The Case For Black Reparations
And The City that Care Forgot “East New Orleans”
BlackProf
by Dr. Salamishah Tillet - Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania
I just visited East New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. We drove around these two towns — neighborhoods formerly predominated by African-Americans, respectively upper-middle class and working-class, and disproportionately ravaged by the (foreseeable) breech of the levees and the (perhaps deliberate?) neglect of the federal government. And then I remembered that the empty houses, abandoned churches, and drowned stores were not simply the remains of our government failure to protect its black citizens from this federal calamity, but were extensions of a much older and I would argue more insidious betrayal of its African-American citizenry: the federal withholding of reparations for slavery to the freedmen and women.
As I stood at one the most popular and profitable sites of the transatlantic slave trade, a question not only about America’s past, but about its future loomed. When will America pay its debt for slavery? And when will African-Americans demand repayment? This is not to suggest that there have not been several reparations for slavery movements in America. While most of us are familiar with the Freedmen’s demands for their “40 Acres and a Mule,” there have been several subsequent movements such as Callie House and the Ex-Slave Pension Association in 1899, Queen Mother Moore’s creation of the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves in 1955, and the activism of the National Coalition of Black Reparations Activists (N’COBRA) from the 1970s to the present.
But Not The Guy Below
Comment by xxPeter on 28 March 2008:
Black Africans never had an opportunity for oral disclaimer of the U.S. Constitution and all of its laws, statutes, rules and regulations. When the question of jurisdiction was brought to the courts there was silence. A maxim of law is that silence means consent, baring the Statute of Limitation. Since there was no opportunity for disclaimer at the time when the 14th Amendment forced citizenship upon the slaves. In recent years a Slave Descendant Plaintiff delivered a disclaimer in Court.
The arguement that since the Plaintiff disclaimed the Constitution on the grounds that no mutuality ever at any time existed between the United States and Plaintiff, it is the duty and law of the United States to overcome this disclaimer by proof of mutuality or consent, showing that the Plaintiffs are by mutual law subject to even paying taxes as free people.
The issue of Domicile, or orgins of Slave Descendants: Can domicile be forced? An attorney Dr.Robert Brock states the following:
“The domicile gained by free birth of Africans in Africa cannot be changed by a slave birth in the United States, and the Rules are:
(1) It lies upon the other side (the U.S. and IRS) to show that the clear unquestionable domicile, gained by birth of Africans in Africa was abandoned and given up;
(2) That the domicile of origin is the domicile of every Person, until that is abandoned, and another gained;
(3) That no domicile can be acquired until the Person is free and sui juris.”
The conclusion is that slave descendants don’t have domicile as of yet until they take it out, and they can’t take it out because they are slaves.
(Remember Dr. Brock’s argument that because there is no mutuality, and a disclaimer exists, slave descendants are in involuntary slave status until the Government offers mutuality, reparation and self determination.)