Of Course Mitch McConnell’s Ancestors Were Slave Owners
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been blunt about his thoughts on the U.S. providing reparations to the descendants of slaves: a hard no. In June, the day before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held the first hearings on reparations in more than a decade, the top Republican in the Senate said, "I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, when none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea. We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president."
The "we" in that last sentence is a bit of a stretch, especially coming from a senator who announced immediately after Barack Obama's election that his top priority was denying him a second term, and then refused to confirm dozens of Obama appointees, including Cassandra Butts, a black woman who actually died while McConnell stalled a vote on her ambassadorship to the Bahamas for more than two years. On top of that, while slavery did officially end 150 years ago, its legacy has lived on in a variety of forms, from brutal legal systems, like Jim Crow, to outright domestic terrorism. And that's not to mention the wealth that enslaved blacks produced for white families—families, it turns out, like Mitch McConnell's. NBC News has confirmed that two of his great-great-grandfathers owned a combined total of 14 slaves. According to the "Slave Schedules" of the 1850 and 1860 censuses in Limestone County, Alabama, James McConnell and Richard Daley collectively owned two men and 12 women.
Of course, McConnell's depiction of slavery as a self-contained and impact-free historic episode is faulty, regardless of whether or not his family owned slaves. Ta-Nehisi Coates—whose writing on reparations has done a lot to revive the concept in modern politics—took his time before Congress to respond directly to McConnell's dismissive "something that happened 150 years ago," explaining that while the Kentucky senator wasn't alive for slavery itself, like everyone else in the country, he's experienced the brutal legacy of it that lasts to this day:
Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader. What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s "something": It was 150 years ago. And it was right now.
While experts on slavery don't necessarily advocate that individual descendants of slave owners pay reparations directly, they have argued "that the families that descended from slave owners, like McConnell’s, are likely to have benefited from the labor of slaves that propped up farm families in earlier generations" and that "descendants of slaves were never compensated for the economic benefit their forebears made to white families," according to NBC News. Multiple Democratic presidential nominees, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, have come out in favor of reparations, although none of them has yet proposed concrete details.
Originally Appeared on GQ
