Unpaid dues

The question of reparations has finally been brought before America's courts. Gamal Nkrumah examines the implications
Few would deny that nearly 150 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, race relations still constitute a prickly political issue, and one with explosive international ramifications. Well in the past few weeks, the race question has been thrust to the head of America's legal agenda.
A sure test of democratic values is whether the law of the present can be used to redress the wrongs of the past. Such litigation, especially when used to defend the rights of minorities, legitimises and lends credibility to the democratic process. And this is how we should view the wide-ranging reparations lawsuits that recently appeared before US courts, brought with the aim of atoning for the savage legacy of slavery.
Last Tuesday, African-American lawyer and activist Deadrina Farmer-Paellmann filed a lawsuit against several prominent US corporations that she accuses of having profited from the enslavement of Africans in America. These firms include the insurer Aetna, the railroad company CSX and the financial services firm FleetBoston. She charges that these firms profited vastly, both directly and indirectly, from the institution of slavery.
The lawsuit marks a turning point in the way African-Americans settle their historic disputes. The notion of private bodies, rather than the state, paying monetary compensation or reparations for crimes against humanity is novel to the US. Instead of seeking restitution from the US government, activists have a new battleground: the adversarial forum of the courts, with corporations the target. Legally, activists point to the articles on "unjust enrichment," which allow cases to be brought against those who have made profits by harming others. African- American claimants insist that firms that profited from slavery have a moral obligation to support the descendants of the victims.
For all its flaws, African-Americans, from all walks of life, have seized on the reparations cause. "There will be many lawsuits to follow, and I am proud to be associated with Roger Warehan, the lead attorney in the [New York] case. Africans in America will help our brothers and sisters throughout the [Diaspora] to file similar lawsuits against companies, governments and the descendants of those who benefited from the enslavement of our ancestors," said Ray Winbush the director of the Race Relations Institute at the historically black Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee.
Passions are riding high. "While several of us knew the lawsuit was inevitable, and that the first of many would be filed this month, when I actually read that it had indeed been filed, I wept," Winbush told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I wept because I knew that the beginning of justice for the millions of my ancestors had begun. Slavery was a crime against humanity that has remained unpunished for nearly six centuries and the lawsuit is going to begin a global public education campaign about the horrific crimes against my people," Winbush explained.
Many African-Americans now link the current struggle against the legacy of slavery to the struggle for African emancipation and economic betterment in the tradition of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association movement, which attracted millions of African- Americans during the years of depression in the 1920s.
"I also know that the lawsuits, more than any other movement since Marcus Garvey, will begin to unite Africans in the [Diaspora] over what happened to all of us. Already in the US, Africans are talking about their common ancestry of slavery and colonialism and how the lawsuits will create networks of steel among us. Like Garvey's movement, [the lawsuits] will force Africans all over the world to examine how the economic, psychological and cultural exploitation of our ancestors is linked and so requires a common strategy to advance our interests and address our concerns," said Winbush.
African-American bodies across the country have answered the call. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), the largest and oldest African- American organisation in the US, fully backs the cause of reparations and The Nation of Islam and black churches have been at the forefront of the struggle.
In Congress, too, the fight for reparations continues apace, in spite of the seeming intransigence of the overwhelmingly white legislature on this emotive subject. Since 1989, representative John Conyers has slogged away in a thankless campaign to introduce a bill urging a serious debate on reparations. Needless to say his arguments have fallen on deaf ears.
Slavery itself, as an institution, is not in the dock. As a system designed for ruthlessly exploiting black labour, it is firmly behind bars. This evil institution has been universally denounced and was most recently convicted at the United Nations- sponsored World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), convened in Durban, South Africa last year. What is new is that America's giant corporations -- and soon the country's leading private education institutions such as Yale University, the Harvard Law School and Brown University -- are being charged with profiting from the enslavement of Africans in America.
The cause has not only seized the imagination of African-Americans. In Africa itself, the Organisation for Africa Unity (OAU) has long cooperated with African Diaspora groups in the US to drum up support for reparations.
The first international conference on reparations was convened in Lagos in December 1990. The OAU set up a group of "Eminent Persons" in June 1992 to determine how to proceed and secure technical advisers. A second conference on reparations was convened in Abuja, Nigeria, in 1993 The Abuja Proclamation was issued at the end of that conference and national reparations committees were set up in Africa and the African diaspora.
To understand this phenomenon, many are looking to the historic roots of their grief. "Centuries of chattel slavery laid the foundation for our relationship with America. From sharecropping fields to the factories, African labour built the superpower that is the US," said Conrad Worrill of the National Black United Front (NBUF). "But the descendants of slave labourers profited nothing; rather, they were punished for their ancestors' vital contribution to America's economic well-being and prosperity," Worrill continued. "We have endured the terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan, systematic lynchings, chain- gangs, plantation prisons, police torture and murder, poverty, inadequate housing, unemployment, degrading welfare programmes, disfranchisement and voter-discrimination, crack, heroin, Rockefeller drug laws, political prisoners and the assassination of our leaders," he said.
Abdul Alkalimat, director of the African Studies department at the University of Toledo, Ohio, also looks to the roots. "Reparations are a timely and a just demand. One way to understand this fight is to put it in historical perspective. Slave labour produced the surplus necessary to launch an economy based on industrial production. Profits were locked through inheritance patterns and the continued existence of corporations who benefited from slavery. Now, at the end of the industrial era, and the beginning of the information age, if no correction is made, there will never be justice in the 21st century. We must clear up the evils of the 19th century and let the 21st century be different from the 20th," he told the Weekly.
But this is not just about the past. The impoverishment of the descendants of African slaves continues. The stark economic disparities between black and white in the US today are largely a result of 250 years of enslavement of blacks by America's white elite. Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, but its impact has long outlasted the diabolical system itself. The main beneficiaries of reparations ought to be the poorest and most socially marginalised of African-Americans who are the obvious descendants of the eight million Africans enslaved from 1619 to 1865 -- both in a biological and figurative sense of the word descendant.
One would think the lawsuit would attract wide attention, but it was barely mentioned in the US and Western media. Instead, the results of a study examining the role of the Swiss government and Swiss corporations in the Holocaust dominated the headlines. This is a shame, as the credibility of the entire Western media is on the line.
The 21-page lawsuit is only the latest development in the fight for reparations. The Federal Republic of Germany reached an agreement in 1952 with Israel for payment to the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. Austria made similar payments to Holocaust survivors. And, in the US, a total of $1.2 billion was paid to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.
Yet while the international legal precedent of monetary compensation for crimes committed against humanity has been firmly established, the entire issue of an estimated $300 billion in reparations for America's 40 million descendants of African slaves has not.
This is the first time that African-American reparations claims have been brought against companies as opposed to the government. Even though the case is unusual, indeed unprecedented in the history of the US, there are historic precedents in other parts of the world. Israeli and Jewish groups demanded and received reparations from German firms (including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Daimler Chrysler and Volkswagen), that allegedly exploited Nazi-era Jewish slave labour. All of the firms paid survivors of the Holocaust. Indeed a total of $4 billion in reparations has been paid to Holocaust survivors by German firms.
African-Americans, too, have now turned to the courts, largely because successive US governments have refused to heed their demands. Three years ago, the US government did consent to pay the largest US civil rights settlements -- possibly up to $2 billion in compensation to 20,000 black farmers for years of discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture. In this, as in other such similar cases, the US government voluntarily waived its immunity. It was a tacit acknowledgment by Washington that the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the US was a crime against humanity. But now at stake are the deplorable conditions of the descendants of African slaves. These individuals are alive and easily identifiable.
But some advocate different tactics. "The reparations movement should not, I believe, focus on the payment of individuals. The reparations movement must aim at undoing the damage where that damage has been most severe and where the history of race in America has left its most telling evidence. The legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in America is seen in well- documented racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, insurance, and other social goods. The reparations movement must, therefore, focus on the poorest of the poor," explains Charles J Ogletree, Jr, co-chairman of the Reparations Coordinating Committee. "It must finance social recovery for those stuck at the bottom, providing an opportunity comprehensively to address the problems of those who have not benefited from affirmative action."
However the activists proceed, the world will be watching. If the US is serious about building civil society and good governance in Africa, its own record must be without blemish. The developing world will look to see whether the US government and courts handle the challenge of slavery with justice and fairness. For if the US fails the victims of slavery within its own borders, how can it ever hope credibly to champion radical change abroad?
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor