
Cotton Harvest with dog lying in pile of cotton. Six pickers face toward the camera. On the far left is the presumed plantation owner holding still for Coovert’s exposure. Photo…
Here you will find reparation news, articles and media posts
Cotton Harvest with dog lying in pile of cotton. Six pickers face toward the camera. On the far left is the presumed plantation owner holding still for Coovert’s exposure. Photo…
By Walter Johnson — In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016) It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting. I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal…
The modern equivalent of £17bn was paid out to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. Some people believe we should be proud. By David Olusoga — It is hard to imagine why somebody at the Treasury thought that the subject of slavery was fertile territory from which they might harvest their weekly “surprising #FridayFact”. Just after lunchtime on 9 February the department’s Twitter page presented its third of a million followers with its latest offering. “Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes,” it trumpeted.
By Alex Carp — According to the surviving records, the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with the rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island (the estate, in a stroke of historical irony, was named Whitehall). The scholarship’s first recipient went on to found Dartmouth, and a later grantee…
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose otherwise. By Kathy Roberts Forde and Bryan Bowman, University of Massachusetts Amherst — The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity. The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color. But how did we get this system…
By Grace Laria and Emma Lux — Georgetown University should offer direct reparations to descendants of the 272 slaves sold in 1838 to validate the demands of African-American individuals affected…
Reparations at UChicago (RAUC) and UChicago for a Community Benefits Agreement hosted a teach-in with guest speakers this past Tuesday. The speakers drew connections between seeking a community benefits agreement (CBA) for the Obama Presidential Center and demanding reparations from the University for benefiting from slavery.
By Natalie Hopkinson — I awoke each morning dead tired, and often parched. I was going to the restroom constantly. My doctor did some blood work and delivered the dreaded news: My A1C levels were in the danger zone. Like 1 in 3 Americans, up to 90 percent of whom don’t know it, I was what she called “prediabetic.” My body was struggling to process sugar. I had to eat less…
A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized—and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result. By Melinda D. Anderson — A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship—with students’ lying on the dark…
Barbados has made another step towards the goal of obtaining regional reparations. Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS) — This step comes as members of the island’s Reparations Task Force recently presented Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth, Stephen Lashley, with an official report on arguments in support of reparations, in his Ministry’s Conference Room at Sky Mall. After receiving the document, Lashley noted that he was very pleased to see…
Reparations was the focus of the 2018 Sparer Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (Penn Law). This video is of a panel discussion “Building the Ivory Tower: How…
Reparations was the focus of the 2018 Sparer Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (Penn Law). This video is of a panel discussion “The Caribbean Claim for Reparations…