“Black Holocaust,” proclaimed a green poster with large white letters. Below was a picture of a ship taking the tragic journey known as the Middle Passage, where enslaved Africans died of sickness, disease and brutality on the way to the Americas.
“The horrors of this journey include young African girls and boys being raped; African adults being brutally beaten at random in front of all the slaves to instill fear in them; Africans jumping and being thrown overboard to the sharks; Africans urinating, defecating and vomiting on one another and Africans being separated so that they could not communicate with one another,” said Brother Pruit, a member of the Black Telephone Workers for Justice in New Jersey.
Next to the banner was a collection of old black-and-white photos of African Americans who were tortured and mutilated by white American racists. Three photographs from the early 1900s portray a muscular naked back man, Wayne Embry. White folks gathered together around him. Some of the men in the crowd were unshaven and wore ragged hats and rumpled white shirts. In the first photo, he stood tall and covered his penis. He was nearly bald, with tiny traces of black hair on top of his circular head. He had round rugged shoulders. And he grimaced at the lens.
The second picture showed Embry’s backside, which was full of bloody scars and tears in his skin. In the third photo, Embry’s body hung by a noose around his neck, the rope tied to a crooked tree branch. His hanging head tilted to his right. His lower body, covered by a white sheet, remained above the dusty ground. The white spectators continued to gaze at him, even though he was dead.
Above the photos loomed a large rectangular board with black letters saying: “REPARATIONS NOW! For the descendents of Africans enslaved in America.”
Welcome to the New Jersey Statewide Reparations Conference at the Paul Robeson Campus Center at Rutgers University-Newark. Members of the New Jersey People’s Organization for Progress (NJPOP), the New Black Panther Party of New Jersey, the Black Telephone Workers for Justice, the Rutgers-Newark Black Organization of Students and other African groups organized the event during spring 2003. They hope to repair the damages and heal the wounds caused by the racist acts of Americans and their government.
“Reparations are a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments or corporations,” an NJPOP pamphlet said.
Pruit added, “The definition of reparations is for a group … to repair the damages they have done to another group or people, by stipulating well-deserved compensation and, in the case of African Americans, create programs for restoration, too.”
Members of the NJPOP and others in attendance said they wanted the conference to establish the basis for a movement to bring reparations to New Jersey. They said reparations could be in the forms of cash payments, economic development, scholarship funds, community development and the creation of multimedia depictions of the history of the black people of African descent. They said reparations would enrich and help the lives of African descendants in the United States. Reparations, they said, would help future generations gain complete economic, social and political power, and would strengthen their identity.
“We’re trying to accomplish a movement that works toward justice and peace,” said Lawrence Hamm, the president of NJPOP. “African Americans never received restitution for the forced labor and exploitation for nearly 100 years.”
He added that the conference was a strong way to start building a movement, through a coherent strategy that brings about reparations. He said it builds the movement on grassroots and helps define the actions necessary to achieve the goal.
The conference program itself had three keynote speakers in the welcoming ceremony to discuss the meaning and importance of reparations: Dr. Larry Greene, professor of African American history at Seton Hall University; Dr. Judy Miller, director of the Center for African American Studies; and New Jersey Poet Amiri Baraka.
Baraka said fighting for reparations is a cause that comes under the struggle of democracy. He added that reparations are one aspect of the struggle. He said it should be one of the instruments to help bring about a people’s democracy based on a majority, which is based on all different ethnic backgrounds—not just white Americans. “Reparations will give us bigger muscles,” he said.
After the opening ceremony, different groups in New Jersey’s African American community gathered to devise strategies for achieving reparations. Members of black churches discussed ways to develop a monthly program to inform the church community about African American history. Public officials talked about introducing reparations bills and supporting the passage of two current bills.
NJ State Legislative Bill A3272, sponsored by Assemblyman Craig Stanley of Irvington, calls for the establishment of a 25-member New Jersey African-American Reconciliation Commission. The bill said the commission would examine the historical and current conditions affecting African Americans and recommend means to foster communication between those of African descent and other people. Moreover, it said it would push for appropriate means to achieve reconciliation and justice.
“As too many generations of African Americans have already passed without benefits of any remedies for the injustices they endured, it is important that New Jersey make the establishment of their commission an imperative,” wrote Stanley in his bill, which passed in General Assembly in late February 2003. The bill has not yet passed the State Senate.
Congressman John Conyers Jr.’s bill, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1997, also called for a commission to examine the institution of slavery.
At other workshops, black labor unions pushed for organizing workers, and educators discussed ways to teach reparations in schools. As for youth, the young crowd grouped together to find methods to spread its importance at high school and college levels.
“We’re still suffering today,” said Minister Divine Allah of the New Black Panther Party of New Jersey. “Reparations relieve some of the pain.”
