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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kumar who wrote (26454)	1/26/2004 10:52:42 PM
From: gamesmistress	Respond to of 793838

The "logic" ? You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, according to the victimology crew. Notice that one lawyer said: "These suits are not going to go away. If this society is going to go forward ... this will have to be decided in a courtroom," said Roger Wareham, a New York attorney who filed one of several lawsuits consolidated in Chicago on behalf of descendants of slaves. Translation: we haven't gotten anywhere in Congress so we're going to tie up companies in the courtroom until someone pays us a whole lot of money to go away.

To: kumar who wrote (26454)	1/27/2004 7:17:18 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793838

If, I as a recently naturalized US citizen, start a company, and I hire African American staff, I open myself up to this idea of "slavery reparation". I don't see how. Slavery reparations are aimed at companies that made money off of slaves prior to emancipation, not companies that hire African American citizens now. Am I missing something here?

To: kumar who wrote (26454)	1/27/2004 8:43:00 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 793838

Court defeat isn't the end of the attempted shakedown January 27, 2004 BY MARY MITCHELL SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Unsettled. That's how U.S. District Judge Charles R. Norgle's ruling left the reparations issue. Although the nine lawsuits seeking reparations for slavery were dismissed, Norgle's opinion didn't convince me that reparations is a dead issue. "It is well established that a plaintiff must show that he personally has suffered some actual or threatened injury as a result of the putatively illegal conduct of the defendant," Norgle reasoned on Page 26 of his opinion. "Plaintiffs cannot establish a personal injury by merely identifying tort victims and alleging a genealogical relationship." In an earlier interview with Chicago Sun-Times staffer Curtis Lawrence, the Rev. Hannah Jane Hurdle-Toomey, 71, one of the plaintiffs in the class action reparations suit, established a relationship as close as her own father. She is one of the few African Americans who can trace their roots back to slavery. Her father was born into slavery on the Hurdle plantation in North Carolina. At age 10, Andrew Jackson Hurdle was sold to another plantation in Texas. "What did my father think," Hurdle-Toomey told Lawrence, "just being a young kid and being snatched up like that?" Unlike many blacks, Hurdle-Toomey didn't have to depend on slave narratives and "Roots" to empathize with the plight of slaves. She could look to her own heart, a daughter's heart. All this raw emotion is sucked out of the courtroom when judges and lawyers give lip service to the immoral institution. In ruling that plaintiffs cannot bring claims over a century old, Norgle's opinion parrots the arguments of reparations critics. But he ignored the reality that it has taken that long for America to listen to the voices of those calling for reparations. Plaintiffs had to climb a mountain of bones to even get into a courtroom. Once there, they had to argue that predecessors of 18 corporations were "unjustly enriched through profits earned directly or indirectly from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." Yes, no slave is alive to testify that any of these companies were founded on the sweat of free labor. But we all know that plantations -- owned exclusively by whites --prospered when slaves were picking cotton and cutting sugar cane. "After working from dawn to sunset, the weary slaves then had to care for the livestock, put away tools, and cook their meals before the horn sounded bedtime in the quarters. During the cotton-picking season, the men sometimes ginned cotton until nine o'clock at night. For the hapless slaves on the sugar plantation, the work of boiling the sugar cane continued far into the night: they often worked eighteen hours a day during the harvest season; some sugar factories ran in shifts seven days and nights each week. The work seemed almost endless," wrote John W. Blassingame in The Slave Community. Those who are fighting for reparations will continue to climb the mountain. Because they know the laws that failed to protect slaves, and the laws that failed to compensate the descendants of slaves, is the same law that Norgle interprets. "The injury alleged cannot be 'conjectural or hypothetical,' Norgle reasoned. "While most would like to assume that they will be beneficiaries to their ancestors' wealth upon their demise, this is a mere assumption. Plaintiffs can only speculate that their ancestors' estates would have been passed on to them, and cannot say that they would have inherited their ancestors' lost pay." Surely, white landowners passed on their land to their sons and daughters. Why should it be conjectural or hypothetical to assume that had a slave been compensated during his or her lifetime for the back-breaking labor, that slave would not have tried to pass the wealth to descendants? "The most brutal aspect of slavery was the separation of families," according to Blassingame. "This was a haunting fear which made all of the slave's days miserable. [P]ractically all of the black autobiographers were touched by the tragedy. Death occurred too frequently in the master's house, creditors were too relentless in collecting their debts, the planter's reserves ran out too often, and the master longed too much for expensive items for the slave to escape the clutches of the slave trader. Nothing demonstrated his powerlessness as much as the slave's inability to prevent the forcible sale of his wife and children." Hurdle-Toomey, a woman of God, would not have expected Norgle to understand the debt owed, and she has come too far to let a judge stand in her way. Twenty years ago, reparations slumbered in the minds of most slave descendants. Then, only politically conscious men and women -- activists like Conrad Worrill, chairman of the National Black United Front -- demanded that the debt owed dead slaves be paid. Today, plaintiffs are putting flesh on the slaves' bones. Soon the bones will talk. suntimes.com