Reparations By Race Do Not Repair A Nation. They Divide One.
Alexander Muse – Begin with a simple picture, because the law in this case is finally as simple as the picture. Two families lived on the same Evanston street in 1955. They shared a fence, a school district, and very likely a set of grievances against the city that zoned and policed them.
Today the city of Evanston will write one of those families a check for $25,000 and turn the other away at the door. The families are identical in every particular the law has ever cared about, with one exception. One family is Black and the other is not. That single fact, and nothing else, decides who is paid and who is refused.
When a government sorts its citizens that way, it is doing the precise thing the 14th Amendment was ratified to forbid. This is the heart of the matter, and it is worth stating plainly before the lawyerly fog rolls in. The Equal Protection Clause protects persons, not races.
Timeline – In Montgomery, the first ten seats of every bus were reserved for white patrons, regardless of whether or not they were being used. It was common to see blacks standing over the empty seats. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks and three other black passengers were asked to move from their seats which were behind the white section in order to allow a white man to be seated.