to substance. I think both the decision by the Florida legislature and the impressive comments by Gov. Crist are signs of America's progress on the issue of slavery and effort to begin to address some consequences of that tortured part of our history," says Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, and founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

Ogletree, who has been a member of a team of lawyers pursuing reparations for the victims of the Tulsa, Okla., race riots of 1921 and has been involved in seeking reparations from companies that profited from the slave trade, adds that he hopes CEOs follow Crist's lead.

"Gov. Crist's comments are rare in deed and ultimately refreshing for someone to even think about addressing the past and at least considering current remedies," says Ogletree. "I hope that it is an example of the independence and courage that other Chief Executives of the U.S. will consider in the months and years going forward."

Black leaders in Florida said they hoped the state's resolution would influence the U.S. Congress to offer an apology for the nation's involvement in slavery. At the very least, Florida's resolution is a great way for the state to begin to heal slavery's wounds, said State Democratic sen. Tony Hill.

"We've passed a lot of resolutions up here, a lot of powerful resolutions, but today it was done from a historian perspective," Hill said to NBC 12, a local news station. "I think we took another step in Florida in the area of reconciliation. This is a great opportunity for the House and the Senate to say I'm sorry back in the 1800s."

The resolution was passed unanimously by Florida's House and Senate. Florida becomes the sixth state to make a formal apology for slavery, following North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, which apologized for slavery in January. Florida has state slavery laws that date back to 1822.

Florida, which became a state in 1845, seceded from the Union to join slave-holding states of the Confederacy in 1861. But The New York Times notes that the state's slavery roots stretch further back to the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565 when Africans were used as slave labor on the state's cattle ranches and sugar-cane plantations.

"From 1845 to 1860, it was one of the fastest-growing slave states in the union," author Larry E. Rivers, who wrote Slavery in Florida, told The New York Times. "When things were slowing down in Virginia and still going in South Carolina and North Carolina, slavery in Florida was growing in leaps and bounds."

Florida's resolution admonishes the state for authorizing "African slavery in one of its most brutal and dehumanizing forms." It also reveals the cruelty of the time, noting that laws then declared that a "slave duly convicted of robbery ... or burglary shall suffer death or have his or her ears nailed to posts and there stand for one hour and receive 30 lashes on his or her bare back at the discretion of the court." And it noted that freed slaves "were denied the right to vote and in later years were, by law, so repressed, restricted and harassed that by 1850 most had been driven from Florida," reports CNN.

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