Top Lawyers Seek Slavery Reparations

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 4, 2000 | by John Elvin

Legal superstars who have won billions of dollars in court or defended celebrity clients have formed the Reparations Assessment Group to pursue monetary compensation and other remedies and recognition for the descendants of slaves. Targets of a prospective lawsuit may include federal and state governments as well as corporations and institutions said to have benefited from slave labor.

The group includes Johnnie Cochran of O.J. Simpson trial fame; Harvard University law professor Charles J. Ogletree; Alexander J. Pires Jr., who won a $1 billion settlement for black farmers in a discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Richard Scruggs, who won the $368.5 billion tobacco settlement; Dennis C. Sweet III, who won a $400 million settlement in the "phen-fen" diet-drug case; and Willie E. Gary, who won a $500 million judgment in a lawsuit against the world's largest funeral-home operators. Also involved is TransAfrica Forum President and activist Randall Robinson, author of the book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks.

"We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation," said Ogletree. "We want a change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own."