By Eusi Kwayana — This statement is a personal one intended to support opinions, especially in the Caribbean, that the costs of practical recovery from annual hurricanes should not fall, as they mainly do, on the victims of these natural disasters. This statement is a personal one intended to support opinions, especially in the on the victims of these natural disasters. As it is, the pain, the agony, the distress,…
By Robert Samuels, Washington Post — This city’s south side was devastated when a highway section went up. Now that there’s talk of taking it down, residents think they should be protected — and compensated. SYRACUSE, N.Y. — When Ryedell Davis heard the 1.5-mile stretch of elevated highway slicing through this city might be torn down, he had a vision about what could emerge from its dust. He could open…
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 (ACLU) and the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina. Charleston’s wealth was built and sustained for centuries on an economy that relied on slavery. Pictured here is the Old Slave Mart on Chalmers Street in downtown Charleston. By Caitlin…
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 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 out of the Civil War a wealthy man. His descendants, with land worth millions, are still part of Mobile society’s upper crust. The people whom Meaher enslaved, however, emerged from the war with freedom but little else. Census forms that…
“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 DeCandia, Center for Humans and Nature — I am a person of European descent living on occupied Leni Lenape territory, in the so-called Hudson Valley of New York State. For thirty-three years, I have moved through this world as a…
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…
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