Black Reparations Idea Builds at UCLA Meeting

The movement among African Americans to seek apology and compensation for slavery, enforced segregation and other racially biased acts has gained unprecedented popularity among mainstream Americans, according to speakers at a UCLA conference on the issue Friday.

More than 150 years after the first blacks turned to the courts for relief from racist laws, the issue of widespread redress now is increasingly discussed in concrete terms among black intellectuals, activists and policymakers, they said.

“This is the fourth paper I’ve delivered on reparations in this year alone,” said Roy Brooks, a law professor at the University of San Diego and author of a recent book on the subject. “That suggests there’s much to say about the subject and that the question of reparations is a hot issue internationally and nationally.”

The discussion came on the first day of a two-day conference at UCLA that focused on broad issues of compensation for ethnic groups that have suffered systematic abuse by governments and corporations.

As affirmative action and other programs designed to compensate racial minorities for discrimination are increasingly being dismantled nationwide, such gatherings underscore a belief that redress is still needed. Tougher issues--such as who would qualify for reparations, how much they would cost and how Congress could be convinced to approve them--have yet to be tackled.

The conference, titled “The Struggle for Justice: A Symposium on Recognition, Reparations and Redress,” included discussion of Native American and Mexican American claims to land and ancestral artifacts that many argue were unfairly acquired when Europeans settled in the United States.

The conference also discussed the reparation movement’s debt to Japanese Americans interred during World War II. It was not until the late 1980s that some Japanese Americans won court decisions that effectively said the government agency behind the imprisonment had overstepped its bounds.

Soon thereafter, a parallel movement that had long been rumbling within the black community took on new form when Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) in 1989 drafted a bill in the House of Representatives seeking reparations for slavery.

For years, Conyers stood virtually alone in his push, which many considered a militant fringe movement. But last year, the tide turned. Randall Robinson, a respected black leader widely credited with leading America’s anti-apartheid movement, wrote “The Debt,” a widely publicized book calling for reparations for African Americans.

“The book was a catalyst,” said David L. Horne, a political science professor at Cal State Northridge who was at the conference. “Once Randall Robinson said, ‘It’s time now. Can we deal with this?’ people started to pay more attention.”

Added Connie Brown, a political consultant and activist, “It got the attention of the middle class.”

Last summer, Horne, Brown and others started the Reparations Platform Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on educating the public on the issue. Theirs is one of several such groups dealing with African American compensation in Los Angeles, and one of hundreds across the nation, Horne said.

In February, the first annual National Reparations Conference was attended by about 100 in Chicago. Also, a high-powered team of black lawyers--including Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Harvard’s Charles Ogletree--meet regularly to strategize on the issue.

The topic garnered local attention in late February when conservative Malibu activist David Horowitz began taking out advertisements in college newspapers denouncing the movement as unfair to Americans who were not responsible for slavery. The ads caused a furor on some campuses, particularly UC Berkeley.

The issue also is expected to be hotly debated at a United Nations conference this summer on race and ethnic issues in South Africa.

In the United States, many advocates of reparations for blacks believe a discussion is justified not only by historical wrongs but also by ongoing racism in the form of biased loan-giving and racial profiling, said Manning Marable, a speaker at the conference and chairman of the African American Studies Institute at Columbia University in New York.

“Indeed, brothers and sisters, it’s payback time,” he said. “It is time to redefine reparations. It is not a claim solely on the basis of antiquity. It is a crime we see around us every day in this country.”