Millions of Blacks Coming to DC for Reparations Rally

The Millions For Reparations Rally that will be held on August 17, 2002, the 115th birthday of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, in Washington, D.C. promises to be one of the most historic gatherings of African people in America.

Day-by-day, African people in America are becoming more familiar with the concept of reparations and what it means to our continued struggle in America for self-determination, liberation, independence, and freedom. Therefore, we must be clear that reparations means repair for the damages inflicted on a people or a nation.

In pursuit of this repair, we are conscious of the fact we must engage in the process of assuming responsibility for repairing ourselves that includes: changing the way we think, supporting our own institutions, particularly financially, supporting our families, supporting our own Black business enterprises, cleaning up our own communities, and changing the way we relate to, and think of, each other as a people. These are just a few of the internal repairs we must constantly work on.

In this connection, part of our internal repair is to struggle, fight, mobilize, and organize to demand external reparations from those governments, corporations, and institutions that are responsible for our historical and continuing state of oppression. Just as Jewish people proclaim “Never Forget,” African people should do no less.

We should “Never Forget” that “They Owe Us!” Part of our internal repair is to consciously understand that, “We Are Owed” and have a historic responsibility to demand reparations from those forces of white supremacy that continue to benefit from what they did to us that lingers on as part of the vestiges of our enslavement.

As we prepare for our participation in the Millions For Reparations Rally on August 17, 2002, we should be clear that They Owe Us For:

1. The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery - The United Nations World Conference Against Racism declared that the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery were Crimes Against Humanity. Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations.

2. Expropriation of Our Labor- For more than 250 years, we were forced to work for free. Our free labor was a major ingredient in the building of America and its wealth as a nation. Also, the thousands of white individuals and their families’ accumulated wealth that continues to benefit them as a result of our free labor.

3. Slave Code Laws- The slave owners developed their own codes of what they could do to enslaved African people in America that permeated throughout the emergence of this country. In many ways, informal slave codes exist today (racial profiling).

4. Destruction of the African Family- The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery had a devastating impact on destroying and dismantling African families.

5. Raping of African Women- Our capture and enslavement provided white men with the power to rape African women and girls by the thousands without reprisal.

6. Fugitive Slave Laws- When our enslaved ancestors resisted their enslavement and fled plantations, the government of this country sanctioned laws and policies that supported the capture and return of so-called runaway enslaved Africans. The Dred Scott Decision should be consulted to fully understand the implications of the Fugitive Slave Laws.

7. Colonizing of Our African Culture- Created systems by law and societal practices that forbade African people, in our captured state, to engage in our traditional spiritual cultural practices.

8. KKK Night Riders and Lynchings- The Ku Klux Klan was established in the late 1860s as a secret society whose mission was to exterminate, by any means necessary, African people in America. They were known to have been responsible for the lynching and murdering of thousands of African men, women, and children.

9. The 13th and 14th Constitutional Amendments- The abolishment of slavery was really a constitutional scam and the 14th Amendment that allegedly made African people citizens of America was imposed on us. We were never asked if we wanted to be citizens.

10. Denied Our 40 Acres and a Mule- We didn’t get it! It was sold down the river and the land was given to white confederate soldiers.

11. Jim Crow Laws- The Jim Crow Policies of America became the fabric and foundation of American society after the period of Reconstruction. Jim Crow Laws and Policies reinforced the foundation of white supremacy and Black inferiority in every aspect of American society.

12. Fighting and Dying In Imperialist and White Supremacist Wars- We fought and died for the freedoms of others and were denied our own freedoms and civil rights.

13. Assassination of Black Leaders- Malcolm X, Dr. King, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark to name a few.

14. COINTELPRO- This was a government program, established by the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, designed to destroy the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

15. Crack Epidemic- Research reveals the United States Government, through the CIA, targeted Black communities for the dispensing of Crack Cocaine.

16. Criminalizing Our Youth- It should be obvious that the aim of the Prison Industrial Complex is to Criminalize Our Youth to insure a young and viable work force for this multibillion-dollar industry.

17. Jailing of Freedom Fighters- The incarcerating of our Freedom Fighter thus, making them Political Prisoners.

18. & 19. Centuries of Mis-Education and Mental Atrocities- This has caused serious damage to our people, which continues to cause much mental confusion about our true reality as an African people in America and around the world.

I am sure, as we approach August 17, 2002, you can add to this humble list of why “They Owe Us!”

(Dr. Worrill is the National Chairman of the National Black United Front / NBUF located at 12817 S. Ashland Ave., Fl. 1, Calumet Park, IL, 60827, 708-389-9929, Fax 708-389-9819, E-Mail: nbufchi@allways.net, Website: nbufront.org)

Let me recall for you the circumstances under which the four poor little unarmed scum got what was coming to them while nine others were fortunate enough to merely be wounded or crippled. They got a good taste of what their generational moral superiors were up against in Vietnam but only a small taste.

The National Guardsmen in question had been called up weeks before and were separated from their families dealing with violence associated with a Teamsters' strike in Ohio in which snipers had been shooting at non-union truckers from overpasses. When Governor Jim Rhodes was ready to send them home, the sniveling leftist punks at Kent State burned their ROTC building to the ground. Rhodes apparently talked to Nixon and discussed appropriate response and decided to send in the National Guard.

The punks defied the National Guard as though their campus was some sort of legal sanctuary. I was a law student at the time in the northeast. For years, the campus Cong had escalated their tactics and gotten away with it again and again. Only Reagan met their pretentious defiance with naked force (over occupation of a soccer field at Berserkely by student radicals trying to substitute their judgment for that of the college trustees. They tangled with the wrong governor in Ohio in Jim Rhodes, a "moderate" Republican at the time.

The Scranton Commission and the other fashionable upper class and upper middle class clueless who Monday-morning quarterbacked their way into laying the blame on the guard to spare the feelings of the Americong and their clueless mommies and daddies and whitewashing the punks did what they were expected to do: blame the guys whose backsides were on the line. I will never believe other than that a string of salutes were set off by provacateurs in the crowd, triggering the National Guard to protect themselves by firing into the crowd.

As to Alison Krausse, sob, sob, if her mommy and daddy had taken the trouble to bring her up with civil behavior as one of her characteristics, maybe she wouldn't have been part of a crowd that marched on Guardsmen who were armed with rifles. Or if she had been brought up to be realistic. Or pragmatic or anything but suicidally revolutionary. Marching on armed Guardsmen left Guardsmen no choice but to flee (thankfully not likely) or protect themselves which is thankfully the option they chose. One can be sorry that the students shot at Kent State had no more sense than to be defiant little revolutionaries with nada to back them up and were therefore shot, without being sorry that, under the circumstances, they were shot.

There is very little whining and never was about students shot at a black college (Jackson State) in Mississippi the same day in larger numbers while IN THEIR DORMITORIES and not while threatening to overrun National Guardsmen, but Alison Krausse was so white (like me), so middle class (like me), so misguided. How could those fascist beasts kill poor Alison for playing revolutionary games???? How could she know that the Guard would take the students seriously? Her behavior and the behavior of the entire mob of spoiled little "revolutionaries" throwing a temper tantrum over their will being thwarted by the elected president of the United States was the functional equivalent of toddlers playing in the middle of a busy intertsate highway. The whining about their fate equals the negligent parents blaming motorists for the fate of the toddlers except that these were college students (after a fashion) and not toddlers.

Ignorance may well be bliss but I would suggest strongly to you that the ignorance is yours. I don't care if Alison Krausse or any of the other casualties was your sister or your friend. I had plenty of friends involved in similar activity, all their deaths would have done would have been to stir a bit of emotion in the nature of regret that I had not tried hard enough to protect them by convincing them to drop the fashionable Americong stupidity and criminality that got them shot.

I do notice that the student "revolution" died nationally that day on the field at Kent State so I guess that the campus Cong must have decided therefter that revolutionary role-playing was not worth the price if the adults were going to act like adults for a change.

There also was one fatality of a mid-30s math graduate student and veteran who was killed when the red punks blew up the math building at University of Wisconsin at Madison but no one is crying for him either. Just road kill of the "revolution."

The United States lost a war because of the aid and comfort rendered to its enemies by this trash. Real men with less fashionable lives were killed in Vietnam, suffered as POWs, were maimed and crippled for what this trash regarded as the "crime" of opposing their communist ambitions and those of their allies in Hanoi.

I only regret that their professors and role models like Hanoi Jane Fonda, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the rest of the leadership slime were not at the head of the crowd on the field at Kent State to take the first bullets. They stayed safe while moving Alison Krausse and the other wind tunnel marionettes around the field against the Guard. If you would care to answer me back, I'll tell you what I really think.

Africians themselves turned over their captured brothers. If there is an injustice, it is the failure of American Blacks to desire a better life for their left behind brethern. America's blacks should be demanding an end to the genocide in Africa by Africian's against Africian's.

Is it possible that African Blacks might have a similar arguement against American Blacks, e.g., a Class Action Lawsuite at the Hauge or Brussels in one of the World Courts for failure to act in a positive manner.American Blacks, while their forefathers were in numerous, but not in all instances, slaves they have their reward being in a Nation which does its best to encourage equality through US Government Programs; now if only Blacks could forget Slavery and get on with their lives - this kind of hatred is the same kind that fuels the conflicts and ethenic violence around the world.

And maybe if American Blacks stay at it long enough, they might just push the situation to the point where we have an ethenic war of our own in America. I never hear of Mexican's wanting to fight Whites, or Asians; but rather that Blacks have long history of violence against other groups - it is the Black leadership in America (like Afarat) who keeps a group of people in conflict with all other groups around them!

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