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Adjoa Aiyetoro is Co-Chair of the National Council of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) Legal Commission.
Reparations is one of the most critical issues that African descendants are dealing with. It has implications for all groups of color who have been oppressed by the system. It has implications internationally as well. I will provide an overview of where we are in the movement for reparations and focus on the issues around legal strategies. I will also make some suggestions on how people can become involved in the movement for reparations for African descendants.
First, the movement for reparations is not a new movement. It is not something that just sprung up in the past few years, or maybe a decade ago. This movement pre-dated the end of slavery. There were demands for the end of slavery, and what David Walker, in his Appeal, 1 called the "repentance" of white people, the repentance of the enslavers, around the issue of slavery. Repentance means not just saying you're sorry, but being ready to do something about it.
There was, of course, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. I was raised with the thought that Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. What Abraham Lincoln actually did is free only those enslaved Africans in states that were rebelling against the Union. He freed them as a military, not a moral, necessity.
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was supposed to have provided freedom for Africans enslaved in the United States. I just wrote a chapter on the Thirteenth Amendment in the book, Women and the Constitution. 2 I titled it the "Unkept Promise of the Thirteenth Amendment," because in all of the litigation and the course of Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence, there has actually been a backtracking from full liberation as it relates to the enslaved Africans. The initial court said it was to eradicate not simply the bondage but all the vestiges of slavery. It went into the legislative history. We see a backtracking almost immediately after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
The history of slavery includes the formation in the 1890s of the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief and Bounty Association Pension, in Nashville, Tennessee. That organization was led by a black...