Reparations & Black Liberation
By Monica Moorehead
Lawsuits have been filed in New York and New Jersey
targeting corporations that profited from the slave trade. One,
a class action lawsuit filed in Brooklyn, N.Y., names three
companies: Fleet Boston Financial, Aetna and CSX.
Fleet Boston grew out of a bank established by a merchant
whose ships transported African slaves.
Aetna is an insurance company that encouraged slave owners
to insure human property--not to protect their slaves, but to
protect their investment in case of the slaves' deaths.
CSX emerged from another company that used slave labor to
build railroad lines.
The lawsuit estimates that the wealth in the United States
created by the unpaid wages of slave labor is today worth $1.5
trillion.
Deadria Farmer-Paellman is the lead plaintiff and initiator
of this suit. At a recent press conference, she stated, "My
grandfather always talked about the 40 acres and a mule we were
never given. These companies benefited from working, stealing
and breeding our ancestors, and they should not be able to
benefit from these horrendous acts."
Political activist and attorney Roger Wareham filed this
lawsuit on behalf of all African Americans. According to
Wareham, the lawsuit is not about demanding monetary
compensation for the descendants of African slaves in the U.S.
Any money won from the lawsuit would go to a collective fund to
help improve the housing, health care and education of African
Americans.
Wareham, on a recent interview on the Black-oriented WABC-TV
show "Like It Is," told host Gil Noble, "Our strength is that
the reparations lawsuit is part of a movement. The stronger the
movement, the greater the possibility of the success of the
suit. The most important thing is the success of the movement.
The suit is just another part of that river of struggle that we
are involved in."
The December 12th Movement and the National Black United
Front have called a "Millions for Reparations" national rally
to take place in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 17, the 115th
anniversary of Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey's birth.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America is
also building the demonstration.
Gov't fears exposure of slavery's legacy
The U.S. government has a despicable history of downplaying
and outright dismissing the issue of reparations. To grant
compensation to millions of descendants of African slaves would
expose the institutionalized racism that African Americans and
other peoples of color still suffer today.
The disproportionate number of African Americans populating
U.S. prisons is just one glaring example of the legacy of
slavery.
Congressional Black Caucus member John Conyers from Michigan
back in 1989 introduced bill HR 40, called "Commission to Study
Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act." Conyers said
that, "African slaves were not compensated for their labor.
More unclear, however, is what the effects and remnants of this
relationship have had on African Americans and our nation from
the time of emancipation through today. I chose the number of
the bill, 40, as a symbol of the 40 acres and a mule that the
United States initially promised freed slaves."
Conyers cited a number of objectives of the bill--including
setting up a commission that "would then make recommendations
to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm
inflicted on living African Americans."
Malcolm X also raised the question of reparations in a
speech on Nov. 23, 1964, in Paris. "If you are the son of a man
who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate,"
he said, "you have to pay off the debts that your father
incurred before he died. The only reason that the present
generation of white Americans are in a position of economic
strength ... is because their fathers worked our fathers for
over 400 years with no pay."
The reparations struggle began with the military defeat of
the Confederacy at the hands of the Union Army at the end of
the Civil War. The victorious Northern government promised the
newly freed slaves in the South "40 acres and a mule," in
effect acknowledging that brutal slave labor had not only
greatly enriched the coffers of the former slave masters but
also the emerging U.S. capitalist economy.
This just compensation for the freed people never came to
fruition due to the counter-revolution that destroyed
Reconstruction. In the Compromise of 1877, the Union Army
abandoned the freed slaves, who had tried to bring about real
social equality in the South by establishing their own
institutions for political empowerment and elevation of their
living and educational standards. For 10 years, the Union Army
had played the role of a buffer between this progressive,
democratic process and the former Confederate forces, who
regrouped during Reconstruction.
The counter-revolution then evolved into a bloody terrorist
campaign that drove the freed slaves to accept semi-slavery
conditions. Under sharecropping, which still exists today, the
former slaves went back to tilling the land of their former
owners. They weren't owned outright anymore, but had to work on
the plantations for slave wages.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court legally sanctioned
segregation as "separate but equal."
Reparations struggle has taken many forms
In his 1903 masterpiece, "The Souls of Black Folks," W.E.B.
Du Bois wrote, "the problem of the 20th century is the color
line." Many Black activists and writers have looked to Du
Bois's words for inspiration in the continuing fight for Black
liberation. Reparations became a very important focus in the
Black struggle for the right to self-determination.
The Back to Africa mass movement in the 1920s and 1930s, led
by the charismatic Marcus Garvey, was in its own way a demand
for reparations. When the Black Panther Party created free
breakfast programs and free access to clinics in the inner
cities during the 1960s, this was another unique call for
reparations. Affirmative action programs are also a form of
reparations.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the traditional civil
rights movement, made a plea for reparations in his 1964 book,
"Why We Can't Wait." He wrote, "No amount of gold could provide
an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation
of the Negro in America (or the Caribbean, or Brazil) down
through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent
(American) society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be
placed upon unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always
provided a remedy for the appropriation of one human being by
another. The law should be made to apply for American
(Caribbean and Brazilian) Negroes. The payment should be in the
form of a massive program by the government of special,
compensatory measures, which could be regarded as a settlement
in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such
measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation
based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated
interest. I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a
G.I. Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a
broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged,
our veterans of the long siege of denial."
The struggle for reparations received a tremendous boost at
the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa,
last fall. The call for reparations, along with equating
Zionism with racism, compelled the U.S. and Israeli governments
to withdraw their high-level delegations from the conference.
The Durban conference helped to provide worldwide exposure
about the long-term, devastating impact of Western imperialism
and colonialism on the developing countries.
Reprinted from the June 6, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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