Slavery ended in New York on July 4, 1827, almost 44 years after the last British ships sailed out of our harbor. Five years later, New Jersey finally became the last slave state in the North.

The disgusting institution continued in the South for more than three decades until it ended at last in the horrors of the Civil War.

That vile stain on American history remains with us to this day.

Over the weekend, there was a rally in Washington demanding reparations for slavery, organized by the Reparations Coordinating Committee. The committee co-chairmen are Charles Ogletree, professor of law at Harvard, and Randall Robinson, founder of the Trans-Africa Forum, both honorable men.

They expected tens of thousands at the rally. They got several hundred.

They also got, alas, Louis Farrakhan.

"It seems that America owes black people a lot for what we have endured," said the leader of the Nation of Islam. "We cannot settle for some little jive token. We need millions of acres of land that black people can build." Then he went on: "We're not begging white people. We are just demanding what is justly ours."

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) was in attendance, but there was no sign of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who must realize that this is an absurd waste of energy. Among other absurdities, it fails to explain how you would separate taxes paid by whites from taxes paid by African-Americans. If reparations ever did happen, today's African-Americans would end up paying for the sins committed against their own ancestors.

An enduring anger over ancient wrongs is, of course, understandable, as painful to African-Americans as the Irish famine remains to some Irish people and centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe are to many Jews. But most African-Americans also know that the past is the past: its injuries can't always be repaired with cash.

Complicated issue

A larger problem with the reparations movement is that nothing about the modern history of slavery is simple. To extract reparations from those who profited from the American system of slavery (it began in 1619 in Virginia), the Reparations Coordinating Committee would need to begin in Africa itself. It would need to sue the descendants of all those Africans who hunted other Africans, usually from rival tribes, and took them to market on the coasts. It's a valid argument to say that the trade was market-driven. But the hard daily reality was this: The vast majority of Africans were captured and sold into slavery by Africans.

Then the reparations activists would have to sue the descendants of the Arab traders who served as middlemen in the brutal trade. And then they'd have to go to London, to sue the British government.

According to historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (in their "Gotham"), from 1700 to 1775, the British took 1.2 million slaves to the West Indies alone. Others went to Britain's colonies in North America. Any lawsuit must recognize that the British created the system of slavery that continued (disgracefully) after the triumph of the American Revolution.

British New York was essential to that system. Slaves were sold for several generations from tin-roofed markets at the East River end of Wall St., most for trans-shipment to the South. Many remained here, to work as domestic help, as longshoremen, carpenters, coopers, laborers - or to work the farms of Brooklyn and Long Island.

At one point, New York was second only to South Carolina in the numbers of slaves. They were banned from schools. They were banned from most churches (for if an African had a soul, how could you enslave him?). They were property, the way horses were property.

Who should pay?

But again, who should pay for these barbaric crimes?

In proposed lawsuits against the federal government, tax money would be used to pay the descendants of slaves. But it would be unfair to use the tax money of descendants of those Irish people who rose in revolt alongside Africans in 1741 in New York (four Irish rebels and 18 Africans were hanged or burned at the stake in the present City Hall Park).

It would be unfair to use the tax money of the descendants of the abolitionists - white men and women who fought valiantly against slavery.

From Louisiana to New York, freed blacks often owned their own African slaves. Should their descendants also pay?

In New York, this city of immigrants, it is equally impossible to seek reparations from people whose ancestors came to America long after slavery was abolished. There is no just way to ask the descendants of the post-Civil War floodtide of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants to pay for crimes committed before their arrival.

It's absurd to argue that those immigrants enjoyed the benefits derived from slavery. What benefits? The great energies of American capitalism were unleashed after the end of slavery, not because of slavery. Immigrants and African-Americans built the modern U.S. - including this city - together. They were often exploited. They were subjected to many indignities. But they worked for pay. They were owned by no man.

Moving forward

The stain remains, but while memory is essential to all human beings, so is a talent for forgetting.

Last week, the world saw that shameless photograph of George W. Bush posing at Mount Rushmore, as if he were somehow the equal of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

He never looked smaller.

It should not be forgotten that when Washington died in 1799, he had 316 slaves working his estate. When Jefferson died in 1826, he left behind 187 slaves and freed the five children he almost certainly had with a slave named Sally Hemings.

But it would be foolish to dismiss the extraordinary accomplishments of Washington and Jefferson on that issue alone. Just as it is insulting to say to millions of today's African-Americans that they are permanent victims of that shameful past and can be helped only with a cash payment.

All Americans have learned to set aside the past and focus on the future. The vast majority of Americans who trace their roots to Africa are doing that - with pride and valor - every day of their lives.