G.T. Bynum: Reparations, The Trump Rally, and The Morning Dew

Part Three

Previously:

Part Two: G.T. Bynum: Pornography, Bibles, and The Vision Thing

BF: You once told me actually more than once, and I believe you the first time,  that you were a lot more conservative than I thought you were. Are you more conservative now than when you said that to me seven years ago?

GTB: I don't know. No. I think I have always been very conservative, but I think there's a difference now. The thing that I've always felt, and I was just talking with that student group about this, the art in governance is being able to find common ground with people who are elsewhere on the political spectrum from you and bring that stuff forward . . . that doesn't mean that you give up your fundamental principles, but it's based on the basic belief that making incremental progress is better than making no progress at all. And I don't think there's any art in just proclaiming your extreme position or your 100% belief and not making any progress on it.

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BF:  I want to read you something you told The Washington Post. “I pointed out my family were white who lived in here in 1921. I'm not trying to make white people look bad. I'm just trying to find the truth.” Was that your motivation in reinvestigating whether there are mass graves from a century-old race massacre that left hundreds of African Americans dead? Is just the sense of closure enough for people who experienced that, whose neighbors were killed and whose houses were burned?  And would that be enough for you and your white family? Would you be satisfied with talk about ‘closure’ or would you want something for that house that was burned down, for the businesses that were destroyed, for the relatives lost? A long way of asking: What are your thoughts on reparations?

GTB:  So a lot of thoughts on that. So, first of all on the investigation is my belief that that is just a fundamental service of the city government that anyone should expect to have and was not provided to the victims in 1921.  And then 98 years went by and there was never a search in earnest for the graves. And so we launched that. We can't go back in time and make the city do the right thing in 1921 or 1922, but we can do our best to do it today. It has taken a lot longer than I would have hoped.

BF: But what about reparations?