by Manning Marable

About the author: Manning Marable directs African American Studies at Columbia University and writes a weekly newspaper column distributed nationwide.

The question of reparations for slavery is more than an intellectual exercise. In 1854, my great-grandfather was auctioned off for $500. The sale was “business as usual” for his white slave master in Georgia; for my family and for countless other African Americans, it was an affront against our humanity.

What I call the First Reconstruction (1865–1877) ended almost 250 years of legal slavery. But the four million people of African descent in this country anticipated not just personal freedom but also economic self-sufficiency. Thus African Americans clamored for “forty acres and a mule” as part of their compensation for more than two centuries of unpaid labor.

But compensation (“reparations&rdquo...