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Reparations

Here you will find reparation news, articles and media posts

“Halting at Noon,” a wood engraving showing a slave drive through Virginia in the early nineteenth century, 1864

Slavery and the American University

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

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…

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Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida around 1915

Exploiting Black Labor After The Abolition Of Slavery

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

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…

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Ryan Jobson, Sharon Payne, and Caine Jordan discuss a community benefits agreement for the Obama Center and reparations from the University of Chicago.

Reparations and CBA Organizers Hold Teach-in

By Reparations

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.

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Sugar Slavery

The Bitter Truth About Big Sugar’s Caribbean Colonialism

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

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…

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The Lincoln Emancipation Statue, paid for by former enslaved people and erected in Washington, D.C., in 1876, has been criticized for representing the history of slavery from a paternalistic perspective.

What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

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…

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Caribbean Regional Reparations a Step Closer

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

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…

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Students Learn About Reparations During Youth Baton Relays

Students Learn About Reparations During Youth Baton Relays

By News & Current Affairs, Reparations

By Douglas Mcintosh — Students across the region are learning about the ills of slavery and the issues surrounding reparations through the CARICOM Reparations Youth Baton Relays. The relays have been staged in Barbados, Guyana, Suriname and St. Lucia, as well as in Antigua and Barbuda. The exchange of the baton from Antigua to Jamaica took place on October 10. The Jamaica leg was spearheaded by the National Council on Reparation (NCR), which falls under the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, in collaboration with the CARICOM Secretariat.

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Slave descendants, left to right: Sandra Green Thomas, Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, Zeita Kemp, Melissa Kemp, Karran Harper Royal and Joseph Steward speak at Georgetown University at an April 2017 gathering to announce atonements for the school's 19th century slavery history in Washington.((Linda Davidson, The Washington Post))

Descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown want more than symbolic atonement

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

By Jarvis DeBerry, The Times-Picayune — Imagine discovering that one of the world’s oldest and best candy companies was able to survive to become one of the world’s oldest and best because generations ago it sold as chattel almost 300 human beings, including your ancestors. You may find yourself impressed by the current management’s willingness to apologize for the sins of their predecessors, but what would you make of their idea…

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