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Advocacy for Reparations for Slavery
“Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of African Americans today.”
Without particularly endorsing any specific proposals, in September 2016, the United Nation’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent encouraged Congress to pass the H.R.40 Bill to study reparations proposals.
The report noted the legacy of racial inequality in the United States, explaining, “Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today.”
In 1993, the African Reparations Movement, ARM, was created after the declaration of the Abuja Proclamation at the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations.
The conference was convened by OAU, the Organization of African Unity, in association with the Government of Nigeria.
On 10 May 1993, a British Member of Parliament, Bernie Grant, brought a motion before the House of Commons, endorsing the Abuja Proclamation and saying that the proclamation
“calls upon the international community to recognize that the unprecedented moral debt owed to African people has yet to be paid, and urges all those countries who were enriched by enslavement and colonization to review the case for reparations to be paid to Africa and to Africans in the Diaspora; acknowledges the continuing painful economic and personal consequences of the exploitation of Africa and Africans in the Diaspora and the racism it has generated and supports the OAU as it intensifies its efforts to pursue the cause of reparations.”
The motion was co-sponsored by Bernie Grant, Tony Benn, Tony Banks, John Austin-Walker, Harry Barnes, and Gerry Bermingham. The motion drew support from forty-six (46) additional…