A free forum on reparations for slavery at the Gaillard Center on Nov. 2 will be hosted by the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), the American Civil Liberties Union…
By David Ragland, Melinda Salazar and Tarell Kyles — The campaign FOR Truth and Reparations hosted the Black Manifesto Revival in Atlanta’s historic Candler Park neighborhood this past May. The revival was in observance of the 50th anniversary of the Black Manifesto, which initially demanded $500 million in reparations (and later $3 billion) from Christian European American churches…
Two new books tell the stories of people kidnapped and sold into slavery. One of them sued successfully. By Eric Herschthal, The New Republic — When we think about slavery,…
Now, a search for descendants of the ‘weeping time.’ Historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and James Swanson are writing a new account of the notorious 1859 auction of 429 slaves and searching for descendants. By Michael E. Ruane, The Washington Post — It poured rain at the Georgia racetrack that Wednesday and Thursday, and the wind blew water into the covered grandstand where the merchandise was gathered for auction. Many…
Address by Prime Minister Gaston Browne during the Caribbean Reparations Commission Regional Symposium on Western Banking, Colonialism and Reparations, October 10, 2019. I bring no special expertise or unique perspective to the issue of reparations. However, I am here primarily to signify my personal commitment to the fight to achieve reparatory justice. Approximately five years ago, on October 14, 2014, at the second regional conference on reparations, held at…
By Thomas A. Foster, History News Network — Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men by Thomas A. Foster. Reprinted with permission from The University of Georgia Press. The promise of freedom may also have been used to entice enslaved men into sexual contact with white women. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, one court record of punishment meted out to a white woman and an enslaved man for…
By Lauren Lumpkin and Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post — A couple dozen Georgetown University students broke into a chant Thursday outside a meeting of the school’s board of directors, seeking to put pressure on the university to do more to redress historical wrongs. “Respect our vote! Respect our vote!” they called out. A student vote in April overwhelmingly called on Georgetown to create a fund to help descendants of…
By Jay Reeves, Associated Press — MOBILE, Ala. — Alabama steamship owner Timothy Meaher financed the last slave vessel that brought African captives to the United States, and he came…
Aesthetically, the antebellum plantations of the Old South are undeniably beautiful. But they’re built on human degradation. By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation — It was not a kind thought…
“Reparations are a framework for transformation, allowing people to do tomorrow what cannot be done today.” –Ed Whitfield, author and co-managing director of the Fund for Democratic Communities By Douglass…
By Justin Hansford, ACLU — It is common for nations where mass atrocities have taken place to engage in the process of reparation and repair. This process happened in Germany after the Holocaust, South Africa after apartheid, and here in the United States, forty years after the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. As a result, international human rights bodies have sought to lend their expertise to the process, often by…
Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, and accelerated with the transatlantic trade. Today, slave descendants still retain the stigma of their ancestors. By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, The New Yorker — On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste…