[1848] in peace2
8/16-17 GET ON BUS to DC for Reparations for Slavery
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Tue Aug 13 00:15:34 2002
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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 00:15:18 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Let me know if you are planning to head to DC. Anton and I
are joining up with the March down there. (RCC is very close
to the end of the #1 bus line and an orange line T stop.)
In hope,
Aimee
PS if you can't make it for the march, try to watch "Get on the Bus"
by Spike Lee on Sat in honor of Marcus Garvey's Birthday! Hollywood
Video near City Hall has a copy.
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 17:39:31 -0700
Reply-to: ANSWERBoston@iacboston.org
Subject: 8/16-8/17 GET ON BUS to DC for Reparations for Slavery
GET ON THE BUS! Be in Washington, DC on August 17th to
Demand Reparations for the descendants of African slaves
here and worldwide!
*** Bus leaves Roxbury Community College Parking Lot
11:30 PM Friday August 16
Returns Saturday night/early Sunday morning
$45 round trip + $5 requested donation to subsidy fund
call 617-522-6626 and come by the International A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition office to get your ticket!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Boston
(Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)
http://www.iacboston.org/ANSWER
ANSWERboston@iacboston.org
31 Germania St (enter 284 Amory St near Stonybrook on Orange
line)
National Office: http://www.internationalanswer.org
Millions for Reparations: http://www.millionsforreparations.com
http://www.iacboston.org/directions
Slavery is a crime against humanity. There is no statute of
limitations. Justice demands reparations-the payment for
hundreds of years of unpaid labor. The government's promise
of 40 acres and a mule following the legal end of slavery
was never met. The wealth of this country was built on the
backs of African slave labor along with the theft of Indian
lands, low paid immigrant workers, bloody wars of expansion,
plunder and much more. The legacy of slavery continues today
to haunt this country in the form of institutionalized
racism in education, health care, housing and much more.
Racist police killings, youth incarcerations and beatings
continue to be epidemic. While no amount of monetary
compensation can fully redress the pain and suffering of the
descendants of slavery's victims, it is a step in the right
direction.
The struggle for reparations is a working class issue!
Divided we cannot win our fight for justice on the job or in
our communities for decent wages and working conditions. The
demand to be compensated for unpaid labor is just. Every
union activist would fight to see that any worker was paid
for even one hour of stolen wages. Why not fight for an
entire people who have been denied compensation for hundreds
of years.
For more information or bus tickets ($45 + $5 for subsidy
fund), please call the Boston ANSWER office at (617)
522-6626. We will be leaving Friday, August 16th at 11:30pm
from the Roxbury Community College Parking lot. Everybody
needs to come out in support of this just cause!
- -----
Reparations & Black Liberation
By Monica Moorehead
Lawsuits have been filed in New York and New Jersey
targeting corporations that profited from the slave trade.
One, a class action lawsuit filed in Brooklyn, N.Y., names
three companies: Fleet Boston Financial, Aetna and CSX.
Fleet Boston grew out of a bank established by a merchant
whose ships transported African slaves.
Aetna is an insurance company that encouraged slave owners
to insure human property--not to protect their slaves, but
to protect their investment in case of the slaves' deaths.
CSX emerged from another company that used slave labor to
build railroad lines.
The lawsuit estimates that the wealth in the United States
created by the unpaid wages of slave labor is today worth
$1.5 trillion.
Deadria Farmer-Paellman is the lead plaintiff and initiator
of this suit. At a recent press conference, she stated, "My
grandfather always talked about the 40 acres and a mule we
were never given. These companies benefited from working,
stealing and breeding our ancestors, and they should not be
able to benefit from these horrendous acts."
Political activist and attorney Roger Wareham filed this
lawsuit on behalf of all African Americans. According to
Wareham, the lawsuit is not about demanding monetary
compensation for the descendants of African slaves in the
U.S. Any money won from the lawsuit would go to a collective
fund to help improve the housing, health care and education
of African Americans.
Wareham, on a recent interview on the Black-oriented WABC-TV
show "Like It Is," told host Gil Noble, "Our strength is
that the reparations lawsuit is part of a movement. The
stronger the movement, the greater the possibility of the
success of the suit. The most important thing is the success
of the movement. The suit is just another part of that river
of struggle that we are involved in."
The December 12th Movement and the National Black United
Front have called a "Millions for Reparations" national
rally to take place in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 17, the
115th anniversary of Black nationalist leader Marcus
Garvey's birth. The National Coalition of Blacks for
Reparations in America is also building the demonstration.
Gov't fears exposure of slavery's legacy
The U.S. government has a despicable history of downplaying
and outright dismissing the issue of reparations. To grant
compensation to millions of descendants of African slaves
would expose the institutionalized racism that African
Americans and other peoples of color still suffer today.
The disproportionate number of African Americans populating
U.S. prisons is just one glaring example of the legacy of
slavery.
Congressional Black Caucus member John Conyers from Michigan
back in 1989 introduced bill HR 40, called "Commission to
Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act."
Conyers said that, "African slaves were not compensated for
their labor. More unclear, however, is what the effects and
remnants of this relationship have had on African Americans
and our nation from the time of emancipation through today.
I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the 40
acres and a mule that the United States initially promised
freed slaves."
Conyers cited a number of objectives of the bill--including
setting up a commission that "would then make
recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to
redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans."
Malcolm X also raised the question of reparations in a
speech on Nov. 23, 1964, in Paris. "If you are the son of a
man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's
estate," he said, "you have to pay off the debts that your
father incurred before he died. The only reason that the
present generation of white Americans are in a position of
economic strength ... is because their fathers worked our
fathers for over 400 years with no pay."
The reparations struggle began with the military defeat of
the Confederacy at the hands of the Union Army at the end of
the Civil War. The victorious Northern government promised
the newly freed slaves in the South "40 acres and a mule,"
in effect acknowledging that brutal slave labor had not only
greatly enriched the coffers of the former slave masters but
also the emerging U.S. capitalist economy.
This just compensation for the freed people never came to
fruition due to the counter-revolution that destroyed
Reconstruction. In the Compromise of 1877, the Union Army
abandoned the freed slaves, who had tried to bring about
real social equality in the South by establishing their own
institutions for political empowerment and elevation of
their living and educational standards. For 10 years, the
Union Army had played the role of a buffer between this
progressive, democratic process and the former Confederate
forces, who regrouped during Reconstruction.
The counter-revolution then evolved into a bloody terrorist
campaign that drove the freed slaves to accept semi-slavery
conditions. Under sharecropping, which still exists today,
the former slaves went back to tilling the land of their
former owners. They weren't owned outright anymore, but had
to work on the plantations for slave wages.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court legally sanctioned
segregation as "separate but equal."
Reparations struggle has taken many forms
In his 1903 masterpiece, "The Souls of Black Folks," W.E.B.
Du Bois wrote, "the problem of the 20th century is the color
line." Many Black activists and writers have looked to Du
Bois's words for inspiration in the continuing fight for
Black liberation. Reparations became a very important focus
in the Black struggle for the right to self-determination.
The Back to Africa mass movement in the 1920s and 1930s, led
by the charismatic Marcus Garvey, was in its own way a
demand for reparations. When the Black Panther Party created
free breakfast programs and free access to clinics in the
inner cities during the 1960s, this was another unique call
for reparations. Affirmative action programs are also a form
of reparations.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the traditional civil
rights movement, made a plea for reparations in his 1964
book, "Why We Can't Wait." He wrote, "No amount of gold
could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation
and humiliation of the Negro in America (or the Caribbean,
or Brazil) down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of
this affluent (American) society could meet the bill. Yet a
price can be placed upon unpaid wages. The ancient common
law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of
one human being by another. The law should be made to apply
for American (Caribbean and Brazilian) Negroes. The payment
should be in the form of a massive program by the government
of special, compensatory measures, which could be regarded
as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of
common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive
than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages
and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that
just as we granted a G.I. Bill of Rights to war veterans,
America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for
the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of
denial."
The struggle for reparations received a tremendous boost at
the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa,
last fall. The call for reparations, along with equating
Zionism with racism, compelled the U.S. and Israeli
governments to withdraw their high-level delegations from
the conference. The Durban conference helped to provide
worldwide exposure about the long-term, devastating impact
of Western imperialism and colonialism on the developing
countries.
------- End of Forwarded Message
