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Demonstrators Want Slavery Reparations NewsMax StaffJews have been compensated for slave labor during World War Two, as have Japanese-Americans who suffered internment in U.S. camps - now it’s the turn of American Blacks, a group still suffering the aftermath of slavery, to receive reparations. That was the basic message of a demonstration held on the Mall in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. Although smaller than the tens-of-thousands of demonstrators advertised by organizers of "Millions for Reparations,” a few thousand largely black demonstrators rallied on behalf of compensation for slavery and decades of discrimination, according to a Reuters report. Estimated by police at about 2,000 to 3,000 strong, the demonstrators motored in from all parts of the United States to hear speakers such as activist Louis Farrakhan shout, "We need land for political independence; we need millions of acres. We need payment for 310 years of slavery, of destruction of our minds and the robbery of our culture.” Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, got the biggest rise from the crowd when he declared, "We cannot settle for some little jive token.” "This is the first time there has been a mass rally demanding reparations from the United States government,” Conrad Worrill, chairman of the National Black United Front, told the crowd. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., one of the many speakers through the course of the hot, muggy afternoon and a backer of legislation to study the effects of slavery, said, "We want reparations - not next century, not 10 years from now, but now. These wrongs can only be corrected in the House of Representatives; only Congress can do what we want now. All congressmen ought to be here today.” Supporters of the controversial reparations movement say that there have been recent important gains, referring to lawsuits filed against companies that allege wrongful profiteering from slavery. Furthermore, according to officials of the reparations movement, a lawsuit against the federal government is in the offing. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been lobbying for a federal study of the issue. Meanwhile, opponents of the reparations movement maintain that figuring out who would get what amount from whom is a nightmare having no easy resolution. One demonstrator summed up: "My great-great-grandmother was a slave in Florida, but I don’t expect we’re going to get any cash,” Suzanne Andersen, 51, a nurse from West Hempstead, N.Y., told the Washington Post.
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