David Blight, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, moderated a panel called “The Enduring Legacy of Slavery” on Thursday at the New-York Historical Society. Cosponsored by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York County Lawyers’ Association, the event was part of the Bernard and Irene Schwartz distinguished speakers series.

Mr. Blight had posed questions in advance to the panelists: Should repair for the past injustice of slavery be a major policy agenda in America? Why or why not? What forms might such a plan or discussion or debate best take? What are some manifestations of legacies of slavery and its aftermath in America, or how would we know a legacy if we meet one?

Mr. Blight attempted to define the term “legacy.” He said it could be another word for historical memory, but “often carries a current, present – even political – meaning.” He said perhaps a legacy is what is left in public memory, behavior, and policy after historians, museums, and teachers have had their say.

Georgetown University School of Business lecturer Richard America opened with a case for reparations. He said there are causal connections between the relatively high affluence in white communities and the continuing chronic poverty among many blacks. He said slavery and Jim Crow transferred earned income from blacks to whites systematically: a large class currently enjoy benefits that were produced by these past systemic arrangements. He said one way of looking at slavery was as a “100% income tax.” He called for direct capital grants for education, housing, and commercial development over two generations. He said there eventually would be nationwide consensus about this, quoting Winston Churchill, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”

University of San Diego law professor Roy Brooks largely concurred with Mr. America, saying that slavery is the primary, but not the only, source of deep disadvantages that many blacks continue to encounter presently. He offered an analogy: A black and a white person are playing a game of poker that has been in progress for almost 400 years. The white man has been cheating but says there will now be a new game with new players and no more cheating. “Well that’s great. I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” says the black man. “But what are you going to do with all those poker chips that have stacked up on your side of the table?” The white player responds, “I’m going to keep them here for the next generation of white players.”

“I think I see the issue in a very different way,” said Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter. He said affirmative action could be seen as having been a reparation, as well as welfare in the late 1960s. He went on to examine why, as he viewed it, those earlier reparations haven’t worked. “Something happened to poor black America in the late 1960s – not as a legacy of slavery – that turned poor black America upside down.” He said they were part of a “vast cultural change.” He said in Detroit in the 1920s there were many poor black men who worked at an auto plant that was an hour and a half commute. He said in William Julius Wilson’s “When Work Disappears” their contemporary equivalents were less interested in such work, citing reasons such as having to get up “really early.”

University of Pennsylvania professor Mary Frances Berry responded by saying many blacks in Mr. Wilson’s book were unable to get menial jobs because employers preferred to hire undocumented workers “so that they could exploit them and pay them less and abuse them and threaten them with sending them back.”

She traced reparations to a black woman named Callie House, who was imprisoned after launching a movement to give pensions to old ex-slaves, of which there were only 1.9 million left in the census in 1900. To those who say, “Why should we have reparations? All the people are dead who were slaves,” Ms. Berry said the government gave short shrift to such an attempt when the ex-slaves were still alive: “Closeness in time to the tragedy didn’t help them.”

The evening ended on a lighter note. Mr. America said he had once given a presentation on reparations to a second-year law class at American University that was approximately 60% women. He recalled the response: “Well, what about us?” they said. “Half of the human race has been exploited by you guys for the last 20,000 years. And I said, ‘No, we’ve got to draw the line somewhere.'”

“That will be a different session,” added Mr. Blight, to audience laughter.

gshapiro@nysun.com