I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the
land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands,
has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for
that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands
and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything?
And then didn't the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars
and the rice that we made? . . . I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor.
--Bayley Wyatt, a freedman from Yorktown, Virginia in Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources
of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1993), p. 88.
The Case for Reparations is Based on Four
Premises:
- Millions of slaves and their descendants
are owed money for forced removal from their homeland in Africa;
- People of Afrikan descent require compensation
for the loss of their culture;
- People of Afrikan descent are owed for
the work their ancestors undertook for free;
- People of Afrikan descent deserve compensation
for the acts of segregation and discrimination, sanctioned by the countries, that
perpetuated long after slavery had been abolished.
As Robert Westley, Professor of Law at Tulane University
noted in 2000, “It’s not just the recently freed slaves who were harmed, who were
discriminated against, who were economically disenfranchised, but it was also their
children and their children’s children.”
Listed below are supportive documents, recommended
reading and letters from the Global Afrikan Congress.
Documents of Interest
Letters from the Global
Afrikan Congress
Recommended Reading
- Click here for a list of recommended literature.