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Reparations

Here you will find reparation news, articles and media posts

Formerly enslaved people preparing cotton for the gin on Smith’s plantation, Port Royal Island, South Carolina, 1861–1862

Making Good on the Broken Promise of Reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Katherine Franke — A bill calling for the federal government to “study and consider” how to provide reparations to African Americans for slavery has been introduced into every session of the US Congress for the last thirty years. The bill’s aim is “to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865.” Representative John Conyers, the primary sponsor of the…

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Titus Kaphar: Page 4 of Jefferson’s ‘Farm Book’…, 2018. That page of Jefferson’s ledger lists the names of enslaved people on his plantation at Monticello in January 1774.

How Proslavery Was the Constitution?

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Nicholas Guyatt — Were the Founding Fathers responsible for American slavery? William Lloyd Garrison, the celebrated abolitionist, certainly thought so. In an uncompromising address in Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1854, Garrison denounced the hypocrisy of a nation that declared that “all men are created equal” while holding nearly four million African-Americans in bondage. The US Constitution was hopelessly implicated in this terrible crime, Garrison claimed: it kept free…

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Prof Verene Shepherd, Vice Chair CARICOM Reparations Commission, speaking at the press conference.

CARICOM Reparations Commission Expands List of Countries to be Targeted for Reparations

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

(Issued on behalf of the CARICOM Reparations Commission) This announcement was made by the Vice-Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), Prof Verene Shepherd at a press conference held at the Regional Headquarters of The University of the West Indies (UWI) on June 10. She also revealed that the CRC was in the process of preparing a new round of letters of demand to be presented to additional countries identified…

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Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) sponsored HR 40, legislation to form a commission to study slavery reparations for African Americans.

Reparations for slavery to get a hearing in Congress

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Actor Danny Glover to testify House subcommittee will discuss issue on 19 June – ‘Juneteenth’ The topic of reparations for slavery is headed to Capitol Hill for its first hearing in more than a decade with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Danny Glover set to testify before a House of Representatives panel. 6.19.19 Event NAARC and ACLU Present a National Forum: Healing and Reconciliation, HR-40 and the…

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HR-40 and the African American Quest for Reparations, Part I — June 10th Edition of Vantage Point Radio

By HR 40 Congressional Hearing, Reparations, Vantage Point Radio, Video/Audio

RECORDED 6/10/19 — On this edition of Vantage Point Radio, the Professor Dr. Ron Daniels talks with Atty. Nkechi Taifa: The Taifa Group Consulting and National African American Reparations Commission – NAARC, Rubbie L. Hodge: Author of the poem Lift Ev’ry Voice and Scream: A Cry for Reparations and callers about HR-40 and the African American Quest for Reparations.

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Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback; detail from The Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan mapmaker Abraham Cresques, 1375

Africa’s Lost/Forgotten Kingdoms

By Reparations

By Howard W. French, NYR — There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up with. There are Disney cartoons that depict barely clothed African cannibals merrily stewing their victims in giant pots suspended above pit fires.1 Among intellectuals there is…

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Cardrian Massey, left, and Kate Chandler hold hands in a circle with others from Atlanta, Ga., before joining demonstrators for reparations for slavery on the National Mall in Washington.

Reparations will pave the way to justice for all

By Editors' Choice, Reparations

By Cepeda, Roanoke Times — CHICAGO — In the spring of 1995, I sat in a stuffy classroom studying “Literary History of England, from Beowulf to 1800,” while overlooking Southern Illinois University’s iconic Pulliam Clock Tower. I was on the verge of boiling over. Somehow, the lone Hispanic (me and the lone black person in the tiny class were engaged in a shouting match over reparations for slavery. Rep. John…

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Kamala Harris

What Do 2020 Candidates Mean When They Say ‘Reparations’?

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

Even highly informed commentators lack a shared understanding of what the word means. By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic — Earlier this year, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and other Democratic presidential aspirants began speaking positively about reparations, in contrast to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who opposed the policy. Just 26 percent of voters favor reparations in polls. In the telling of The New York Times, this shift is due to the fact…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

By Editors' Choice, Reparations, Video/Audio

By Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker — When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to treat reparations as a punch line is to misunderstand their purpose. He argues that reparations…

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