Here's the next civil war, brought to you by Johnnie Crookran and his band of tobacco litigationists:
US lawyers to sue for slavery reparations
thetimes.co.uk
FROM LAURA PEEK IN WASHINGTON
A TEAM of lawyers led by a Harvard professor is preparing to sue the US Government and surviving businesses that profited from slavery.
“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Charles Ogletree, leader of the Reparations Assessment Group, said. “We want a change in America. We want full recognition, and a remedy, of how slavery stigmatised, raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”
The group includes Johnnie Cochran, who defended O.J. Simpson; Alexander Pires Jr, who won a $1 billion settlement for black farmers who claimed discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture; and Richard Scruggs, who won a $368 billion dollar settlement for states against tobacco companies.
Their efforts are just one part of a growing lobby for reparations to be paid to black Americans descended from slaves. At least ten cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, have passed resolutions in the past two years urging federal hearings into the impact of slavery. Later this month a new California law will require insurance companies to disclose any policies they held covering losses incurred by slave-owners when slaves died. The state has also commissioned a team of academics to research the history of slavery and report how current California businesses benefited from it.
A local newspaper in Connecticut recently published a front-page apology for the profits it had made from advertisements for the sale of slaves.
“There is a lot more happening around this issue now than ever,” said a spokesman for the Democratic congressman John Conyers Jr, of Michigan, the most senior black member of the House of Representatives. “This used to be talked about only in isolated, black nationalist meetings. That is not the case anymore.”
Since 1989 Mr Conyers has sponsored legislation urging an official study of slavery and its impact. Campaigners point to the precedents set by reparation payments to American Indians and to Japanese-Americans held in internment camps during the war and the fact that Holocaust survivors will receive settlements from Germany and Switzerland.
Many campaigners argue that until reparations are awarded, the wounds of more than 240 years of slavery in America will never heal.
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I hope they opt to sue the african tribes who conquered and sold those slaves to whites, in addition to the Muslim slave traders.
And I hope that reparations received will be properly shared with the descendants of all Union soldiers who fought and died, not only to preserve the nation, but also to destroy slavery. |
