Blacks’ movement intends to bring law suit in USA for payment of indemnity for 200 years of slavery

What started out as being an extremist movement has now gathered pace and has started to gain support from influential black figures in the USA. What the movement wants is the payment of an indemnity for the backwardness caused to the black population due to 200 years of slavery. This suit will also include European countries which took part in the trade of slaves to America, namely the United Kingdom/England, Spain, France, The Netherlands and Portugal. Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865 in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Leading black figures claim that the generally poorer standard of living in which Negroes live in the USA is the result of 200 years of slavery. Randall Robinson, author of the book “The Debt: What America owes to the Negroes”, said: “It is not surprising that the Negroes are all poorer than the whites. The gene of this poverty is slavery”. Influential figures like the three Harvard professors, Charles Ogletree, Henry Louis Gates and Christopher Height, the actor Danny Clover, the lawyer Johnnie Cochran, the ex-lawyer of Martin Luther King, J. Chestnutt and Democrat Party members, Tony Hall and John Conyers, are flocking to the cause, either as supporters for the payment of an indemnity, or for a public debate to be held on the issue. Any such case would be lengthy and very difficult to steer through the legal system, if indeed there are ever grounds for a suit to be brought. The United Kingdom, for example, did not exist at the time in question, so how to file the suit? The Portuguese Constitution has changed a number of times since then, and so on. Should the case ever reach the courts, surely it would do nothing to improve race relations in the USA or in the European countries involved, especially now that relations between blacks and whites are fortunately normalised practically all over the globe.

TIMOTHY BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.RU LISBON