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John Conyers: U.S. Owes Slavery Reparations

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The left-wing Democrat who will become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if his party wins back Congress in November wants to hold full-blown congressional hearings on whether the government should pay black Americans reparations for slavery.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers has attracted attention in recent months for his House resolution calling for an impeachment investigation against President Bush.

But another Conyers cause célèbre is reparations, which he's been advocating since 1989, when he first introduced legislation to establish what he calls "The Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African American Act" (H.R. 40).

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In a press release posted to his official congressional Web site Conyers explains how he intends to handle the hot-button issue.

My bill does four things:

• It acknowledges the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery.

• It establishes a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves.

• It studies the impact of those forces on today's living African Americans.

• The commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.

Conyers says:

"I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the forty acres and a mule that the United States initially promised freed slaves. This unfulfilled promise and the serious devastation that slavery had on African-American lives has never been officially recognized by the United States Government. ... "

He goes on:

"Just as we've discussed the Holocaust, and Japanese interment [sic] camps, and to some extent the devastation that the colonists inflicted upon the Indians, we must talk about slavery and its continued effects."

Though Conyers re-introduces his reparations resolution every year, would-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has never indicated whether she'd back the controversial proposal.

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