Reparation (Reparação)

I don't think that there's words

within our language to fully articulate,

the violence of slavery.

It's what if somebody came to your house,

kidnapped you and your family,

put you know,

you in chains.

You strip them up every piece of dignity of life

and you make them work

and you make them work for free.

Sold!

The, the type of suffering

that the black American community went through,

specifically African-American community went through,

is incomparable.

When you take folks from their native land,

their native country,

you bring them into another community

where they don't speak the language,

you take away the fact that they can reproduce,

you take away the fact that they can be educated

and you make them work for free for hundreds of years.

The United States is founded on violence

towards black people.

Also violence towards native American people.

And there's no denying that.

It's almost like so,

inconceivable, when you talk about it

in the modern day sense.

That's what the common,

daily life was like that,

drove this country

and that was tolerated if not sanctioned,

by many people,

actually the majority of people in this country

for a very, very long time.

During that time period,

I think it's really important for us to understand that

our black community,

actively fought with our union soldiers

to fight for freedom,

in the example of Harriet Tubman,

served as spies to help bring intel,

which helped the union side win the war.

So, black folks were,

were active in their liberation

and found certain allies,

in the form of white abolitionists

and also listening ear where General William

to come to Sherman,

when it came to co-creating and thinking about

what it would mean to give folks a fighting chance,

to feed themselves,

start building wealth on the lands that they had

for hundreds of years sustained.

One of the earliest attempts to provide reparations

in a tangible way for the black African-American community,

happened through special order 15,

put forth by William Sherman.

And what this order would have done,

is provide 40 acres of land,

to freed slaves.

And that was the output of conversations

and advocacy activism,

through freed slaves and black leaders.

Unfortunately, with the assassination of president Lincoln,

those efforts behind special order 15,

the efforts of the Freedman's bureau,

all got completely derailed.

Upon his inauguration,

President Johnson promised Southern whites,

that he would protect them and those who have been loyal

to him and to the Confederacy.

And he did so through his Amnesty Act which then

undid all of the work

that had been done by the Freedman's Bureau

and actually evicted people off of the land,

which they had garnered through special order 15

and gave that land back to white farmers.

There was never economic empowerment,

only a ten-year period reconstruction,

and then they re-entrenched the economic relationships.

And so again people were in the fields picking cotton again.

A spirit of hope was dashed,

as we saw a white lash from the former Confederate south

and the rise of white nationalists

and white supremacists groups,

that work and coordinated to target harass Lynch,

suppress and deny African-Americans their Right to life.

You saw this wave,

in state legislatures called Black Codes,

which were the foundation for Jim Crow laws.

The wealth of this country was quite clearly,

generated through slavery,

cotton, little books about,

you know, when cotton was king

and how central it was to the US and the world economy.

Insurance companies who the,

who their very first revenues,

came from insuring enslaved people.

So the wealth of this country

and the racial wealth gap that we have in this country,

has come about,

because of slavery and the legacy of slavery.

And what happens is you get this thriving American economy

that was built on the backs of black people.

With the Homesteaders Act,

which allowed white settlers to go out West,

to stake out a plot of land,

if they were able to farm it,

it was there's.

It was not available to black Americans.

There only was,

history stacked against black Americans

from before they arrived to the rivalry of slavery,

to legal rulings denying them full citizenship

in the American community,

to separate but equal Jim Crow segregation.

So you have all of that,

plus the decisions that were made in the 20th century,

people don't realize.

So the GI bill,

gave billions of dollars to white people returning from war.

And so that created America's middle class.

And that largely excluded African-Americans in particular.

Returning GIs would be able

to access low interest mortgages

and buy their first house

and make higher education accessible.

However, in the case of black GIs,

their loan applications were often denied,

real estate brokers would not show them houses,

in the newly built suburbs.

The new deal,

explicitly excluded domestic workers.

There was racial,

red lining in home loans,

which was the ways that wealth was created,

within this country.

We moved to our home in Cleveland Heights Ohio,

and the person who owned the home

would not sell it to my parents

because they were black.

And so they had to get a white lawyer,

Byron Krantz, Civil Rights lawyer,

to buy the home and then deed it over,

to my family.

So that was the home that I grew up

and my brother was the first black student

at the elementary school,

Fairfax ELementary School in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

And, my mother says that she used to sleep in her clothes

when we first moved to that home,

because she was afraid that the house might get firebomb.

There's been no true or real opportunity,

for black people in this country,

to develop that sense of true wealth

that they can pass on from generation to generation.

And so we have not had an equitable playing field

for black folks in this country,

since we were brought here on ships as slaves.

And so, all of those particular pieces,

are examples of how

this profound racial wealth gap,

has been perpetuated,

when it started with en slavery

and going on to today.

So that's the current situation that we have

and why it's so imperative,

that we move forward,

around trying to finally reckon with,

government created sanctioned and tolerated,

system of inequality.

No force under the sun,

can scheme

and block and stop,

the Civil Rights revolution.

We stand at our progress stands

on the shoulders of,

the gains made by black Americans,

through their Civil Rights movement.

and the fight for the Civil Rights equality in law,

but at lunch counters,

at schools, on the streets,

to speak publicly,

to get jobs,

the black American Civil Rights movement,

not only spotlighted discrimination,

it also spotlighted,

systemic racism,

and systemic forms of oppression,

that affected all vulnerable groups,

in the United States.

So that included Asian Americans,

Latino, Latinx Americans,

Native Americans,

but also gays and transgenders

and vulnerable immigrants

and a whole range of other groups.

You know, the struggle of African Americans for equality