Conyers, John, Jr. (1929–)

John Conyers, Jr. is the longest-serving African American member of Congress. Born in Detroit and educated in Detroit's public schools, he earned his LL.B. from Detroit's Wayne State Law School in 1957. Cofounder and dean of the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, Conyers was first elected to the 89th Congress as a Michigan Democrat in 1965. Since then, he has been reelected 20 times and has served on and chaired many important committees in the House of Representatives. In 1968, to the consternation of many conservatives in Congress, Conyers introduced legislation for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. It took 15 years for the bill to finally pass in 1983.

Conyers is highly identified with his cause—reparations for African Americans. In 1989, Conyers sponsored H.R. 40 (“40”signifying the “forty acres and a mule”promised freed slaves after the U.S. Civil War) and has reintroduced it every year since then, but the bill has never made it out of committee. H.R. 40, or the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, seeks to acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, and to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies. Key points in Conyers's argument are that the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 agreed that the [Page 393]trans-African slave trade was a crime against humanity and that there are precedents for legislative bodies providing redress, including the U.S. Civil Rights Redress Act, which awarded reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II;Canada's ceding of 250,000 square miles to Indians and Eskimos in 1988;and Germany's payment of $852 million in 1952 to Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Although the intent of H.R. 40 is not primarily monetary, those who oppose it characterize it as a massive giveaway that will do little to correct the prior harms of slavery. Conyers describes the bill's intent as an exploratory commission to investigate whether formal apologies from the U.S. government are required, compensation warranted, and if so, in what form and under what eligibility criteria. Opponents argue that none of the 4 million slaves is alive today and that most living Americans neither owned slaves nor profited from their labor. The reparations controversy, with Conyers at its center, along with ongoing affirmative action debates, continues to be one of the most divisive civil rights issues today. Many political polls reveal that 90% of white Americans are opposed to reparations in any form, whereas 65% of black Americans favor monetary payments from the government. Calculations of the monetary value of slave labor unpaid during slavery range between $1.5 trillion and $14 trillion. Currently, Conyers's H.R. 40 has more than 40 cosponsors in Congress, and city councils in Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Chicago have passed bills in its support.

...