Popularity of Reparations for Slavery Growing

Popularity of Reparations for Slavery Growing

NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001

CHICAGO (UPI) – The sign in front of Christ Apostolic Church reads: "Black Reparations Now."

The church is in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side where you don't want to be after the sun sets. Woodlawn is littered by vacant lots and pockets of poverty, crime, unemployment and despair decades after the hopeful optimism of the '60s civil rights era faded into broken dreams in this part of town.

"It's starting here," said Dr. Leon Finney, national co-chair of the National Reparations Convention, which met Feb. 1-4 at the McCormick Place Exposition Center.

The veteran community organizer and other leaders want to see the reparations issue become more mainstream.

"This movement is a worldwide movement. It is not a new movement. This is an old movement. It is as old as slavery," Finney said.

Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman, organizer of the weekend convention, said reparations for slavery is the movement of the millennium.

Tillman, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sponsored City Council hearings last year that led Chicago in May to pass a resolution supporting reparations for the descendants of black slaves. Mayor Richard M. Daley gave the issue his support.

"It's not becoming a movement. It is a movement," Tillman told United Press International. "It is all over this country and the shocking thing about it is it is not just a black movement. She said white students at the University of Illinois-Chicago were doing research for reparations groups.

"It's a movement that's much greater. It's going to surprise some folks. … We have representation from all over this country."

Saturday morning's opening convention session was broadcast live on WVON-AM, a black-oriented talk radio station.

LeGrand Cleggh, city attorney for Compton, Calif., said he and Chicago attorney Lewis Meyers were doing legal research on every aspect of reparations.

"Large numbers of white men impregnated black women during slavery and abandoned their children. Now that's child support," said Cleggh, "whole generations who were never cared for." Compton last year passed a reparations resolution patterned after Chicago's.

About 80 organizers from around the nation met in closed session Sunday to develop plans to mobilize black communities and to forge a common reparations agenda.

Advocates, notably NCOBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the National Black United Front and the Republic of New Afrika, want trillions of dollars for the hundreds of years of free labor their ancestors provided and degradation they suffered. Some favor a lump-sum, while others say reparations are about more than money and should be part of initiatives to improve education, economic development, employment and housing.

"Reparations have got to mean we take responsibility for ourselves," Finney said.

Tillman did not discuss what form reparations should take or put a dollar figure on the cost.

"We have every region represented here," Tillman said. "We think we will be able to present to this government, to this country, a plan for reparations.

"There several schools of thought out here. There are people like [historian] Dr. Lerone Bennett who think we should have a Marshall Plan … and there others who think maybe we need money, others who think land, others say education, others who say 'give us a ticket out of here.' So there's all kind of thought. When you deal with a Marshall Plan you almost deal with all those things people are talking about."

Gen. George Marshall became U.S. secretary of state and in 1947 put together an economic plan to rebuild a Europe devastated by World War II. The United States sent about $13 billion in development aid, food and machinery to Europe before the plan ended in 1952.

Tillman said the free labor of blacks had built America.

"Had it not been for slaves, had it not been for my ancestors, people would not be coming to America," she said. "Black labor, white wealth."

She said the conference also discussed the whole psychological effect of slavery – "post-traumatic slavery syndrome" – affecting both blacks and whites.

"We can move this issue of reparations to the forefront," said Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., a former Black Panther leader and now a Baptist minister and U.S. congressman. "The reparations movement is a campaign for African-Americans that emerged 100 years ago when the newly freed slaves cried out for restitution for centuries of stolen labor, cultural degradation and dehumanization."

Rush said there are precedents for reparations, citing Germany's restitution to Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust and to slave laborers, and Australia's land grants to indigenous aborigines in 1976. In 1988, Japanese-Americans received $25,000 apiece and an apology from the U.S. government for their internment during World War II.

"So this isn't anything new. This is past historical precedent," he said.

Rush said reparations debates must move beyond academia and the halls of Congress, where Rep. John Conyers for years has sponsored a measure seeking national reparations hearings.

"This reparations movement has to move into our churches, to our barber shops, to our beauty shops. This reparations movement has to move into the agendas of everyday ordinary people," Rush said.

NCOBRA spokeswoman Erline Aripo said activists were preparing a class-action lawsuit for reparations against the federal government that would address the racial discrimination that persists today. Possible litigation will be discussed at the group's 12th Annual Reparations Convention June 22-24 at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La.

A poll on the About.com Web site shows only 13 percent of 5,778 people who responded support reparations for slavery while 86 percent did not and 1 percent were undecided.