Activists take reparations demand to national mall

New Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Harris, Hamil

UpFront

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As far back as the 1960s, Detroit activist Ray Jenkins has been calling for reparations from the U.S. government to compensate African Americans for centuries of slavery. Over the years, he has been ridiculed by many and earned the name "Reparations Ray."

Meanwhile, the U.S. has paid reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, Native Americans whose land was stolen and inmates injured in the 1971 Attica prison uprising.

Today, Jenkins says, nearly four decades after he started raising the issue, African American leaders are seriously discussing reparations.

During the Millions for Reparations rally Aug. 17, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) called Jenkins to the stage, honoring the activist for keeping the cause alive.

"People used to laugh at me until the Japanese Americans got paid $1.2 billion - then they stopped laughing," Jenkins said.

The idea for the rally came from the Durban 400, a coalition of African American activists who traveled to Durban, South Africa, last year for the UN's World Conference Against Racism. The group, led by the National Black United Front (NBUF) of Chicago and the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based December 12th Movement, successfully lobbied delegates to support a statement that condemned modern slavery as a "crime against humanity" and expressed regret for past slavery. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) and the New Black Panther Party were also among the grass-roots organizations that supported the march.

The turnout was modest compared with the endless crowds that descended on the National Mall for the Million Man and Million Family marches. Rally organizers say more than 50,000 people from 66 cities gathered near the U.S. Capitol; the National Park Service declined to release a crowd estimate.

Every year since 1989, Conyers has introduced legislation that would establish a federal commission to determine the effects of slavery. His bill continues to languish, but Conyers said there is a groundswell of support.

"There is momentum building up all over," Conyers said. "There are Republican lawmakers talking about reparations. There are even White people talking about reparations."

A 1995 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that more than 50 percent of Whites questioned disagreed with reparations being paid out to victims of slavery, while the majority of the African Americans supported the idea.

One of the staunchest critics of Ii reparations has been the Washingtonbased Heritage Foundation, which held a forum on the eve of the rally during which several conservative scholars dismissed the idea.

Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the foundation, says reparations is not realistic because people would fight passionately against tax dollars being used for this purpose when there is evidence that some Blacks owned slaves, some Whites were indentured servants and many American citizens are immigrants from Africa who were never enslaved.

While interest in reparations appears to be growing in the African American community, there is no consensus among parties involved about what form compensation should take. Conrad Worrill, chairman of the NBUF, doesn't think cash payments are a viable option. The Reparations Coordinating Committee, a group co-chaired by Charles Ogletree Jr. and Randall Robinson whose prominent members include Johnnie Cochran, Johnetta B. Cole, Cornel West and Ronald Walters, is calling for a trust or scholarship fund to be made available to those slave descendants most in need.

Reparations supporters gained legal ground in March when a federal classaction suit was filed in New York alleging CSX Transportation, FleetBoston Financial and Aetna profited from slavery. At press time, additional suits against corporations were filed in New York and San Francisco. Simiar suits are expected in Illinois, Texas and Louisiana, according to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the lawyer who filed the first suit in March.

The six-hour rally attracted an older crowd of those who came of age during the Civil Rigths Movement. Younger poets and rappers made appearances onstage, expressing support for reparations. Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan was one of the few nationally known leaders who spoke at the rally.

"There is something owed to the descendants of slaves," said Farrakhan. "We are not crazy standing in a city laid out by a Black man in front of Capitol built by slaves and a White House built by slaves. It seems that America owes Black people for what they have endured."

- Hamil Harris