2019 marks 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans on the shores of the Virginia Colony in 1619.i This began the American period of enslavementii of Africans and their descendants. NCOBRA has themed this anniversary – 400 Years of Terror: A Debt Still Owed.
From the very beginning, terror or psychic traumaiii was the reality for these perhaps 3 dozen stolen Africans. Not only was the Middle Passage iva terrifying experience of its own, but history tells us that the ship that brought these Africans here was not the ship they initially embarked upon. Nor was it just 36 of them that left Africa on that voyage. It was 350.
In route to its destination of Vera Cruz Mexico, the original ship – the San Juan Bautista, was met in the Gulf of Mexico by not one, but two, pirate ships – the White Lion and the Treasurer. At the end of the attack, the White Lion delivered all of its pirated cargo from the attack – “20 and odd Africans,” and the Treasurer, a “half dozen” of the 40 Africans it seized, before it sailed to Bermuda.
How did these sixty or so Africans make it upon these pirate ships, as the San Juan Batista was destroyed in the attack? Were they pulled from the sea? Were they forced by gunpoint or at the end of a sword.? Did they choose any vessel other than the one that was sinking and offering them certain death.? More importantly what happened to the nearly 300 others that were on the San Juan Bautista? Were they still chained together in death as they were in the frightening last months of their lives through the horrific Middle Passage?
This began our existence in what was to become America – a terror that has yet to cease and has yet to be redressed. This scene would be followed by 256 years of brutal enslavement of Africans and their descendants- treatment so inhumane -that Fredrick Douglass would characterize later as behavior “that would disgrace a nation of savages.”
The period of enslavement was followed by 100 years of legal apartheid, called Jim Crow Segregation – social separation backed by tremendous force, unjust laws and deadly violence. After the Civil War, former Confederate Army soldiers, officers and their offspring created highly organized terrorist groups that sprang up everywhere in America. Their reach went all the way to the White House. These groups – the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, White Citizen’s Council and their copycats were responsible for thousands of murders and assassinations, unjust imprisonment of tens of thousands, continued theft of labor, theft of millions of acres of land purchased by Blacks post-emancipation, and at least 4,743 recorded lynchings. This, in addition, to the destruction of scores of Black towns and communities and the banishment (racial cleansing) of their inhabitantsvi. In a matter of hours, these towns and communities, some with residents numbering in the thousands, were erased from existence. As throughout the period of enslavement, from fetuses to centenarians, no African life was spared the devastation of white hate. Today descendants of those perpetrators of white hatred defiantly fly the Confederate flag, still standing behind the terrorist intent.
After 1965 and the passing of civil rights laws, even though “segregation” ended, the violent intimidation and forcibly controlled limitations of the Black community did not.
Although white mob action declined, the deadly racial violence of the police remained steady and harsh. “Police brutality,” as it was named, sparked the creation of the Black Panthers Party for Self Defense and other Black nationalist groups. These groups rose to address the criminal behavior of police terrorism, and the social, political and economic domination and control that the police enforced. After the Panthers and others were illegally and unconstitutionally suppressed, police departments like the Chicago Police Department obtained, what amounted to, free license to terrorize African descendants through torture, forced confessions and murder of innocent men and womenvii. These summary executions continue to this day across America – Ayana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Mike Brown, Philando Castile, and Laquan McDonald, are just a few of the thousands who have met this fate post-1965.
Throughout this entire 400-year period, Africans and their descendants fought against this inhumanityviii and put forth demands that these crimes be redressed in the form of reparations through the means of securing freedom, land, repatriation, pensions, compensation, and restitution.
In the latter part of the 20th century international charges of genocide were levied twice by Blacks with the United Nations Human Rights Commission – once in 1957ix and again in 1997x. (In 2014 and 2016 a new generation of activists repeated the chargexi.) In 1969 James Foreman presented his Black Manifesto to the white Church community demanding resources for economic development and various structural and institutional acts of restitution. Mass-base organizations rose in the 1980s to create a grass roots demand for reparation – African National Reparation Organization ANRO and NCOBRA
– The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in American, that at one time had membership in the thousands.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, with assistance from NCOBRA, the December 12th Movement – D-12, and the National Black United Front – NBUF, led nearly 400 delegates to Durban South Africa to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances. Over 14,000 participants attended the conference including governmental delegations from 195 countries.
For the D-12 and NBUF-led delegation, reparations was their focusxii.
The conclusion of the conference reaffirmed some fundamental human rights for people of African descent – particularly the right to be repaired from criminal and injurious acts of one’s government. In the official outcome document of the Conferencexiii – the Governmental delegates declared that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, slavery, apartheid and colonialism were crimes against humanity. Further, that there was an economic basis to these crimes – that are evident to today – the injuring nations are wealthy and “the effects and persistence of these structures and practices have been among the factors contributing to lasting social and economic inequalities [poverty, underdevelopment, marginalization, social exclusion] in many parts of the world today.” And even further, that there is an obligation on the part of those nations that were enriched by these crimes to engage in redress for the inequities that exist and injuries caused.
This historical victory by those in the global reparations movement marked a new phase and new mode of reparations struggle by people of African descentxiv. Everywhere, those of us in the reparations struggle, began speaking the same language- that the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade, slavery, colonialism and apartheid, were not just bad/immoral acts- they were in fact crimes against humanity – “the most egregious crimes a government can commit or allowed to be committed against a civilian population.“ Globally we became aware that crimes against humanity have no jurisdictional statute of limitation. We became aware that the enormous economic theft is still accruing value to the nations and corporations that usurped the productive output from our ancestors; we also became aware that that the wealth that sits in the accounts of many extremely wealthy white westerners was also wealth passed down generationally from the original criminal usurpers; we all became clearly aware that the dysfunction that is seen in African and African descendant populations globally have their initial causation in the crimes committed against the humanity of their ancestors and that are compounded by continued harmful acts done today. We all further became aware since Durban, that the number one global issue for Africans and people of African descent world-wide is the repair from centuries of theft, abuses, terror and lies regarding our humanity and our primary and substantial contributions to the human family long before the advent of the West.
Now today, there is an uptick of public figures and others that are acknowledging either the need for reparations, or the rightness of reparations or both. This is good.
Particularly, 2020 presidential candidates Marianne Williams, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, in addition to former White House cabinet member, Julian Castro.xv Even Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, who was said to have blocked the congressional discussion of reparations during the Obama presidency, has now offered support for a reparations study.xvi
Where some err, however, is in their attempt to tells us – Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States – DAEUS, what form and to what extent reparations are and should be. They should support the demand for reparations. In addition, they should seek to understand the full extent of the crimes of enslavement, Jim Crow and post Jim Crow America, and how these crimes have benefited America and all non-Black citizens of America – including those who just arrived.
The forms and to what extent will be determined by us. This has already begun, in part, as Kamm Howard demonstrated in “21st Century Reparations Manifesto” xvii Also, this has begun with a series of national town hall meetings already held, and more to be scheduled, to introduce, assess and debate the Reparations 10 Point Programxviii compiled by the National African American Reparations Commission NAARC.
Secondly, these new supporters err, because, as sated earlier, we are in a new era of reparations activism – the Post Durban Era. It is in fact the work done post-Durban that has created a climate that demands that these presidential candidates (and others) make such pronouncements. Post Durban, it was NCOBRA’s keeping this issue alive after the New York Trade Towers attack that had the effect of silencing the reparations movement’s momentum that had been built in Durban. Then there were Caribbean political leaders through their group– the Caribbean Community of States (CARICOM) that created the CARICOM Reparations Commission CAR.. CAR has initiated the process to bring a case of crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court against the European nations that participated in the slave trade and slavery in the Caribbean. xixThe charges: native genocide and enslavement of Africans and African Descendants in the Caribbean islands.
Further, CAR sparked the creation of the National African American Reparation Commission NAARC. In 2015 NAARC held an international summit in New York attracting many of the CAR commissioners and delegates from 17 nations. NAARC inspired several of these groups to establish reparations commissions in the nations that they resided.
Black People Against Police Torture BPAPTxx called for a reparations campaign for the victims or police torture in Chicago. That success led to a new generation calling for reparations -culminating in the Movement for Black Lives adding Reparations as a major policy plank in their platformxxi. Ta-Nehisi Coates essay, A Case for Reparations had major significance in shaping this climate. Finally, we can never forget Congressman John Conyers’ longstanding perseverance to hold this government accountable, with the bill HR 40, The Commission to Study Reparations Proposals for African Americans Act, which he revised, at NAARC’s and N’COBRA’s suggestion and with their inputxxii, before his departure from Congress.
Again, it is from all these actions, and much, much, more that those who now speak have the presence to do so. But most are doing so from an extremely limited base of knowledge and action on where this movement and their current support rest. Post-Durban we look to international bodies and law to understand reparations and to base the structure of our claim.
see full documentation Reparations Means Full Repair