Will President Obama Give In to Reparations?
By Robert Oliver
For decades, there have been black Americans, specifically descendants of slaves of African decent, who demanded reparations from the U.S. Government. They claim these reparations would be compensation for over 200 years of their ancestors’ unpaid labor. Now that the United States will have its first president of African decent, many blacks are hopeful that Barack Obama will be sensitive to their demands. However will President Obama give heed to their demands?
A group called the Los Angeles Reparations NOW-Promissory Note Coalition seeks to get President Obama’s attention by an open letter which invokes Dr. Martin Luther Kings’s speech in 1963. The letter says in part: “Being the First African-American or Black-adopted ‘son of the slaves’ in the White House as the Chief Executive of this nation, you can, after your inauguration, immediately by Executive Order implement the mechanism that will complete the unfinished business of all Congressional Civil Rights Acts, including Reparations, that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Promissory Note.
“This Promissory Note which evolved out of the administration of Republican-minded President Abraham Lincoln, whom you seek to emulate, was/is the contention in Dr. King’s 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. King declared that one hundred years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, ‘the Negro is still not free.’..As the new President of the U.S. ‘Bank of Justice,’ you will be obligated to pay due attention to the business of the ‘bad check’ that came back in 1963 ‘marked insufficient funds.’”
On Sunday March 8, the Coalition will stage a "Black Holocaust Slave Procession," with people role playing slaves and masters and “slave ships” parading from the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper building to Leimert Park in the for a "Slave Auction Block in America" rally.
The Coalition is also gathering signatures all across the United States for a petition, online and printed, to President Obama urging him to follow through on reparations, saying: “Before all else, with ‘the urgency of NOW is the time,’ it is morally imperative that you, as the first ‘one of us’ to be the Chief Executive Officer of the United States, execute the highest Order to ensure that America Keeps Its Promise to the emancipated slaves and their children.” The Coalition plans a cross-country caravan from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. in April 2009. At the White House, the Coalition will leave their petition for the President. Their goal is to gather 30 million signatures, representing the number of descendents of emancipated slaves and black freedmen.
The demand for reparations has had a long history in the United States. Professor Roy E. Finkenbine, Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archives at the University of Detroit Mercy commented: “As the generations of African Americans who had known bondage passed from the scene, their descendants, then flocking in ever larger numbers to America's urban centers, continued to push for reparations for slavery. Many black nationalists, especially followers of Marcus Garvey, Communists, and adherents to the Nation of Islam, generated calls for an all-black state or states in the South as a form of restitution to slavery's grandchildren. In 1962, ‘Queen Mother’ Audley Moore of Harlem, a former Garveyite, even presented pro-reparations petitions bearing a million signatures to President John F. Kennedy. During the era of the Civil Rights Movement, a range of African American leaders and organizations called for reparations, including Martin Luther King (the “Promissory Note” – Ed.), Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Republic of New Africa, and especially James Forman, whose ‘Black Manifesto’ (1969) shocked white Americans by demanding $500 million from mainstream churches and synagogues to be directed into black economic development.”
Randall Robinson, black author and former head of Transafrica, in his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks says: “(W)hite Americans can begin making reparations for slavery and the century of de jure racial discrimination that followed with monetary restitution, educational programs, and the kinds of equal opportunities that will ensure the social and economic success of all citizens.”
Recently, a “corporate restitution” movement was started to hold Corporate America accountable for past involvement in slavery. In 2002, descendents of slaves filled nine federal lawsuits against several corporations in different industries. These suits claimed that the companies or their predecessors benefited from the transatlantic slave trade. The Business &Human Rights website says: “ In October 2002, these lawsuits were consolidated into one class-action lawsuit. In 2004, the court dismissed the claim but allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint. The plaintiffs submitted an amended complaint making claims of intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, civil rights violations due to the denial of property rights and consumer fraud…In May 2007, the plaintiffs petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear their appeal of the 2006 court of appeals decision. The Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs’ petition in October 2007, declining to hear the case.”
