A leading reparations activist says there is merit in pursuing a variety of legal strategies that might convince U.S. courts that Black people deserve damages for past treatment in the United States. However, Kamm Howard, of the legislative commission of NCOBRA, the national Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, doesn’t believe there is anything “novel” about the proposal by Dr. Jahi Issa and Reggie Mabry, that reparations activists recognize that slavery was legal in the U.S., and adjust their legal strategy, according. “Slavery was never legal under international norms,” said Howard. “Only a small number of nations in Europe colluded together and created some rules among themselves on how to engage in these international crimes. Those were rules amongst criminals.”
Counterspin interviews Nusrat Choudhury on the modern version of COINTELPRO.
People’s lawyers found the cracks and searched out open spaces in the law.
The centrality of slavery to capitalism is not new, as any serious student of WEB Dubois is aware. “Negro slavery seemed the very basis of American capitalism.”
Even the loss of the equivalent of a full year’s economic production due to US aggression has not broken the people’s will.
Professor Gerald Horne shows that the Dark Continent was Europe, not Africa.
