November 25, 2003
BY MARK BROWN
markbrown@suntimes.com
SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Here we are, coming up on the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and I'm not sure how many years of discussions about slavery reparations, and now Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd) has found somebody to hold accountable.
How ironic that it would be a black woman.
Tillman wants CTA Chairman Carole Brown to "apologize or step aside."
Apologize for what exactly?
For daring to defend the present-day conduct of her employer, a financial services giant that just admitted some past ties to slavery, with comments that might be construed as undermining the reparations cause that Tillman has championed?
It's too easy as the resident white guy on this page to pick a fight with Tillman, who tends to make white people angry, but really, how can this be fair?
No matter what you think about reparations, the place to start can't be with Carole Brown, whose only crime was to work hard enough in life that she was in a position to speak her mind -- and cautiously at that.
In case you missed it, this all started with a Monday scoop from the Chicago Sun-Times' City Hall reporter Fran Spielman that investment banker Lehman Brothers had become the first city contractor to admit some past involvement with slavery in disclosure affidavits now required by the city under an ordinance sponsored by Tillman.
The company told the city that it had found records indicating the brothers who started the business in Montgomery, Ala., in 1850 personally owned slaves and that the company itself purchased a slave in 1854.
Brown, who was responsible for submitting the affidavit as a senior vice president with Lehman Brothers and the head of its public finance operation in Chicago, told Spielman that "the Lehman Brothers in the 1850s is not the company that it is today."
Brown's words couldn't have made Tillman more angry if she'd pulled off one of her hats and stomped on it.
"This woman had no business out there," Tillman told me Monday. "She should have said, 'No, I'm not going to speak on this.' She had no right to be the spokesman for the company. She's tarnished herself with our community."
Tillman compared it to a Jewish person speaking out against Jews receiving reparations for the Holocaust.
"I'll bet the whole Jewish community would have been rallying and kicking their butt if one of them had said that," Tillman said. "She has a responsibility to her people, too. Maybe she needs to do some more research on the company itself. She's not thinking about her people."
This was after Tillman had a few hours to cool off. Her comments earlier in the day to Spielman were arguably more bombastic. Read them on Page 13.
And how does all this relate to Brown's chairmanship at the Chicago Transit Authority, an appointment she received from Mayor Daley barely two months ago?
"I guarantee you that's why the mayor put her there. He was replacing a black woman with a black woman at a time when there was a lot of criticism in the community of the CTA," Tillman said, referring to Brown's replacement of Valerie Jarrett amid CTA fare hike discussions.
On that point, Tillman is probably correct, which doesn't make Brown any less of a good selection.
I would like to tell you a lot more about Carole Brown's views, but I don't really know her and she didn't return my call, leading me to believe that she hadn't anticipated becoming the focal point of a Dorothy Tillman firestorm. I can tell you that she's no politician, despite her recent appointment to the CTA post.
The Baltimore native worked her way up through the ranks of the very white municipal banking industry -- a world split between the political types who bring in the business and the technical people who actually do the banking work.
Brown came up on the technical side, working under former CTA Chairman Clark Burrus at First Chicago before moving to Mesirow Financial and later recruited away by Lehman. In other words, she's the real deal.
As the head of Lehman Brothers' public finance operation in Chicago, she now has responsibility for bringing in business, too, but that's not her background. That doesn't mean she doesn't play the game. Lehman pays a hefty consulting fee to John Wyma, a former aide to Gov. Blagojevich from his days in Congress, to help drum up business.
Brown, a Harvard graduate, first came to Chicago in 1984 to get her MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. She got to like it here.
I don't know Brown's thoughts on reparations. She didn't really spell that out to Spielman, and I'm sure Lehman Brothers would prefer she keep that to herself.
I personally am willing to talk about reparations all day. I'm just not willing to pay them.
Tillman believes the government (i.e. taxpayers) should pay reparations, in addition to the companies that benefitted from slave labor. Her efforts have produced some thought-provoking sessions on the effects of slavery, including our all-too-recent experience with lynchings, which convinced me that all of us would benefit from being better educated about slavery instead of trying to put it out of our minds. But I'm never going to be persuaded that I should be held accountable for the mistakes of long-ago generations.
Lehman Brothers, which already was a defendant in a federal lawsuit in Chicago seeking slavery reparations, will learn soon enough whether it can be held accountable in the courts.
Carole Brown doesn't deserve to pay the price in the meantime.