The greatest challenge African-Americans face in winning lawsuits for slavery reparation payments is, put simply, the passage of time.
Advocates of reparations point to similarities between the suffering of African-Americans under slavery and abuses that have won other groups compensation, chief among them the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and the forced labor of concentration camp victims during the Nazi Holocaust.
But the difference in the amount of time that has passed between slavery and the other historical wrongs has enormous legal consequences, said experts in related law. Most importantly, because slavery ended in America over a century ago, there are no living former slaves to serve as plaintiffs in a court case.
And even the claims of Japanese-Americans and of Holocaust survivors faced daunting legal obstacles, with reparation payments won through political rather than legal means.
Congress passed legislation to compensate surviving Japanese-American internees in 1988. European governments and companies during the late 1990s and 2000 agreed to a series of settlements to compensate Nazi-era slave laborers.
“The Jewish slave labor cases were won in the court of public opinion, not a court of law,” said Stuart Eizenstat, the former Clinton administration official who helped negotiate an $8 billion settlement on behalf of Holocaust victims with governments and private companies in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France.
In fact, Eizenstat noted, federal courts dismissed lawsuits from concentration camp victims seeking compensation.
European companies and governments only agreed to a settlement later, after diplomatic pressure from the U.S. government, threats to disinvest public pension funds from companies that profited from Nazi slave labor and fears of potential consumer boycotts.
The congressional legislation compensating Japanese-Americans offered payments only to living survivors of internment, not their descendants. Likewise, the settlement for Holocaust victims only made payments for slave labor to survivors still living on Feb. 16, 1999, the date negotiations began.
However, descendants of Holocaust victims were allowed to make claims for seized assets such as artwork, real estate and life insurance benefits.
Courts look for proof of a direct link between the actions of a defendant in a lawsuit and the harm sustained by the plaintiff. That direct link grows murkier and more difficult to prove as time passes and especially when the plaintiff is several generations removed from individuals directly affected, said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.
Lawsuits brought over wrongs suffered long ago also run counter to the legal principle of a statute of limitations, Turley said.
