Payments and redistributing government-held land are likely suggestions National Reparations Convention organizers will include in a proposal to spur America to compensate descendants of African slaves.
A weekend convention at McCormick Place ended Sunday with a closed-door session among 80 activists and a pledge by organizers to forge their formal proposal in the coming weeks.
Once completed, organizers said, that document would be forwarded to local, national and international leaders–such as longtime reparations proponent U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.)–in the search for political support and solutions.
Specifics need to be hammered out, organizers said, but proposals from the National Reparations Convention may include grants to individuals and black economic development groups, tax exemptions for individuals or black-owned businesses, allocation of business licenses for blacks, and the redistribution of municipal, state and federally controlled property.
Organizers, including Chicago Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd), declined to address questions of how payment would work or the estimated cost.
“Details will be worked out,” said James Small, a New York City activist and vice president of the Organization of Afro-American Unity who will help draft the document. “We must have had 200 perspectives represented here. That’s what this was all about, to bring these ideas together.
“What we’ve achieved is a consensus of a broad base of our communities.”
Community discussions and even conventions about reparations are nothing new. Last year Chicago City Council hearings about reparations pushed the topic back onto news pages around the nation.
Even among black activists and academics supporting the idea, however, there is much debate over how payment for slave labor and years of post-slavery discrimination can best be achieved.
Chicago’s convention organizers set out to devise a plan. Past compensation proposals have included lump-sum payments, funding for social programs, college tuition breaks and tax breaks.
At least one high-profile reparations proponent–Conrad Worrill, executive director of the Chicago-based National Black United Front–skipped the gathering altogether.
Attendees emphasized that reparations are not just about lump-sum payments but ways in which America can better level the economic playing field that some advocates say the civil-rights movement, racial integration and affirmative action have failed to achieve.
“You might have a few blacks that have a decent income, but that’s not wealth,” said Claud Anderson, who heads a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and has authored several books, including “Black Labor, White Wealth.”
“Civil rights have failed. Affirmative action has been killed off,” said Anderson, who will help draft the group’s conclusions. “Where else do we have to go? There is nowhere for blacks to go without capital.”
Organizers noted that–after years of aid and land grants to Native Americans and settlements for Japanese citizens detained during World War II–the idea of reparations should not be foreign to America’s political leaders.
At Sunday’s closed session, several speakers, including Tillman, directed leaders to return to their communities and generate support for reparations through public meetings, conventions and other public events, according to those in attendance.
As members filed out, Tillman declared the conference–which drew several hundred people from across the country–a success.
“We are so blessed to have people spread out all over the United States. That’s the power,” she said. “Representatives from every region have given us this mandate.”
