I will scatter them, and then I will gather them: Deuteronomy 4:27; 28:64; 32:26; Isaiah 11:12;

Jeremiah 23:8

REPARATIONS NOW IN OUR LIFETIME!

N E W S L E T T E R…….#13

JANUARY 2001

“Take direct action against the U.S. government!” Dr. Robert Brock

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GIVE POWER AND MEANING TO

THE REPARATIONS MASS MOVEMENT

GIVE OF YOURSELF!

Note from the REPNOW Newsletter Editor:

Well, now, after one long and sensational roller coaster ride, the United States finally has a very controversial president – President Elect George W. Bush. And this is to the dismay of many an African American who cannot accept the election results. There is no question that this Election 2000 year will go down in history as the most controversial of all times and for many reasons some of which are yet to be disclosed and/or revealed.

The prolonged determination for a new president made the U.S. appear like a small potato to the entire World, and the jokes were and still are endless. Also, Blacks and other people of color will never forget this Election 2000 year because they feel they have been cheated – first, because their votes weren’t tallied, and second, because their candidate did not win the election. While recently watching members of the Black Caucus exhibit their concerns for the voting fiasco in Florida, I was disturbed that they don’t realize that nothing they say or do will change the election results.

I learned a long time ago, that elected presidents to the U.S. do not serve descendants of Slaves. They serve the dominant race – White Folks. Vice-President Al Gore was in office for eight years, and I cannot tell you one thing he has done to better the conditions under which Blacks and other people of color must live in this country. A most rude wake up call for us was President Clinton’s statement that he doesn’t know why Blacks support him. (Read The Debt by Randall Robinson) I bet he knows why White Jews were most supportive of him!!! Think about it!

I also learned sometime ago that it wastes time to cry over spilled milk. And that is to say, we cannot do a darn thing about the results of Election 2000. Therefore, we, Blacks, must make the best of it. And it behooves us to encourage Representative John Conyers, the Black Caucus, and other members of the U.S. government to meet and discuss the matter of Reparations with the President Elect – very soon to be President of the United States.

President Elect George W. Bush WILL RUN AGAIN in the next presidential election, and he does not want to meet the same close and debatable election. He will need the Black and Latino vote. Therefore, it behooves him to hear our concerns if he wants to grace the White House for eight years. Reparations must be high on his list of matters to discuss and resolve, and it is up to us to place it on his agenda.

Make the best of this Election 2000 by using wisdom to deal with the issue at hand. We will get our Reparations, and it might be under another banner. However, REPARATIONS, by any other name, WILL MANIFEST, as this will be the only way that justice can be served for the inhumane and merciless African Slave Trade and for the pain and suffering we continue to endure as a result of this heinous crime against Black Humanity. If Whites today have a legacy from the enslavement of Blacks, then so also should the descendants of Slaves.

As I meet and speak with different ones, I urge them to read the REPNOW Newsletters for enlightenment concerning Reparations and justice for the Slave Trade. I am so very grateful and appreciative to all who continue to keep the Reparations issue alive.

There are many interesting articles in this issue of the REPNOW Newsletter. Therefore, be sure to peruse the entire publication. And by all means do read the very interesting article by Marie Roberts, a White woman, in support of Reparations for Descendants of Slaves. If there were more people like her, there would be no need for this fight for Reparations, as the government would have corrected the ills and the discrimination resulting from Slavery a long time ago. And those of us who choose to relocate would have our requests honored.

I am learning that more and more individuals are excited about Reparations and are interested in learning more. I just started selling Reparations buttons and am doing considerably very well. You’d be surprised at the people interested and quite pleased to wear these buttons in support of our fight for Reparations. I also encourage everyone seeking information on Reparations to read all the REPNOW Newsletters, and I hope that you are doing likewise: (http://www.thelawkeepers.org/ / click on Newsletter).

It wouldn’t hurt for us to have a mock trial for the barbaric African Slave Trade and for all the other inhumane atrocities committed against us that ensued. Let the trial air on National Television and call witnesses to the stand who yet live and once lived in the South, as well as others who experienced the worst of Jim Crow Laws and who know of first hand incidents involving Slavery in these United States. And let my eighty-five (85) year old father be first on the stand to share the nightmare he lived being Black while living in Mississippi. Let others also share their tales of race hatred while living in the northern States, as there wasn’t (and still isn’t) any peace for Black Peoples anywhere due to our being stigmatized by the African Slave Trade. We cannot permit the indignities and degradation our forefathers suffered and that we now suffer to be swept under the rug.

Unfortunately, I must admit, that not enough publicity is getting to the grassroots. Too many people still continue to tell me that they don’t hear anything at all about Reparations. Hence, we must work harder to bring even more awareness to this new thrust for REPARATIONS NOW IN OUR LIFETIME!

Tziona Yisrael, Editor

REPNOW Newsletter

[www.thelawkeepers.org]

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REPARATIONS – A FUNDAMENTAL SOLUTION

TO THE BLACK COMMUNITY’S PROBLEMS

By Attorney Dr. Robert L. Brock

President, The Self Determination Committee

The United States enslavement of Black People some 12 decades ago and
prior has powerful residual lingering effects some 12 decades later. It
has produced a whole damaged people. Many would be surprised to know the
overwhelming patterns of behavior and activities in TODAY’S Blacks that stem directly from slavery.

The U.S. Black collective lost their ability to function and maneuver
independently. Slavery took it. Today, the masses of Black People still
work for White People via White-owned companies and corporations. This
was the exact “Black-White relationship” during chattel slavery: Black
folks working for White folks. This is not normal. And what is common
must never be mistaken for what is normal.

Black People must arise from this fallen state, and this money called
Reparations is the key. Reparations is a legal wealth paid to Black men,
women and children because of the damages done to them by slavery.

Reparations is the fundamental solution to many of the problems that
afflict the Black community. Reparations will counter “lack”. Reparations
will afford Black People the capital to implement their own ideas and
start their own businesses. Reparations will allow Black People the means
to produce jobs for their own children. Reparations will enable Black
People to develop the type of educational curriculum, schools and
universities that they deem necessary for their own children. Reparations
will afford Black People the opportunity to institute the type of
religious standard and training that they want from themselves and their
children. Reparations will free U.S. Blacks from the monthly worries of
paying for this and paying for that just to exist on Planet Earth.

Reparations is not something that Black People should run from, but rather should run toward it.

Attorney Dr. Robert L. Brock

P.O. Box 15288

Washington, D.C. 20003

Website: http://www.directblackaction.com/

Information is compliments of:

Black Power - Black Power
http://www.bcentral.com/listbot/tellme1

*********

[BRC-NEWS]

Volume 7, Issue 3 (Spring 2000)

THE CASE FOR UNITED STATES REPARATIONS

TO AFRICAN AMERICANS

Human Rights Brief

"Rep.a.ra.tions: Payment of a debt owed; the act of repairing a wrong or injury; to atone for wrongdoings; to make amends; to make one whole again; the payment of damages; to repair a nation; compensation in money, land, or materials for damages." --National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America

The political and juridical viability of reparations for descendants of enslaved black people is emerging as a highly contested concept in U.S. debates about justice and law. For decades, reparations have been an essential part of the international discourses of war and human rights. Even the United States has paid some reparations awards to Native nations. Today, Korean women seek reparations from the Japanese government as recompense for what amounted to sexual enslavement during World War II. And in addition to on-going suits against the German state, Holocaust survivors seek damages awards from corporations who enslaved them, banks who appropriated their funds, and insurance companies that refused to pay the life insurance claims of those murdered. Among the political mainstream in the United States, there is support for all of these reparations efforts. From newspaper op-eds to legislation, Americans have expressed their outrage about these immoral practices. California State Senator Tom Hayden wrote a law giving the state jurisdiction over claims stemming from World War II slave labor issues and extending the statute of limitations for filing such claims until 2010. Also, California, the sixth largest economy in the world, bars insurance companies who refused to pay or work to settle claims from doing business in the state. Within U.S. legal culture the language of economic rights and justice is persuasive and remedies seem natural.

Yet the U.S. government has refused to consider the need for domestic reparations to be paid for the labor and sexual slavery enforced in the United States for over two centuries. In contrast to Hayden's legislation, U.S. Representative John Conyers's bill H.R. 40, Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, introduced in 1993 to study the economic effects of slavery on black Americans has not made it out of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. At its initial vote, the bill received 28 cosponsors out of 435 members in the House of Representatives. Only ten of those co-sponsors were not black. Even as the United States demands other nations make moral and economic recompense for their actions, it declines to consider even the possibility of repairing its own history.

Since 1995, I have been involved in the black reparations effort, now well over a century old. I am a member of the three-year-old Reparations Litigation Committee convened by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. The chair of that committee, Adjoa Aiyetoro, and I have co-taught courses on litigating reparations at the Washington College of Law (WCL), and supervised students in independent research efforts. To the best of my knowledge, WCL is the only law school in the United States to offer such a course. What has emerged from our work is the conclusion that reparations for black Americans are warranted, justifiable, feasible, and fair.

The Case for Reparations

But what are reparations? What support do they find in law? How are they different from ordinary civil lawsuits and other civil rights remedies? Who awards them and who gets them? The framework of reparations is the duty to repair injury imposed on another. Unlike tort law, which addresses individual injury, in their conceptualization, reparations suits frame harm as group-based, even when the plaintiffs are individuals. Unlike criminal law, the harm is explicitly conceived of as against the group, not the state. Therefore, unlike criminal cases, the decision for bringing and shaping reparations lawsuits should lie with the victims, not with the state. In this sense, these suits should be organized at the grass-roots level and should be designed to recompense the harm as understood by communities, not decided by lawyers.

Another distinction is that the explicit function of reparations would be national atonement for the moral wrong and financial injuries of enslavement to black Americans. The primacy of atonement and morality differentiates such suits from ordinary civil suits that do not rest on these principles.

Finally, such suits emphasize the economic damage of enslavement to black Americans as serious and in need of national recognition and compensation. In this sense, they depart from other civil rights remedies that address post-slavery racial harms or rest on political or criminal remedies. Affirmative action, for instance, was a remedy to combat existing racism against blacks and the on-going effects of post-slavery racial apartheid. It did not compensate black people for slave labor, nor did it seek to. The point of reparations is not to "make blacks equal" or to ensure racial opportunities, like affirmative action. These are necessary and important goals, but other causes of action and frameworks of analysis address them better. Instead, the theory of domestic reparations is to identify and atone for economic injuries and harms that blacks as a group suffered under enslavement.

We have identified two distinct, but related judicial legal principles that justify and support reparations for black Americans: the equitable remedy of restitution for unjust enrichment and the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against badges and incidents of slavery. I will sketch the contours of the latter, as the former is not innovative in its inherent conception, although it is in its application.

Those who know American history are typically familiar with the political assaults and human rights depredations that enslaved people suffered. Enslaved people and many free blacks could not vote, serve on juries, or testify against whites in a court of law. In addition, the state authorized slaveholders to inflict with impunity horrific violence, including beatings that scarred and maimed, as well as rapes and other sexual coercion. In some instances, what would be criminal homicide if committed against a white went unpunished when done against an enslaved black. Literacy was denied in most states, and the slave-holding states employed a variety of mechanisms of varying brutality to suppress cultural, as well as political self-determination. These denials of bodily autonomy, citizenship, and dignity were the most visible deprivations.

But American enslavement also suppressed what I have called economic personality. Enslavement denied blacks the economic fruits of their 200 years of backbreaking labor. They could not make and enforce contracts. Property rights of use, ownership, or management did not follow from their market participation in the labor force, but were systematically denied by the state. The slave-holding states did not confer legal status on black families; through inheritance, the family is one of the primary institutions of wealth transfer, but black slaves were excluded from inter-generational wealth transfer, one of the centerpieces of Anglo-American culture. From the public sphere of market work to the intimate sphere of the family, black economic relationships were systematically and often brutally suppressed. For the first 250 years of American economic history, the law excluded blacks from the market in a society in which market participation was emerging as vital to personal, political, and social well being.

Furthermore, political and economic personality are closely intertwined. For blacks as for many other groups, the denial of full citizenship rights, such as voting and jury service, was also accompanied by circumscribed market rights: property, contract, inheritance, and labor. Denial of economic rights marked lesser citizenship, as did refusal at the ballot box. Reparations seek to remedy the suppression of over two centuries of black economic personality.

The Case Theory

Our primary theory of the case rests on the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the first in the trilogy of post-Civil War (1865-1870) amendments. Its better known sisters are the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; each of these spawned a compelling and contested twentieth century jurisprudence, on equal protection of law and voting rights respectively. The Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. It has two sections: "Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." The amendment was followed the next year by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which overruled the U.S. Supreme Court's denial of black citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. Significantly, the Civil Rights Act also authorized basic economic rights of property and contract in addition to access to courts. Each of the three amendments represented some effort to grant meaningful citizenship to blacks and to prevent Southern states from re-enslaving the race in new forms. But they have generated quite different jurisprudences. Although the Fourteenth Amendment is the best known, it is the Thirteenth Amendment that would best support a reparations cause of action.

All three amendments were fairly buried in the racial retrenchment following the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War. Despite congressional intent to ensure meaningful black citizenship, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the U.S. Supreme Court began that effort in earnest. During the years in which Chief Justice Warren presided over the Supreme Court (1953-1969), the Fourteenth Amendment emerged as the original engine for combating racial supremacy. The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal protection to all people before the law. The possibility of a fully racially liberatory interpretation was almost immediately limited, however, as the Court concluded that state action and discriminatory intent were required to trigger Fourteenth Amendment violations. Under this interpretation, the Fourteenth Amendment did not reach purely "private" acts-a jurisprudential category invented to contrast with the doctrine of state action-and mere racial inequity or racially biased acts did not constitute violations of the Fourteenth Amendment if invidious intent could not be proven. In its post-Warren incarnations, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to be a guarantee of color-blindness rather than racial equality. Under this conceptualization, white Americans as much as black Americans suffer the harms of race, although blacks were enslaved and systemically denied all meaningful rights, while whites held them in bondage.

The Thirteenth Amendment has promise both as a cause of action for reparations and as an intervention into the jurisprudence of color-blindness. The critical twentieth century case law that gave anti-discrimination content to the Thirteenth Amendment was Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer, Co., decided in 1968. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court resurrected the validity of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Thirteenth Amendment to conclude that a private actor's refusal to sell property to blacks violated federal civil rights law. The Jones decision focused on Section 2 of the amendment, noting that it specifically gave Congress power to end what the Court named the badges and vestiges of slavery. As legal scholar Douglas Colbert summarizes it in a Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article, the Court refused to limit its interpretation of the amendment to eliminating only the formal "auction block," while allowing black slavery to continue unimpeded in new forms.

Although the Jones decision focused on Section 2 of the Amendment, many legal scholars and judges have urged a restoration of the meaning of the first section, which is arguably the more significant one. Not only can Congress pass legislation to eliminate enslavement under Section 2, there is a state imperative to actively eliminate enslavement and its badges and incidents, as required in Section 1 of the amendment. Constitutional theorists have argued about the applicability of this theory in contexts ranging from labor, to forced prostitution, to children's rights, to abortion. Despite these creative and promising scholarly treatments, the Thirteenth Amendment remains an under-litigated doctrine and its ban on slavery an under-theorized concept in the struggle for racial justice.

A Jurisprudence of the Thirteenth Amendment

Developing Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment is potentially valuable to a reparations movement for several reasons. The theory of reparations is economic recompense from public and private actors for the on-going effects of black enslavement. Starting with the last point, unlike the Fourteenth Amendment, the Thirteenth offers a direct framework to connect contemporary economic depredations to blacks to the economic violence of slavery. This is important because people working at the grass-roots elements of the campaign conceptualize reparations as repairing slavery. Casting reparations as less than this, a remedy for an abstracted racism for instance, would most likely lose political support from the black community, and sympathetic non-blacks. A crucial part of what reparations remedies repair is the psychic damage done by state-inflicted or sanctioned injuries. This implicates the essential core of the U.S. legal system: wrongs done for which injury can be shown warrant recompense absent a compelling reason justifying the harm. Reparations are more than an economic payment; they are a deeply philosophical recognition of the humanity and worth of one wronged. A cause of action for reparations that does not explicitly incorporate slavery will almost certainly fail as a political and moral, as well as, a legal matter. And because it exists as an anti-slavery imperative, the Thirteenth Amendment does not exclude considerations of the on-going racial effects of enslavement. Slavery explicitly was a racial institution. In every state but Delaware, blacks were presumed at law to be slaves; proving one was legally white constituted a defense to slavery. The badges and incidents of slavery the Thirteenth Amendment opposes will overwhelmingly manifest in racial forms. The amendment does not prohibit, and even invites, analyses of racial harm.

The Thirteenth Amendment also diverges from the Fourteenth Amendment in the intent requirement. Unlike the latter, the Thirteenth Amendment has not been interpreted to require state action and intent to discriminate. Because its emphasis is on eliminating slavery and its relics, its jurisprudence recognizes that actors, private and public, can often unwittingly permit and perpetuate the customs and norms of slavery. Finally, the legislative history of the Thirteenth Amendment shows it was meant to protect economic rights as well as political rights. Douglas Colbert shows how the legislative debates explicitly were about, not just the end of servitude, but the extent of affirmative black rights. He concludes: "By linking present racial discrimination to this nation's history of slavery and apartheid, a Thirteenth Amendment analysis uniquely addresses existing racial and economic injustice as modern relics and badges of slavery." It thereby offers the perfect theory for awarding black reparations.

In summary, the Thirteenth Amendment did not end slavery with the understanding that racial economic castes would replace formal black slavery. To prevent this, the amendment calls for policies and state efforts to end the economic manifestations of black slavery, whether perpetuated by the state or a private individual, with or without invidious intent. The goal of the Thirteenth Amendment is to end the badges and incidents of slavery, not to engender color-blindness.

Preparation for Litigation

Certain legal procedural obstacles are to be anticipated, such as statute of limitations, laches, standing, and sovereign immunity. Some can be avoided with expert technical lawyering. Others will require more substantive strategies. But rather than being viewed as diversions, surmounting some of those barriers may enhance the political and judicial viability of the suit. For instance, the statute of limitations on bringing suit may appear daunting. Reparations are based on a harm stemming from slavery; the statute has run on practically every cause of action we have conceived. However, under the doctrine of continuing violation of rights, a statute of limitations may be tolled. Reparations lawyers must therefore identify deprivations of black economic personality under slavery that continued post-slavery, into this century.

While there are several potential causes of action, one of the primary ones involves denial of federal benefits. Not only were enslaved blacks unable to enforce property rights, but much of the massive homestead distributions of land in the American West during the 19th century excluded blacks, either directly or de facto. In addition, black veterans returning from World War II found patterns of earlier wars repeated when they received lesser benefits than did their white compatriots. In programs initiated for returning soldiers in the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as "the G.I. Bill," mortgage and school tuition benefits extended to black soldiers were devalued due to state endorsed and enforced segregation. There were far fewer places they could attend school or purchase housing. The schools they were able to attend and houses they were able to buy were less valuable because they were black institutions and neighborhoods, respectively, in an economy that valued whiteness. Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, the federal government took several steps to subsidize the construction of suburbs as racially segregated spaces, which simultaneously devalued black property in urban areas. Independent, private banks followed these federal guidelines, and blacks found themselves doubly squeezed into emerging ghettoes and out of suburbs being invented as white. Like the homestead acts, the G.I. bills for soldiers and the federal housing programs were moments of massive government subsidization that supported an emerging middle class. Blacks were excluded from this process and denied economic personality in ways that reflected the badges of slavery.

Another obstacle may be resolved by distinguishing legislative and judicial reparations awards. Standing is frequently raised as a procedural obstacle to judicial reparations; unlike comfort women and internment victims, American slaves and their direct heirs are no longer alive. Moreover, part of the invidiousness of slavery is that the system ripped apart black families, denying them the possibility of keeping records and genealogies. The fact that few blacks can trace their ancestry to specific enslaved persons is part of the injury of enslavement. One could approach this obstacle in two ways. One could utilize equitable principles to argue that one who actively destroys records cannot then invoke that absence to recuse its own legal liability. Another approach is to craft a series of causes of action, stemming from different continuing violations, similar to the strategy for statute of limitations. Because these actions will have to conform to the statute of limitations and the harms extend into this century, blacks today should be more able to identify and prove legal relationships with those affected. In the case of World War II veterans, many will still be alive today.

Conclusion

Putting racism into economic language is important. A significant effect of racism is its dissociation of blacks from markets and economics. Part of the reason so many Americans are skeptical of awarding reparations is the absence of a compelling discourse of black economic personality and desert of wealth. Reparations are recognition of the severe economic harm inflicted on blacks. Developing a reparations cause of action will yield several positive results. In defining the contours of a Thirteenth Amendment-based racial jurisprudence, it will turn the nation's attention toward what black slavery entailed, connect current acts, including private ones, to customs, norms, and history stemming from slavery and segregation, and comprehend slavery's on-going economic effects. When confronted with this history, then perhaps we can come to a national consensus on what the anti-slavery imperative of the Thirteenth Amendment means.

By Adrienne D. Davis

<davisad@email.unc.edu>

http://www.wcl.american.edu/PUB/humright/brief/v7i3/reparation.htm

For additional information, see the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America website at <http://www.ncobra.com>.

Adrienne D. Davis is a Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill.

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N’COBRA CALLS FOR APRIL 4^TH REPARATIONS WALK-OUT

FROM: Alvin Brown

RE: April 4th 2001

TIME: 1OAM-3PM

WALK-OUT OF SCHOOLS INCLUDING COLLEGES DEMANDING REPARATIONS NOW!

MARCH ON ALL GOVERNMENT OFFICES In Honor Of ROSA PARKS AND ALL COURAGEOUS Freedom Fighters Led by The TUPAC Generation

***

AND REPARATIONS

December 13, 2000

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people" Proverbs 14:34

All Praises to our Elohim, The Elohim of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, The Creator of the Universe

“Although we may never know with complete certainty the winner of this year’s election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear: It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as the impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

The latest presidential debacle should be a wakeup call to every African slave descendant in America that reparations are due. How can we not see that our participation in determining the direction of a government that has historically refused to address the wrongs committed against us as a people will never be to our benefit?

Once again, as in countless times in the past, African slave descendants have been political pawns used not to represent our interest, but the interest of a nation that has steadfastly refused to right the wrongs of the past. Justice is crying out.

The fact that not only both political parties refused to address the documented discrimination at the voting booth in Florida, and that the white-dominated media played down the significance of the voter disparities in largely African American precincts, proves that America does not and will not ever face up to the historical reality of its existence. Florida only brought to light the corruption of the voting process as it relates to Africans in America of slave descent that has existed all along.

The fact of the matter is that all along the democratic way of governing "for the people and by the People" never applied to African slave descendants. Yet, when they GAVE us "citizenship" and "civil rights," we proceeded to act as though we were now "included." Florida demonstrates that we are not "included," that going to the voting booth in reality does NOT COUNT especially when it comes to people of color.

Our ancestors were captured and brought to this country to be slaves and we never agreed to become Citizens of these United States. And no amount of amendments to a Constitution we played no part in adopting can force citizenship upon a people who never agreed to it. No wonder our vote was disregarded.

What amazes me is that they will go all the way back to the Rutherford presidential election in the 1800's and the history of how the electoral process developed, yet refuse to deal with the reality that the process had its beginnings during the physical bondage of our ancestors and some have the nerve to tell us slavery happened along time ago and we should leave the past alone.

America boasts itself as the greatest most powerful country in the world and the promoter of Democracy worldwide yet refuses to address the injustices of African slave descendants. The integrity of the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court of the United States is now in question. It brings into question "the "rule of Law" and "justice for all," "for the people and by the people". This is our wakeup call.

Law, righteousness, and justice are the issues that the Creator has placed before us.

We must continue to increase awareness to our plight as a people in this western hemisphere and the world that reparations are due. Until we strive to determine our own future and the future of our children, we will always be used to further the interest and agenda of our captors.

We are calling upon all of our people to keep the issue of reparations alive. In its effort to do so, The LawKeepers, Co., has made available, "Reparations Now In Our Lifetime," buttons that can be worn to increase awareness that reparations are due. http://www.inetmgrs.com/hebrew/law/index.html. These buttons are available for a nominal donation and represent our ongoing contribution to the reparations movement.

Please support our efforts in seeking Reparations Now, in our Lifetime and spread the word about Reparations for the African Slave Trade and support the fundraising, relocation efforts of The LawKeepers Co.

The LawKeepers. Co, a non-profit cultural organization of Hebrew Yisraelites who exalt the Creator of heaven and earth and the Law He gave to Moses for the children of Yisrael to follow, are seeking to return to the geographical location of our forefathers.

We believe as foretold in scripture, that the Nation of Yisrael was "scattered to the four corners of the earth". That the book of Deuteronomy describes the curses that befell them and their descendants, and we are those descendants.

We believe [and can prove] that the "African Slave Trade" and the slavery and bondage that resulted, is the final fulfillment of the book of Deuteronomy 28:64-68 and Chapter 30, that Yisrael would go into captivity in the lands of other nations to serve them. That we would call to mind our experiences and what is written in that book in the lands of our captivity, as we are doing this very day, and seek to return to YIHOVAH the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our forefathers, with our whole heart, soul and mind.

By Yehudah Benyamin Ben Yisrael

Yehudah Benyamin Ben Yisrael is the President of The Lawkeepers, Co., a TORAH based organization of Hebrew Yisraelites (not Jewish) of so-called African Descent (Blacks) scattered throughout the Diaspora, whose primary purpose is: to exalt, honor and give praise and glory to the Holy ONE of Yisrael YHWH; DO the Laws given to Moses to give to the children of Israel; and to return to the land of our forefathers, the land of Yisrael. Also, it is our purpose to assist and act as an advocate for like-minded Hebrew Yisraelites who have returned to their heritage, and who desire to return to their homeland, the land of our forefathers the land of Yisrael.

http://www.thelawkeepers.org

Yehudah@thelawkeepers.org

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people"

Proverbs 14:34

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NetWORKER Wayne Young sends us the article below, featuring longtime reparations activist Robert Brock.

As we enter the New Year, let's work together to heighten this righteous call for justice.

Peace and Power,

Ukali

***

PUTTING A PRICE ON SLAVERY’S LEGACY –

CALL FOR REPARATIONS BUILDS AS

BLACKS TALLY HISTORY’S TOLL

FITZGERALD, Ga. -- People begin trickling into the ramshackle recreation center an hour before the program is slated to begin, drawn by a promise that many of them believe speaks to the core of their existence as African Americans.

Leaning over the mismatched folding chairs, they buzz about the upcoming lecture. The speaker is Robert L. Brock, 75, a legal activist who for decades has been barnstorming the country spreading the word on reparations. He contends that black people are eligible for special tax rebates and, if they pay him $50 to fill out a claim form, they will one day collect a half-million dollars in compensation for all that slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination stole from African Americans.

The people eagerly awaiting Brock's message can hardly be called radicals. They labor on farms, in factories and at store counters, united in their belief that nothing shaped their often dour circumstances so much as the nation's history of slavery and racial discrimination. And although there is no assurance they will ever collect the promised $500,000, those who come to hear Brock deeply believe in the reparations quest.

"We're glad to be in America," said Gary Grant, a Pentecostal minister who helped arrange Brock's visit here. "But the white man has been taking advantage of the black man all our lives. Now, we want to get paid."

It is a refrain being sounded increasingly across the country, from this small city nestled amid the pine forests and cotton farms of southern Georgia to the Ivy-covered walls of Harvard University. The idea is catching on not just among those who could most use a financial windfall but also among civil rights groups, intellectuals and others who see reparations as the only way to get to the root of America's enduring racial problems.

For many years, any discussion of reparations to compensate the descendants of African slaves for 246 years of bondage and another century of legalized discrimination was dismissed. Many whites and blacks alike scoffed at the idea, reasoning that slavery is part of the nation's past that would only unleash new demons if it were resurrected.

But that attitude is slowly changing. At least 10 cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, have passed resolutions in the past two years urging federal hearings into the impact of slavery. Mainstream civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference regularly raise the issue. And last summer, the Democratic Party for the first time adopted a plank endorsing the idea of establishing a federal commission to study the lingering effects of slavery.

*** Legal Team Gathers ***

A high-powered group of lawyers, including Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogeltree Jr., Alexander J. Pires Jr., who won a $1 billion discrimination suit on behalf of black farmers, and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., have been meeting to plot strategy for a possible class-action lawsuit seeking reparations.

"There is a lot more happening around this issue now than ever," said Greg Moore, chief of staff for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who since 1989 repeatedly has sponsored legislation urging a federal study of slavery and its contemporary impact. "This used to be talked about only in isolated, black nationalist meetings. But that is not the case any more."

The surging interest in reparations parallels a heightened sensitivity to the horrors of slavery, in which as many as 6 million Africans perished in the journey to the Americas alone. There also is growing attention being paid to the huge economic bounty that slavery created for private companies and the nation as a whole.

Earlier this year, Aetna Inc. apologized for selling insurance policies that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when their slaves died. Last summer, the Hartford Courant printed a front-page apology for the profits it made from running ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaways. Next month, a new California law will require insurance companies to disclose any slave insurance policies they may have issued. The state also is requiring University of California officials to assemble a team of scholars to research the history of slavery and report how current California businesses benefited.

"As a result of the ravages of slavery and the racial strictures that followed it, blacks in America were consigned to this nation's economic bottom," TransAfrica president Randall Robinson said at a recent reparations conference held by the Washington lobbying group. "A yawning gap was opened. It has been a static gap since the Emancipation Proclamation. This condition can no longer be tolerated."

*** Slaves' Contributions ***

Proponents of reparations argue that the nation owes African Americans for their contributions to the nation's wealth and for the widespread discrimination they endured after slavery was abolished.

Black slaves helped to build white wealth as they toiled as unpaid stevedores, servants, craftsmen and farm hands across the South, and for many years, in the North as well. Slaves also built some of the nation's most hallowed symbols of freedom: They cut stone for the U.S. Capitol, cleared trees for the National Mall and laid the foundation for the White House.

The exploitation did not end with emancipation in 1865. For nearly a century after that, blacks legally were excluded from many opportunities that became the cornerstones for today's white middle-class. Segregated schools limited their educational choices, restrictive covenants barred them from many neighborhoods and rampant loan discrimination prevented them from financing houses and businesses.

In a book published this year, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," Robinson argues that slavery "produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended." The disproportionate numbers of blacks who are in prison, undereducated or living in poverty are all today's victims of slavery, he says.

*** 40 Acres and a Mule ***

Reparations for slavery have been discussed since the conclusion of the Civil War, when President Andrew Johnson reneged on Union Army Gen. William T. Sherman's promise to furnish former slaves with 40 acres and a mule. In the early 1900s, several bills were introduced in Congress to provide former slaves small payments and a pension, but they all failed.

Ironically, the movement is beginning to gain mainstream credibility even as there seems to be a growing sentiment that the nation has gone too far in extending opportunities to African Americans.

In ballot initiatives that won overwhelming white majorities, voters in California and Washington state have outlawed government-sponsored affirmative action programs that gave an edge to minorities when it came to public contracting, university admissions and government employment. Likewise, Florida last year ended many of its affirmative action programs. Liberal mayors in cities such as Atlanta and Baltimore have restructured programs that set aside small portions of government business for minority-run firms.

Opponents of reparations contend that the fledgling movement overlooks many important facts. First, they argue, reparations usually are paid to direct victims, as was the case when the U.S. government apologized and paid compensation to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Similarly, Holocaust survivors have received payments from the Germans. In addition, not all blacks were slaves, and an estimated 3,000 were slave owners.

Also, many immigrants not only came to the United States long after slavery ended, but they also were confronted with discrimination. Should they pay reparations, too? Or should they receive them?

And regardless of how much slave labor contributed to the nation's wealth, opponents say, blacks benefit from that wealth today. As a group, African Americans are the best educated, wealthiest blacks on the planet.

"This movement is counterproductive because it fixates African Americans on their victim status," says Myron Magnet, whose book "The Dream and the Nightmare" argues that poor minorities suffer more from cultural problems than societal ones. "I think that what blacks most need now is not to be shackled to the past, but to recognize that this is a society and an economy which is filled with opportunity for them and for everybody."

None of this dissuades reparations advocates. "The point is that there has been a series of arrangements, slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, all of which were mechanisms that had the effect of transferring money from blacks as a class to whites as a class," said Richard America, a Georgetown University economist who has written two books calling for reparations. "Even folks who came to this country in the last 100 years or so had an advantage in that their whiteness was an asset in the marketplace."

Although there is no agreement among proponents, America suggests that reparations take the form of grants for education, homes and black businesses. "This should go on for about two generations," he said. "If done right, this should just about do it."

As he has traveled the country, Brock has been promoting a compensation idea that is apparently striking a chord: a $500,000 check from the federal government. The figure is drawn from an unsuccessful lawsuit Brock filed against the U.S. government in 1965.

In the past couple of months alone, several thousand people have come to churches and community centers in places such as Waycross, Ga., and Lake Wales, Fla., to hear Brock's lectures. Many of them have paid $50 to fill out his claim forms, which other reparations advocates, including Conyers, have condemned as an obvious scam because there is no settlement to claim. Similarly, the IRS in October issued a statement cautioning African Americans against being "misled" by offers related to reparations. The statement said that the IRS has received "a growing number" of reparations claims this year, even though there is no such provision in tax law.

Brock is elusive about where he would file his claim forms or precisely what happens to the money he collects. In his talk, he indirectly addresses the charge, telling people that "slavery was the scam."

That is enough for the people who come to hear Brock, often by the hundreds. Here in Fitzgerald, the turnout is smaller than most, no more than 75 people, but the audience is enthusiastic.

"We all deserve reparations," offered April Wilson, 38, a homemaker, as she waited for the talk to begin. "There was something to this years ago. We just didn't know anything about it."

After he takes the stage, Brock goes on for two hours. He offers angry lines about white and Jewish slave traders and chilling stories about the rape and torture endured by slaves. When he turns to his decades-long battle for reparations, the crowd is riveted. Before he finishes speaking, people are filtering to a table in the back of the room, where they can pay their $50 and fill out his claim forms. No one seems particularly concerned that Brock has nowhere to file them or that the tax rebate he talks about does not exist.

"I have been hearing about this thing for a long time," Harold Coney, 50, a farm worker and logger said after buying a claim form. "I've been through hell making the white man rich. Now I want my money, interest and everything."

By Michael A. Fletcher

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 26, 2000; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50095-2000Dec25.html

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JOIN THE BLACK REPARATIONS MOVEMENT TODAY !

IT IS A WIN, WIN CASE FOR US!

Oscar L. Beard

*********

The Reparations Movement’s goals are as follows:

- Obtain Reparations from all countries that prospered from Black Slave Labor

Schedule Conferences, Marches, and Protests until the White Society apologizes and

compensates Descendants of the Slave Trade

- Speak at the United Nations on Reparations for Survivors of the Slave Trade in order

to gain International Support of all or most countries

- Demonstrate in front of the UN in Geneva for World Attention

- Establish an International Fund for Descendants of Slaves

- Target Companies that existed during the days of Slavery for Reparations, and if they

do not comply, then list them as “Unworthy” for Black patronage

- Seek support for Reparations from Companies that prosper off of Black Clients

- Seek Celebrity support for Reparations

- Involve the Media

- Make “Reparations” the buzz word for 2000

- Etc., etc., and by “any means necessary” within the Law

*********

IN SUPPORT OF REPARATIONS!

WAKE UP!

STAND UP!

STEP UP!

and DO SOMETHING IN SUPPORT OF REPARATIONS!

OR THERE CAN BE NO REAL - PEACE!

Ahna Tafari

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THE POLITICS AND MORALITY OF

BLACK REPARATIONS

FROM THE NEW YORK METRO BLACK RADICAL

The NY Metro Local Organizing Committee is

Working Hard to Build Massive Black Reparations Campaign

We are working to help build a National Reparations Campaign with other pro reparations organizations and individual which will culminate in a mobilization of several million Black people not only demanding reparations but actively engaged in the various efforts for its realization. We understand that a comprehensive reparations campaign embraces ALL of our sites of struggle and are of concern.

There are many reasons why this campaign should be for reparations, not the least of which is the announcement to the US and the world, that people of African descent are determined not to begin a new millennium with this
UNRESOLVED issue of compensation for past and present crimes against African Humanity.

The following are some of the rationale for a National Campaign for Reparations for people of African descent.

o A Reparations Campaign enjoys major support within our communities. It has the capacity to revitalize the Black Liberation Movement and reassert the leading role of the Black progressive forces.

o A Reparations Campaign is directed at the U.S. primarily (Federal and State governments) but also is directed at other Western Imperialist, Capitalist powers, corporations and individual families that have benefited from slavery as well. Foreign states who participated in the slave trade and slavery and the United Nations can still be used as part of an international Reparations strategy.

o A Reparations Campaign is fundamentally anti racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It attacks the very heart of these oppressive systems. We have never been compensated for the millions and millions of hours of unpaid labor conservatively estimated to be $97 trillion. Our ancestors were the backbone to the development of capitalism here in the US and throughout the rest of the world!

o A Reparations Campaign will include the demand to cancel the usury rates imposed upon us through killer mortgages and loan shark credit card interest rates.

o A Reparations Campaign will include a debt cancellation demand resonating throughout Africa and the Diaspora but also support the demand for reparations for African nations and the Diaspora.

o A Reparations Campaign is a powerful tool to educate the people of the U.S. and world societies about a brutal and savage system that is the basis for institutional racism and white supremacist oppression today. A system which inflicted on African people the most horrific form of cultural genocide (virtually complete destruction of historical memory, religion, language, traditions, ancestry) which continues to be the basis for the racist dehumanization and demonization of African people and other oppressed people of color.

o A Reparations Campaign will educate our people to the fact that our ancestral mothers have never been compensated for the reproduction of Human Capital (i.e. giving birth to an African child during slavery which meant that this child automatically had a “price value”) through rape/forced breeding. This most beastly form of slavery tried to humiliate and strip our ancestral mothers and fathers of their womanhood and manhood. The Black Woman has not only never been compensated for her brutal field work (and the tortuous work in the Master's house), but also her domestic chores within the slave quarters. In addition, a reparations Campaign will demand just compensation for the millions of Black children forced into horrific death inducing child labor from the age of 3 years.

o A Reparations Campaign will expose the additional injuries inflicted during slavery: the never ending war against free Blacks. This war was an anticipation of what would become of us during the post-slavery oppression period: rapes, lynchings, pogroms (state sanctioned and initiated murder) and anti-migration laws. For instance, this included 19th century anti-migration laws- often written into state constitutions- that were passed to stop African Americans from settling in Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon. This pattern of conscious legal exclusion denied our ancestors the possibility of benefiting from land grants made available for old and new members of these states. These are legal injuries that must be calculated into the reparations demands. We cannot look at the oppression and repression of our enslaved and "free" ancestors as two distinct realities. They were just two sides of the same racist and capitalist coins that fed the banks and wallets of the ruling classes of Europe and the Americas.

o A Reparations Campaign will educate our people to the fact that our ancestral fathers had to face systemic humiliating attempts to strip them of their manhood and dignity.

o A Reparations Campaign is a self-reliant movement; it is a nation-building campaign that allows Black people to address some of the fundamental issues confronting our survival today. It gives us the ability to create our very own self-determining institutions in developing jobs with a living wage, quality
affordable housing, healthcare and anti-racist education.

o A Reparations Campaign will include the fight to free all US political prisoners and prisoners of war as well as the battle to dismantle the racist prison industrial complex.

o A Reparations Campaign is the most powerful weapon that can be used against racism and the right-wing onslaught on affirmative action and political disenfranchisement (voting-while-Black).

o A Reparations Campaign will create a strategic bridge between Africa and the Diaspora. Blacks from Brazil, Costa Rica. Columbia, Honduras, and throughout the Caribbean are joining in the International Reparations Campaign.

o A Reparations Campaign is ultimately a political offensive. Issues such as homelessness, struggles for jobs, universal health care, decent affordable housing organizing against attacks on welfare, cutbacks on education, attacks on
affirmative action, anti - gay violence, discrimination based on sexual orientation, sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence, police brutality, racist and fascist attacks on the black community, amnesty for political prisoners, the genocidal incarceration of black youth, and the prison industrial complex, etc all can be connected to and enhanced by a Campaign for Reparations.

Given this political understanding, we in the NY Metro Black Radical Congress have developed a resolution that ORGANIZATIONS can sign onto supporting the work to fight for reparations. Included with each resolution is a fact sheet that answers the most commonly asked questions about Black Reparations.

Below are the documents. Feel free to duplicate them and distribute them. We would like to receive all signed resolutions so as we can keep track of this national campaign.

The Black Radical Congress

122 West 27^th Street

New York, NY 10001

Telephone # 212-242-4201

E-mail: ebontek@earthlink.net

***

REPARATIONS CAMPAIGN OF

THE BLACK RADICAL CONGRESS

RESOLUTIONS ON BLACK REPARATIONS

Whereas, People of African Descent in the US have a just claim to compensation because of both historical and present-day violations of human rights, the right to
self-determination, imposed citizenship and property rights; and…

Whereas, The vast majority of the United States and corporate wealth was
created by enslaved labor; and…

Whereas, The United States government and many of its corporations maintain their wealth today, in large part, through the continued exploitation of Black labor
by practices of job and wage discrimination; and…

Whereas, The United States government and some of its corporations also uphold their wealth through the maintenance of its large pool of millions of
surplus labor; and…

Whereas, The issue of Black Reparations must also be seen in the context of the global issues as they affect the African continent, the Caribbean, Central and South America, due to the kidnapping and robbing of Africa's human and natural
resources as well as the ruthless colonization of Africa and the Diaspora; and...

Whereas, Reparations has been raised by Black People since the 19th Century and throughout the 20th Century as a legal, legitimate and moral demand; and...

Whereas, The United States government supports the just compensation of the Jewish People for the genocidal acts of the German state, and compensation they gave the Japanese Americans who were, during World War II unjustly held in concentration camps throughout the US.

Therefore, be it resolved