Irfan Khan | Jason Davis
Larry Elder, a Black politician and attorney, believes slave owners should have received reparations after the end of slavery.
Elder appeared on The Candace Owens Show back in July, but a specific clip of his appearance has been circulating on social media recently and causing outrage. Elder, who is running for governor in California, said that slave owners in America should have received reparations after slavery ended. He said this type of compensation was deserved because the slave owners lost their legal “property” after the passing of the 13th amendment and the end of the Civil War.
He justified his argument by referring to how the British slave owners were compensated when slavery ended after the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
“Did you know that slave owners were compensated?” Elder told Owens. “After they lost their quote-unquote ‘property’ the government compensated slave owners.”
“Yeah, so when people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Because, like it or not, slavery was legal. And so their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War. You could make an argument that the people who are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose quote ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War.”
After slavery ended in Britain, the British empire took out a hefty loan of £20 million to compensate former slave owners under the British Slave Compensation Commission. British taxpayers finished paying off the loan in 2015.
He added an unsupported claim that this “great deal of money that the former slave owners got” was “one of the reasons they didn’t fight a war.”
Even though, he is saying slave owners deserve this money, that’s not happening. In 2019, Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmons proposed a reparation plan that made Evanston, Illinois, the first city to approve reparations for Black residents who suffered the effects of housing discrimination in the city from 1919 to 1969.
