Reaching for reparations.

Byline: Thse Register-Guard

The recent lawsuit charging that three major U.S. companies profited from the slave trade marks just the beginning of a broader legal effort seeking reparations for American blacks who are descendants of slaves. Later this year, a group of prominent black attorneys and legal scholars is expected to file a similar suit against the U.S. government.

The hard legal reality is that neither of the suits has much chance of winning any actual damages. But they may succeed in the more important goal of making America's ugly history of slavery, which many white Americans would rather avoid, a part of the national conversation.

The traditional concept of reparations - payments that the federal government or companies would make as restitution for allowing the system that kept millions of blacks in abject servitude for more than two centuries and oppressed them for the next 100 years - is unworkable for a number of reasons.

The biggest legal hurdle is the passage of time. It not only raises statute-of-limitations problems, but all direct victims of slavery are in their graves. Successful lawsuits seeking compensation for unjust gains by governments or private companies normally limit claims to classes of people who can be immediately and clearly identified or, if they are dead, their direct heirs. That was the case for the Holocaust victims who recently won a $1.25 billion settlement from three large Swiss banks. Such specificity is lacking in the slavery reparations cases.

Lawyers will also have to prove that what the government or companies did during slavery was actually wrong at the time. The unpleasant reality is that slavery was legal at the time U.S. companies were profiting from the practice. As one law professor recently observed, "The law doesn't deal with wrong or right. It deals with legality."

There are countless other complications. How would the courts factor into reparations the efforts made on behalf of former slaves and their descendants - from the Civil War to affirmative action? How would they account for the huge employment, educational and political gains that blacks have made on their own?

In the case of the lawsuit filed late last month against Aetna, FleetBoston Financial and CSX, how would the court handle the negative impact of reparations on the thousands of blacks who are employed by these same corporations? Presumably, black employees, as well as pensioners and shareholders, would be every bit as much on the hook for damages as their white counterparts.

While the lawsuits are unlikely to produce tangible damages, they will certainly succeed in generating a long-overdue American debate on slavery and its legacy. Such an in-depth, public examination has long been sought by black leaders but has never taken place.

The value of these lawsuits lies not in the unlikely possibility that they may produce reparations for the descendants of slavery, but in the debate itself and the opportunity it provides Americans to come to grips with an ugly facet of this nation's past.