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National Reparations
Mobilization & Education Campaign Conference
June 29-30, 2001
City College of New York
New York, NY, USA
People of African descent are determined -- now more than ever -- not to begin a new Millennium with the UNRESOLVED issue of compensation for past and present crimes against our Humanity.
Sisters and Brothers!
Never before has there been such powerful motion around the demand for reparations for past and present inhumane acts against people of African Descent. Today, in every part of the world, people are talking about and mobilizing around the right of our Sisters and Brothers -- the right of you and I -- to obtain Reparations.
This current Reparations upsurge is grounded on the historic reality that our Ancestors suffered the greatest crimes against humanity:
* Centuries of brutal captivity not even a pig had to endure.
* Centuries of a middle passage experience far beyond one's
worst nightmare.
* Centuries of being deliberately worked to death without pay.
* Centuries of thousands of daily rapes of our African Sisters.
* Centuries of knowing your children will automatically be
born enslaved and put to work at three years old.
* This immoral and evil system still prospers today from
peoples of African descent being exploited, dehumanized,
and demonized based on this legacy of slavery and the
ongoing plundering of Africa.
All this and more resulted in the rulers of Europe and their ruling European descendants in the Americas becoming increasingly rich and powerful on a global scale.
This historic and international groundswell of support for Black Reparations is causing fear and reaction within the ranks of the ruling white supremacists and their political allies. They clearly understand the power of the Reparations Movement to transform the world's uneven social and economic relations into a more equitable distribution of wealth founded on the blood, sweat and tears of our African Ancestors. They have tried all of their international arm-twisting tactics short of use of arms to "persuade" the African Ministries and other nations of Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America to prevent the issue of Reparations from being considered at the upcoming UN World Conference Against Racism. Their desperate acts have only resulted in a stronger unification of peoples of color to be resolute and stand strong for Black Reparations.
We have also experienced these very same ruling oppositional forces siccing their racist right-wing hounds upon the Reparations Movement through college campus newspaper ads, TV talkshows, and various kinds of so-called "debates." Their hopes were to kill the Reparations Movement. But, just as in the international arena, their attempts to crush our Movement for just compensation have only resulted in positively promoting our righteous cause.
These very same evil forces have also witnessed -- much to their fear and frustration -- a growing awareness among tens of thousands of our Latino and Latina Brothers and Sisters of their African roots and its historic meaning within the newly revitalized Global African Reparations Movement.
Sisters and Brothers!
We must never forget that Reparations is not about a demand for putting cash in Black hands to -- in turn -- give it back to the Sonys, Nikes, and Proctor & Gambles of the world! It's not about making a few of us rich! It is one of our most powerful political offensives!
This puts us at a most critical stage:
The need to educate and mobilize our Sisters and Brothers about joining the battle for Reparations at this most pivotal moment.
This is why we, who have signed on as co-sponsors, are calling for a working conference on Reparations Mobilization for June 29 and 30, 2001 in New York City. We are united and committed to building the structures that can help us educate and mobilize millions of our Sisters and Brothers across the US and the African Diaspora about how we can -- all together -- join in contributing to the realization of Black Reparations.
Our Ancestors will not rest until we -- Africans of the New Millennium -- achieve Reparations. Our Descendants will not forgive us if we do not fight the Good Fight for Reparations.
Join us at City College of NY on June 29-30, 2001 at this historic conference that launches the Reparations Education and Mobilization Campaign!
By Linda Wallace
One recent Sunday morning, readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer were greeted with a bold headline in large type: "Forward on race – together". In a two-part editorial, the newspaper, Philadelphia’s largest daily, joined a chorus of African-American newspapers in arguing that "A good-faith process of acknowledgment, atonement and reconciliation can help America address a long-delayed moral task: Reparations." It went on to voice strong support of a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich,, a measure he has introduced unsuccessfully and annually since 1989. The bill would, among other things, require the United States to "acknowledge the fundamental injustice cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery." Reparations, a movement once confined to African-American organizations, has made it into the mindset of mainstream America – 136 years after the end of the Civil War. The Inquirer, a newspaper with a circulation of about 800,000 on Sundays and 400,000 weekdays, may be the first major daily newspaper in America to come out in support of reparations for African Americans. Editorial Page Editor Chris Satullo, who is white, credits Kevin Ferris, a white member of the 13-member editorial board, with pushing the issue front and center and taking the initiative to do the research. Two of the 13-voting editorial-board members are African American, Satullo said. "Since Kevin Ferris (the newspaper’s readers’ editor) came to the editorial board six years ago, we have been attempting to frame a conversation and a dialogue on race," Satullo said, adding that Ferris has devoted the reader’s page, which runs in the editorial-page section, to local residents’ essays on race. Reaction to the two-part editorial, which ran on May 20 and May 21, has been intense. More than 2,500 people have reponded and the calls, e-mails, and letters are running 3-1 against. Ninety-six percent of voters in the newspaper's on-line poll were against reparations. The Inquirer’s editorial itself became major news, as Satullo took a flood of phone calls from reporters capturing what they believe is a journalism first: The first daily newspaper in America to support reparations for slavery. Satullo said the board didn’t research that issue but it did not know of any other major newspaper that has adopted a similar stance. So across America, reporters wondered how a movement that was once discounted by African-American leaders had taken root and found fertile ground in Philadelphia?
Research likely is propelling the dialogue and the country’s changing demographics may be hastening its pace, said noted African-American author and psychologist Naim Akbar. "It has been a little over 40 years that textbooks have actually dealt with the true atrocities of slavery in America," Akbar said. "Only in the last 25 to 30 years, have we been able to get graphic and concrete information on what the slave experience was like." Previously, U.S. history books portrayed slavery’s abolishment as the great political triumph of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, and not as an economic, social or traumatic event, Akbar said. After the civil-rights movement, however, that changed as African-American historians, psychologists, economists and even journalists began shifting through documents and probing the longer effects, according to Akbar. Akbar and other researchers began to link behavior in African-American culture with slavery making a correlation between behaviors – such as patterns of detachment to or abandonment of children by African-American men – and slavery – during which black male slaves were torn apart from their families. The inferiority stemming from that period still exists within the culture, Akbar said, and there is mounting research that it affects African-American families even today. "It is a kind of inferiority that is so entrenched that it gets passed on from generation to generation," he said. "You will hear parents tell children, ‘Come here with your black nappy-headed self’, even today." Then last year, a dream team of African-American lawyers, including Alexander Pires, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, who won a $1 billion judgment against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for African-American farmers, Johnnie Cochran, Richard Scruggs, Dennis Sweet, Harvard Professor Charles J. Ogletree and Willie Gary, formed, formed the Reparations Assessment Group and began planning lawsuits aimed at winning monetary damages for descendents of African-Americans victimized by slavery. The Inquirer Editorial Board began discussing reparations nearly a year ago, after publicity surfaced regarding a deadly race riot in Oklahoma in 1921 that left as many as 300 African-Americans dead and destroyed dozens of thriving businesses. Just last week, Oklahoma lawmakers approved
By TAMAR LEWIN
It has been more than a century since Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that the coastlands confiscated in the Civil War be divided into 40-acre plots and distributed to thousands of former slaves.
After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and took back the land that had been distributed. Since then, the idea of compensating African-Americans for the sins of two and a half centuries of slavery has hovered in the background, far from reality. But now the movement for reparations is gaining steam.
As a political matter, reparations has been a nonstarter: every year since 1989, Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, has introduced legislation calling for a comprehensive study of reparations, and every year the legislation has stalled.
But as a social and legal movement, the call for reparations has taken on substantial force this year. Black professionals and scholars are taking up a cause that used to engage mostly working-class blacks. And beyond the longstanding efforts to seek government restitution, there is a new focus on winning reparations from corporate targets that once profited from slavery.
Calling For A National Reparations March
By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill
10th December 2001
It is without question that millions of African people in America support the Reparations Movement's demand for reparations from the United States Government and a variety of private institutions and corporations who all benefited from the more than four hundred years of free slave labor from African people in this country.
The growing support of the Reparations Movement by millions of African people in America manifested itself through the hundreds of African people from this country, who joined forces with African people around the world, in demanding that the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery be declared a Crime Against Humanity and that reparations were owed African people at the recently held United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa.
The Reparations Movement forces were victorious at the WCAR by impacting on parts of its outcome in the Durban Declaration. The WCAR government delegates passed that "We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of their magnitude, organized nature and especially their negation of the essence of the victims and further acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity."
As Ambassador Amina Muhammad from Kenya pointed out in paragraph 119 of the Durban Declaration Plan of Action, "calls on these states to take appropriate and effective measures to halt and reverse the lasting consequences of those practices" was in fact, a call for reparations.
The spirit, energy and momentum galvanized by the participation of the Durban 400, through the leadership of the December 12th Movement International Secretariat and the National Black United Front (NBUF), has inspired a call by the Durban 400 for a Millions For Reparations Mass Demonstration, March, and Protest Rally demanding reparations from the United States Government in its Capital City, Washington, D.C. on August 17, 2002.
It is only fitting that this march and demonstration be held on the 115th anniversary of the birth of the Honorable Marcus Garvey, who through his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League, led one of the greatest mass movements for African redemption and liberation in this country during the 1920's.
We must build upon the momentum of our organizing work that led to our successful participation in the WCAR. Therefore, the Durban 400 is calling on African people in America to get prepared over the coming months to participate in the Millions For Reparations March, Protest, and Demonstration on August 17, 2002. Now more than ever African people must stand United in our demands for reparations in America.
In the Durban 400 Call for this Millions For Reparations March, Protest, and Demonstration we say, "The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Jim Crow set the stage for the 21st Century. The policy of entrenched racism has emanated from all branches of the United States government; from the days of the auction block and the recent United States walk out of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. The United States government has relentlessly held on to its white supremacist ideology.
The exploitation of African people in this country has taken many forms through the years. The centuries of chattel slavery laid the foundation of our relationship to America. From the sharecropping fields to the factories, African labor built the 'super power' that is the United States. In return, we have endured the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, systematic lynchings, chain gangs, plantation prisons, police torture and murder, poverty, miseducation, inadequate housing, unemployment, welfare WEP programs, ACS child kidnappings, voter discrimination, crack, heroin, Rockefeller drug laws, Political Prisoners, and the assassination of our leaders. However, we're still here!
The demand for reparations for African people is just and simple. It is simply an attempt to 'repair,' to 'make whole' the descendants of the victims of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, which was a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY! Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations. And our people still suffer from the vestiges of their enslavement and colonization.
We are going to the Capitol of the nation, built on slave labor, the rightful and only place to declare our human and legal right to Reparations...THEY OWE US!!!"
It is time to invoke the spirit of our ancestors, many of who sacrificed so much for the liberation of African people. We must work harder to build the Reparations Movement in America. We must not let the events of September 11th take our agenda off the table.
We must begin to spread the word through every venue available that the Millions For Reparations March, Protest, and Demonstration is ON!
(Dr. Worrill is the National Chairman of the National Black United Front / NBUF located at 12817 S. Ashland Ave., Fl. 1, Calumet Park, Ill. 60827, 708-389-9929, Fax 708-389-9819, E-Mail: nbufchi@allways.net, Web site: nbufront.org)
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