Charles J. Ogletree: Reparations

New York Times Article, "Litigating the Legacy of Slavery," by Charles J. Ogletree Jr, on 31 March 2002 -- Last Tuesday, a group of lawyers filed a federal class-action lawsuit in New York on behalf of all African-American descendants of slaves. The lawsuit seeks compensation from a number of defendants for profits earned through slave labor and the slave trade.

This lawsuit is limited to FleetBoston, Aetna, CSX and other to-be-named companies. The broader reparations movement seeks to explore the historical role that other private institutions and government played during slavery and the era of legal racial discrimination that followed. The goal of these historical investigations is to bring American society to a new reckoning with how our past affects the current conditions of African-Americans and to make America a better place by helping the truly disadvantaged.

The Reparations Coordinating Committee, of which I am a co-chairman, will proceed with its own plans to file wide-ranging reparations lawsuits late this autumn. The committee is a group of lawyers, academics, public officials and activists that has conducted extensive research and begun to identify parties to sue and claims to be raised.

The shape of a reparations strategy can already be seen. Among private defendants, corporations will be prominent, as last week's lawsuit shows. Other private institutions -- Brown University, Yale University and Harvard Law School -- have made headlines recently as the beneficiaries of grants and endowments traced back to slavery and are probable targets. Naming the government as a defendant is also central to any reparations strategy; public officials guaranteed the viability of slavery and the segregation that followed it.

A number of recent examples illustrate the possibilities for making reparations claims nationally and internationally. In South Africa, reparations have been part of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which seeks to compensate people with clear material needs who suffered under apartheid because of their race. It was also in South Africa that, in the final documents of a racism conference sponsored by the United Nations, slavery was defined as a ''crime against humanity,'' a legal determination that may enable the reparations movement to extend its reach to international forums.

In the United States, just three years ago the federal government reached a consent decree with a class of over 20,000 black farmers to compensate for years of discrimination by the Department of Agriculture. The case represents the largest civil-rights settlement by the government ever, with a likely payout of about $2 billion. Previously, the government also approved significant compensation for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II and paid reparations to black survivors of the Rosewood, Fla., race riots.

Although these precedents differ from a slavery-based reparations claim in that they involved classes of individuals who were both alive and easily identified, they nonetheless indicate government willingness to acknowledge past wrongs and remedy them. It is important that in each case the government waived its immunity from suit, thereby lifting the ordinary bar that prevents lawsuits against a sovereign.

Bring the government into litigation will also generate a public debate on slavery and the role its legacy continues to play in our society. The opportunity to use expert witnesses and conduct extensive discovery, to get facts and documentation, makes the courtroom an ideal venue for this debate.

A full and deep conversation on slavery and its legacy has never taken place in America; reparations litigation will show what slavery meant, how it was profitable and how it has continued to affect the opportunities of millions of black Americans.

A full and deep conversation on slavery and its legacy has never taken place in America; reparations litigation will show what slavery meant, how it was profitable and how it has continued to affect the opportunities of millions of black Americans.

Litigation is required to promote this discussion because political accountability has not been forthcoming. In each Congressional session since 1989, Representative John Conyers has introduced a bill to study slavery reparations and it has quickly died each time.

Though claims for slavery reparations have moved near the front of national and international policy discussions in the past few years, the movement has deep historical roots. Those roots go back at least as far as the unkept promise in 1864 of ''40 acres and a mule'' to freed slaves, which acknowledged our country's debt to the newly emancipated.

Indeed, the civil rights movement has long been organized, in part, around the notion that slavery and the century of legal discrimination that followed have had enduring and detrimental effects on American minorities.

The reparations movement should not, I believe, focus on payments to individuals. The damage has been done to a group -- African-American slaves and their descendants -- but it has not been done equally within the group. The reparations movement must aim at undoing the damage where that damage has been most severe and where the history of race in America has left its most telling evidence. The legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in America is seen in well-documented racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, employment and other social goods. The reparations movement must therefore focus on the poorest of the poor -- it must finance social recovery for the bottom-stuck, providing an opportunity to address comprehensively the problems of those who have not substantially benefited from integration or affirmative action.

The root of ''reparations'' is ''to repair.'' This litigation strategy could give us an opportunity to fully address the legacy of slavery in a spirit of repair.  [source: New York Times; Copyright 2013 The New York Times]

A Dutch Slavery Remembrance Fund

Politicians positive about slavery remembrance fund

General  --  Tuesday, September 9, 2008 A Dutch fund in memory of the history of slavery come. That is historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate, during the first Day of Slavery, on 6 September in Amsterdam, approval received from the MPs Harry van Bommel (SP), Kathleen Ferrier (CDA) and CU (Christian Union).

Johannes Houwink ten Cate, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, called the present politicians to generously with reparations to the descendants of African slaves in Suriname and the Antilles. "I think payout to individual victims is virtually impossible, but that precisely because of the long-term effects of slavery a good doped Dutch Foundation for the Remembrance of Slavery must be set."

During the ensuing debate between MPs from SP, CDA and Christian Union appeared to support this. "I'm not going to write a blank check," said Harry van Bommel (SP) "but I think it's an interesting idea." According to Kathleen Ferrier (CDA) would be a possible new fund should be integrated with the existing National Institute of Dutch slavery history and heritage (NiNsee).

Apologies  --  Van Bommel said in May this year, Prime Minister Balkenende on his visit to Suriname to intervene on behalf of the Dutch government officially apologize for the Dutch role in the slave trade. The Prime Minister gave to ignore this, but van Bommel announced 'it is not to leave. " Ferrier, daughter of the first President of Suriname and MP on behalf of the CDA, see nothing in an official apology. "By the former colonies to apologize, we create only a situation of inequality between our countries. We need to correct on the basis of equality with each other more. ' Voordewind find an official apology also counterproductive. However, he, like his fellow politicians, believes that considerable attention to the history of slavery in schools should be spent. For the idea of ​​a special fund he is therefore open.

Abolition  --  The Day of Slavery was organized by NiNsee and Historic Newspaper and had greater knowledge of the past to target. During an interview with Maartje Janse, a researcher at Leiden University and author of the thesis The abolitionists. Public opinion and political organization in the Netherlands, 1840-1880, came the painful question of why the Dutch abolished slavery in 1863 was over after England (1833), France (1848) and even Russia (1861).

According to Janse was the political culture in the Netherlands, which after the revolutionary years, mass movements were no longer part, an important responsibility for the late abolition. The political will was there, but the removal was a "civilized" way to happen. That the Netherlands in imitation of England in 1814 it abolished the slave trade, according to Janse was a prerequisite for the British government to the Netherlands and Belgium as a country to recognize. [SOURCE: by Maarten Muns]

Caption: Music on the Day of Slavery by Verno Romney & The TK Jive (photo Sander Heijne)

Christopher Hitchens about Reparations for slavery ( 2001)

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens debates reparations in 2001: "Beware when someone tries to make 'the best' the enemy of 'the good.'" 

Christopher Hitchen's Thought Experiment on Reparations:

• Was there an original traceable offense?

• Was there a taking, a theft, a rape, a dispossession, a confiscation?

There isn't a thinking person that can say “no” to that. The evidence is very clear. And it mounts with every chapter of historical inquiry.

• Did it consist of (as I said ) a confiscation?

• Can it be made, therefore, good?

• If not all of it can be made “good,” can some of it be made “good”?

• Can ANY of it be repaired? Again, don't make the “best“ the enemy of the “good”

• Is the anything that can be rescued from this terrible story?

• Is there anything that can done once it's been recognized?

We can not possibly undo … I don't actually think we can imagine the scope of what it would take to undo the damage that has been done to Africa, especially West Africa by colonization, colonial division, plunder, slavery and rape. We can't undo the forced underdevelopment of Africa....the amputation and dismemberment of Africa.

Christopher Hitchens about Reparations for slavery ( 2001)

Reparations for Slavery

Cynthia Greenlee-Dnnell reported in The Herald-Sun on 18 June 2005 in an article entitle, "Reparations for slavery still big debate": Even 140 years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in rebelling U.S. territories, there's still debate about who benefited from slavery and who, if anyone, should gain from it now.

On June 1, Charlotte-based Wachovia Corp. rekindled that debate by admitting that two of its predecessor companies owned slaves or used them as collateral. As a goodwill gesture, the nation's fourth-largest bank plans to spend an unspecified amount of money on programs about black history.

Wachovia's admission wasn't exactly news to William "Sandy" Darity Jr., the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics at UNC and director of the university's Institute of African American Research.

"My presumption is that basically any corporation with antecedents dating to the antebellum period, you're bound to find they're linked to slavery," said Darity, a Durham resident and also a professor at Duke University.

Darity has added his voice to a small group of grassroots activists, lawyers, scholars and students who believe that the United States owes a financial debt to the descendants of slaves. The issue of slavery reparations, or compensation, has attracted passionate supporters -- such as Durham scholar John Hope Franklin, the late attorney Johnnie Cochran, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan -- but also just as passionate opponents.

Critics like writer David Horowitz -- who rocked the boat at UNC and Duke in 2001 when he tried to place an anti-reparations ad in campus newspapers -- call reparations a shakedown.

The public's opinion

Raymond Winbush, Baltimore author of "Should America Pay: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations," sees slavery as the granddaddy of shakedowns, paraphrasing the late writer Ralph Wiley: "Give me one person to work for me for free for one year, and I will be a rich man. Give me several people to work for free for me for several years, and I will be a very rich man. Give me millions of people to work for me for free, and I'm America."

Darity said slavery gave whites an economic leg up. With no wealth to pass on, ex-slaves' progeny got reserved seats at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Then, the racial discrimination of slavery was codified with the racial discrimination of Jim Crow, a fact that Darity thinks the current slavery-oriented discussion often obscures.

"If we had gotten [equal protection under the law and access to land and income], we would be looking at a vastly different distribution of wealth," he said.

Darity and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, plan to launch an awareness campaign next year about the push for slavery and Jim Crow reparations. Such compensation could be direct payments to individuals, government- or corporation-funded scholarships, initiatives to increase black homeownership, or, as political pundit Alan Keyes once proposed, a temporary federal tax-free status.

But before anyone can talk about how reparations would work, activists would have to overcome public opinion. Polls have shown that whites overwhelmingly disapprove of the idea.

William A. Darity Jr., professor of economics at UNC, Chapel Hill discusses the economic case for reparations for black Americans.

And though Darity believes reparations may have to be handled legislatively, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has been trying unsuccessfully since 1989 to pass his H.R. 40 bill to establish a commission to research the impact of slavery and possible remedies.

"So few people take reparations seriously. They think it's a joke. I've done presentations at conferences, and people are frequently dismissive," Darity said.

But Peter Flaherty, of the Fairfax, Va., National Legal and Policy Center -- despite his opposition to reparations -- said they shouldn't be seen as radical balderdash.

"The demands that many people see, at first blush, as outlandish are being honored by big corporations. I believe the reparations activists certainly have the momentum," he said.



Businesses with ties

States and large cities such as California, Philadelphia and Chicago have enacted ordinances that require corporations wishing to do business with them to disclose any history of slavery. A similar bill has been proposed in North Carolina by state Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth.

Lawsuits have been filed against corporations alleged to have roles in slavery. And a still-pending complaint includes companies such as Charlotte's Bank of America, which had acquired the FleetBoston bank named in an earlier action.

Flaherty predicts that Bank of America will be next with a statement of complicity or apology, though the bank has denied any slavery connections.

More businesses definitely will be stepping forward, said N.C. A&T graduate Richard E. Barber Sr. Once a plaintiff in a slavery-reparations suit, the New Jersey resident now directs the U.S. Reparations Group.

His organization is examining records of more than 60 companies and plans to give corporations from July 1 to Sept. 22 (the date in 1862 when Lincoln signed a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation) to disclose slavery ties.

But David Horowitz says a company is not responsible for the misdeeds of its predecessors.

"Wachovia's trust has nothing to do with slavery, even though it owns a company that did. A corporation has to earn its way every year, so to speak," said the California-based Horowitz during a phone interview.

Darity took issue with that notion.

"These are the most prominent companies in America," he said, "and they are because of, not despite of, slavery."

Seemingly the only point of agreement for reparations fans and foes is that blacks lag behind whites in economic indicators such as household income and net worth.

It's the "why" they can't agree on.

Slavery connection

New Jersey attorney Diane Sammons is part of the pro-reparations legal team awaiting a decision on the case that involves Bank of America and other companies.

"Blacks are 13 percent of the population and own 3 percent of the assets," she says. "How do you explain the difference?"

Horowitz's take is that lack of family stability and failing public schools have more to do with the large black underclass than racial prejudice or slavery.

"There's not a single black person who's living now in America who was a slave," he says. "It's unlikely that there's a single black person in America whose parents were slaves."

That is in contrast to Holocaust survivors, who have received reparations.

Sammons has heard that argument before.

"People often get the Holocaust case wrong," she said. "There was a fund that was set up for the descendants of those people. Likewise with the Japanese [who were sent to internment camps during World War II]. To suggest that there's no residual harm from slavery, that's totally inaccurate."

Mullen, founder of the Carolina Circuit Writers literary organization, believes the historical distance between the present and slavery is not so far.

"People say, 'Why should I pay? My family didn't own slaves.' Well, were your family barrel makers who made the barrels that carried the rum? Were they sugar makers? Did they eat? Everybody was tied to the slave trade at one point or another. You cannot take your scissors and cut your family out of it."

Payoff possible?

Flaherty calls the reparations movement a scam that preys on white guilt and racial discord. Sammons of Rosedale, N.J.'s, Negel, Rice and Mazie LLP firm says it's far from fraud.

"It is money that was earned that was never paid, as opposed to an obligation to pull people up to the same level. When you look at it that way, it really is a debt. It's not a handout or a gratuity."

But a common argument against reparations is that, with 36 million black Americans -- many of whom have slave ancestors -- it would bankrupt federal coffers if the government signed onto the idea.

It's about political will, said Winbush, noting that the Bush administration found $80 billion to fund the war in Iraq.

Will there ever be a payoff or even a national apology for slavery?

Mullen won't venture a guess about when, but believes reparations of some sort will happen.

"I'm sure in 1840, people never thought that slavery would end. Or in 1920, that women would get the right to vote. You just have to keep pushing the mountain," she said. (source: http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-618559.html)

University of Alabama’s Slavery Apology

Alabama Governor George Wallace

Inscription. Buried near this plaque are Jack Rudolph and William “Boysey” Brown, two slaves owned by University of Alabama faculty, and William J. Crawford, a University student who died in 1844.

Rudolph was born in Africa about 1791 and died May 5, 1846, from “Bilious Pneumonia.” Brown was born April 10, 1838, and died November 22, 1844, from “Whooping Cough.”

Jack Rudolph and Boysey Brown were among the slaves owned by the University of Alabama and by faculty. Their burials were honored and recognized by the University of Alabama on April 15, 2004. The Faculty Senate apologized for their predecessors’ role in the institution of slavery on April 20, 2004. This plaque honors those whose labor and legacy of perseverance helped to build the University of Alabama Community since its founding.

According to the Alabama Law Review, "Professor Wants UA Apology for Slavery: Alfred Brophy will present proposal for university to consider reparations to slave descendants," on 16 March 2004, by Jeff Amy: A University of Alabama law professor wants the school to apologize for its pre-Civil War ownership and use of slaves, and to consider a commission to study the history of slave use at the school and the possibility of reparations to slave descendants.

Alfred Brophy, who studies the legal history of slavery, plans to present his proposal at today's Faculty Senate meeting. The faculty body isn't scheduled to vote on Brophy's resolution until April.

Brophy, who is white, said Monday that he has discovered numerous links between slavery and the Tuscaloosa school, established in 1831. The school owned a handful of slaves for much of its early existence, and rented others, according to Brophy's research. Professors, students and at least two university presidents owned slaves, he said.

Slaves cleaned buildings, planted trees, served students and aided professors, according to records Brophy has found. Though the professor hasn't found any direct evidence yet, he believes slaves helped build at least some of the seven surviving buildings that escaped destruction by Union troops in 1865.

But Brophy believes what UA really needs to atone for is the intellectual defense of slavery made by many of its leaders. Brophy points particularly to two university presidents and a Mobilian who founded the forerunner of the university's medical school. All three were prominent public defenders of slavery and the idea that blacks were naturally inferior. All three have buildings on the Tuscaloosa campus named for them.

So far, the resolution has caused little stir on the 20,000-student campus. Cathy Andreen, a university spokeswoman, declined comment on behalf of administrators.

"At this point, we're not ready to comment on it, because we haven't seen it," Andreen said.

Robert Turner, a senior from Tuskegee, said he had heard about some of Brophy's work, and said he hoped university leaders would support further inquiry.

"It should be something we look into, discovering the role the university played," Turner said.

Turner, who is black, is the outgoing executive chief of staff for Alabama's Student Government Association.

Vivian Malone attends class in 1963 after her admission to the University of Alabama despite Gov. George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door."

Success in race relations:

The University of Alabama, though famous for George Wallace's 1963 attempt to prevent integration, known as the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door," is in some ways a success in today's race relations. The school's student body is more than 13 percent black, a higher share than Auburn University or some other Southeastern Conference schools.

Even if the Faculty Senate adopts Brophy's proposal, UA President Robert Witt or University of Alabama System trustees would have to take a similar position for the faculty action to mean anything. For example, student and faculty resolutions last fall calling for the university to condemn discrimination against gays and lesbians have so far garnered little public recognition from top UA leaders.

Among campus structures that survived the Union Army destruction are outbuildings of the 1841 President's Mansion that have been identified in the past as slave quarters. Today, they appear on university maps under names like "President's storage."

At least six buildings on the campus are named for people who owned slaves or advocated slavery, according to Brophy. He notes that Basil Manly, university president from 1837 to 1855 and Landon Garland, president from 1855 to 1865, both owned large numbers of slaves who worked the presidents' personal plantations. Manly and Garland encouraged their students to believe that slavery was part of the natural order ordained by God, according to their surviving papers and other accounts.

Brophy also points to Josiah Nott, a physician in Mobile who founded the forerunner of the University of Alabama Medical School in 1858. Nott wrote and lectured about claims that blacks were genetically inferior, based partly on skull measurements he made in his medical practice. Slavery suited black people, Nott said, because the race could never hope to achieve the level of accomplishment and civilization that whites had reached.

Vivian Malone and James Hood. Vivian Malone became the first African-American to graduate from the university.

The question of whether universities profited from slavery, and what they should do to make up for it, has been a prominent subplot in a larger national debate about reparations in the last 15 years. Up until now, most attention has focused on Ivy League universities -- Brown, Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

Most recently, Ruth Simmons, the first black president of Rhode Island's Brown, appointed a committee to examine the school's ties to slavery, teach students about that history, and consider whether Brown should do something to compensate for that past.

Some black leaders have called for economic payments -- typically called reparations -- as a way for the nation to erase some of the damage caused by slavery, and share the economic gains that slave owners enjoyed. They point to reparations paid to citizens of Japanese descent whom the American government imprisoned during World War II. They also note payments by Germany and German companies to Holocaust victims.

But opponents say that idea is logistically difficult at best, and an ideological travesty at worst. Those against reparations say its unfair to tax people for the sins of previous generations. A federal judge in Chicago recently dismissed a lawsuit seeking reparations, in part because there are no slave owners or slaves still alive.

A 2002 Mobile Register-University of South Alabama poll found the state's citizens racially polarized over the question of reparations. While 67 percent of black respondents favored the federal government making cash payments to slave descendants, only 5 percent of white respondents agreed. Pollsters said some white people became so upset that they had trouble finishing telephone interviews for the poll.

Vivian Malone and James Hood register for classes at the University of Alabama despite Alabama Gov. George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" protesting racial integration of the institution.

Favors reparations:

For his part, Brophy has favored reparations. As a law professor in Oklahoma, he counseled black residents of Tulsa in their efforts to gain compensation for a 1921 race riot that left numerous blocks of a black business district in ruins and may have killed 300 people.

He thinks it might be possible to track down descendants of slaves owned by the university and its early professors, to offer them scholarships or some sort of symbolic payment. He acknowledged, however, that such an effort would provoke widespread opposition.

"I'm not going to fall on a sword for reparations," Brophy said.

He said other measures, such as an open debate about UA's slave past, headstones for unmarked slave graves, a university apology, and maybe a museum in one of the former slave quarters, would all be healthy for the school

"It's not like we don't have the buildings built with slave labor," Brophy said. "Having benefited from that labor, this institution has a moral duty to make amends." (source: Alabama Law Review)

Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation

Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation

Whites Respond to the Call for Black Reparations

". . . the question of why white america should support Black reparations is in many ways the wrong question. It is the wrong question because it places the burden of convincing the nation to live up to its creed on those this nation has systematically brutalized and worked to do away with. In other words, the responsibility does not lie on those historically and contemporarily oppressed by american society to educate white america about that oppression. Instead, the burden lies on those of us who are white to justify why reparations and justice are not due." Quote from Mark David George, co-author. Anthology by Members of CURE

Donna Lamb Black Reparations Part1

Back Pay: Reparations for Slavery

A Jamaican Newspaper, the Gleaner, published an article entitled "Back pay for slavery," on 7 August 2011, by Carolyn Cooper, Contributor to the Gleaner:

THE PRINCIPLE of reparations was established long ago in the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British colonies. But there was a catch to the act - not much different in essence from the original sin of catching Africans for enslavement in the Americas. Reparations were to be made to the perpetrators of human trafficking, not to the victims.

This is how the act opens: "Whereas divers persons are holden (held) in slavery within divers of His Majesty's colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable compensation should be made to the persons hitherto entitled to the services of such slaves for the loss which they will incur by being deprived of their right to such services ... ," etc.

This is a classic example of the diabolical mindset of 'wicked white people'. Slaveholders were legally entitled to the services of their slaves and therefore had a right to 'reasonable compensation' for loss of service. The enslaved had no such rights or entitlements. They were freed with nothing in their two long hands; just like that rather sad-looking couple standing in a basin of water in New Kingston's 'Emancipation Park'.

Statues in Emancipation Park, Kingston, Jamaica

When I talk about 'wicked white people' I don't mean specific individuals who have done me personal wrong. I'm not speaking about singular acts of evil. It's a far bigger issue. What concerns me is the collective crimes against humanity committed by gravalicious people who consider themselves absolutely entitled by God and nature to dominate the world. In many instances, these self-proclaimed rulers just happen to be white.

In the age of colonial conquest, 'wicked white people' as a special interest group committed crimes of unapologetic horror. They ravaged other people's bodies, souls, lands and histories; they vandalised sacred objects and then locked them away in 'museums' - those cemeteries of other people's culture. 'Wicked white people' invading and stealing, stealing, stealing without conscience.

I know I'm going to be accused of racism for exposing 'wicked white people' to public scrutiny in this way. But that's just another ploy of 'wicked white people' and their collaborators to perpetuate mental slavery. It's racism to talk about racist behaviour. But actual racist behaviour is not racism. It's just human nature. What an irony!

Justice versus expediency

So let's say instead that 'nice and decent' white people agreed that it was "just and expedient" to set the enslaved free. But the yoking of justice and expedience in the Act for the Abolition of Slavery reveals the central philosophical and practical dilemma at the heart of the emancipation enterprise.

Justice seemingly puts emancipation on solid moral ground. Expedience erodes all claims to moral authority. It was expedient to emancipate enslaved Africans because plantation slavery had become an expensive proposition. The substitution of beet for cane turned West Indian sugar into a rather sour deal.

After centuries of mostly verbal outrage - incessant talk, talk, talk about 'wicked white people' - we, the collective victims of transatlantic slavery, must finally decide to take legal action in the largest class-action suit in the history of the world. This is a truly wonderful idea. Not the wishy-washy, everyday sense of 'wonderful', meaning simply 'great'; it's the mind-blowing, original meaning of the word: full of wonder.

Five hundred years after the rape of the body and land of the original inhabitants of this part of the world; 500 years after the violent uprooting and enslavement of millions of Africans, we, their descendants, both native and immigrant, must lay claim to rights of reparation.

In the sweet by and by

Enslaved Sugar Plantation Labour

For many Africans in the diaspora, it is in religion that we find hope for reparations. The Christian religion seems to recommend long-term investment in the celestial stock market. The concept of reparations has best been expressed in pious hymns like this: "In the sweet by and by I'll have a mansion so bright and so fair, won't it be glorious when I get there in the sweet by and by?" God will repair the breach. God is the ultimate human rights arbitrator.

Then we have those Africans who want hard cold cash in the here and now. Think of the title song from the movie The Harder They Come: "They tell me bout the pie up in the sky waiting for me when I die. But between the day you born and when you die, they never seem to hear even your cry. So as long as the sun will shine, I'm gonna get my share, what's mine. The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all."

That's an excellent anthem for the Reparations Movement, the Garveyism of our times. It's the same kind of daring that made Marcus Garvey conceive the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Communities League: a global movement of African peoples who see themselves as having a shared history and a common destiny.

And don't think it's a joke. With derisive laughter cynics like to say, 'when you get the money you can check me.' But the Jews got compensation from the Germans; Japanese-Americans got compensation for the atrocities committed against them. Why not Africans? I'd like to know what, exactly, our National Commission on Reparations is doing about it.

If you think that after 500 years it's now too late for reparations, just remember Psalm 90:4 in which David, himself a Jew, converses with the Supreme Arbitrator: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." Come to think of it, all we're really talking about is half a day's back pay. (source: The Gleaner)