Moving Toward Reparations

The resurgence of the reparations movement is taking shape
with Black leaders, intellectuals
By Ronald Roach

In 1998, historically Black Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, Fla., answered the Clinton administration's call for colleges and universities to sponsor race relations discussions and events in support of President Clinton's National Conversation on Race initiative. The Bethune-Cookman program, conceived by Dr. Sheila Flemming, chairwoman of the college's social sciences division, brought together hundreds of Black and White citizens from Daytona and the surrounding counties to witness a mock trial to judge the legitimacy of the claim for Black American reparations.  
The jury of six Whites and six Blacks decided unanimously that reparations should be studied officially by the federal government and that they are justified for African Americans because of slavery's impact and legacy. The mock trial gave public expression to an idea long shunned by the government and misunderstood by the general public.
Nearly a century and a half after Union Army General William T. Sherman proposed granting "40 acres and a mule" to newly freed Black slaves in the waning days of the American Civil War, the issue of reparations is getting serious public scrutiny. Long considered an idea that only Black radical activists took seriously, the notion of reparations finds itself, at the dawn of the 21st century, firmly advocated by America's most influential Black leaders and intellectuals.
The movement's most visible leaders and advocates include human rights activist Randall Robinson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., Dr. Manning Marable of Columbia University, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, political scientist Dr. Ronald Walters, activist Dr. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, and others. Prominent legal figures, such as Ogletree and Johnnie Cochran, have joined forces on a reparations team that is planning lawsuits against corporations, localities, states and the federal government over slavery and past discrimination.
 To a great extent, Robinson, best known as the central figure in the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s and the former president of the TransAfrica advocacy organization, has captured center stage in the reparations movement. This is largely a result of his influential book The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks. The book, published in 1999, sparked considerable public debate on reparations. Robinson also is credited with convening the group of lawyers that includes Ogletree, Cochran and trial attorney/philanthropist Willie E. Gary. The group is known as the Reparations Coordinating Committee.
The resurgence of the movement among Black Americans is taking definitive shape as African American groups prepare to file lawsuits and scholars pursue research to fully document the present-day effects of slavery and post Civil War, segregation-era discrimination. Experts say the current reparations movement is stronger and deeper than ever before.
"More intellectuals are involved with the reparations movement than were the case with (other Black social movements)," says Dr. Ray Winbush, executive director of the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University.