The Dream of our ancestors to repair our
communities and the nation is under siege–
Let's pledge to continue the fight for justice and repair
WASHINGTON, July 3, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- Recent attacks on efforts to obtain reparations for
Black communities undermine the work done by our ancestors to
repair the long lasting and devastating injuries of slavery and its
living vestiges. These attacks obstruct justice and the realization
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of repair and the
creation of a true inclusive democracy.
The movement for reparations is a movement for healing and
reparatory justice for crimes done against Black communities. The
backlash against community-led efforts for true justice and repair
has appeared in the past couple of months in two different ways.
Both reflect the different ways in which Courts are used in an
attempt to deny Black reparations. First, in its
June 2024 dismissal of Randle et.
al. v. City of Tulsa, et. al. the Oklahoma Supreme Court
proclaims that judicial reparations are impossible, and relief can
only come from local or state legislatures. The Court holds that
Oklahoma Courts are the wrong forum to seek relief, even though the
plaintiffs' claims—that the blight in the Greenwood District was
caused by the City of Tulsa's
actions during and after the 1921 Race Massacre—fall squarely
within Oklahoma's nuisance
statute. Second, Judicial Watch, a far-right special interest
group, filed a class action complaint, Flinn, et. al. v.
City of Evanston in May 2024. That complaint seeks to
undermine legislative reparations, arguing that a legislature
cannot grant relief even if it recognizes that Black communities
were specially victimized by historical discrimination. In this
way, the Flinn plaintiffs seek to reinstitute the injustices
done to Black people in Evanston by challenging the City of
Evanston's right to legislate a Reparations program.
The Evanston program and the Tulsa case are attempts to obtain reparations
for the injuries caused by slavery and its vestiges, the remaining
traces of a government system that, for almost 350 years, allowed
and often required Black people to be denied equal treatment, for
example Jim Crow. The filing of the
legal challenge to Evanston's reparations program and the dismissal
of the Tulsa case should come as
no surprise. They are the most recent examples of the
use of the U.S. legal system to deny reparations for the heinous
crimes of slavery and its legacies that were designed to make Black
people less than whites, and second-class citizens. These
injustices in the past and in the present day have created enormous
disparities between white communities and Black communities in
every area of life. For example, homeownership and business
ownership are the primary sources of generational wealth in
the United States of America.
Evanston and Tulsa both deal with
housing and the devaluation and destruction of homes in the Black
community.
Despite the backlash from those who seek to maintain the
benefits whites gained from slavery and its legacies, we must
continue to advocate for the removal of the "badges and incidents
of slavery" as promised by the 13th Amendment. We
must push back on the United
States' courts, state and federal, limiting and shutting
down the legal avenues for reparations and racial justice,
preventing justice and the development of an inclusive
democracy.
The use of the United States'
legal system to create and support a system based on white
supremacy started when the courts in the
United States upheld the institution of slavery.
Dred Scott v. Sanford
(1857) is a noted case where the United States Supreme Court,
in supporting the institution of slavery, held that a Black man has
no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Even after
Emancipation and the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments (the
13th 14th and 15th Amendments),
the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson denied
equal treatment between the races by holding that separate
accommodations were constitutional, despite being unequal. Thus,
the Supreme Court legalized segregation in the United States where Black people were
subjected to substandard, unequal accommodations and treatment in
virtually every area of life. The United States Supreme
Court's legalization of segregation in the United States served as a model for the
German Holocaust against Jewish people, the U.S. Imprisonment of
Japanese Americans during WWII, and South
Africa's system of Apartheid (1948-1994).
Charles Hamilton Houston and
Thurgood Marshall designed a legal
strategy, as a part of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s and
1950s, that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court beginning to rectify
its historic support of subordination of Black people
(anti-Blackness) in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown reversed Plessy, holding that separate
accommodations cannot be equal.
After Brown, the federal, state and local governments
began to design and implement programs to remedy the historic
exclusion and inferior treatment of Black people in many fields
including education and government contracting. Less than 25
years after Brown, the Court began to backtrack on the
promise of addressing unequal treatment. The Supreme Court has
denied States the right to generally remedy the past exclusion of
Blacks in education and business. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court
in Bakke v. California held that California's affirmative action program
violated the 14th Amendment. In 1989, the U.S.
Supreme Court in Croson v. City of Richmond held that the
City could not create a program that, as a general practice,
required general contractors to subcontract with a certain
proportion of "minority-owned" businesses as a way to address
historic discrimination against minority-owned businesses. Any
requirement for subcontracting with minority businesses had to be
based on first satisfying an oppressively burdensome (onerous)
level of judicial review known as strict scrutiny.
Fast forward to 2023, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Students
for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College held that a program to
diversify the student body to enhance learning violated the
14th Amendment. The strong dissents by Justices
Sotomayor and Jackson address in depth the importance of ending the
significant imbalances in United
States systems, in this case educational systems, that act
for the benefit of whites, to the detriment of Black people.
Importantly, Justice Jackson started
her dissent by noting "Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with
respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens.
They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been
passed down to the present day through the generations."
Justice Jackson's dissent
provides a legal roadmap for why the Fair Admissions case
was wrongly decided. Her dissent also provides the legal roadmap
for continuing and increasing the advocacy for reparatory justice
for Black communities as a means of making the victims of
enslavement and its legacy whole, as was the goal of Dr. King,
repairing the nation.
While continuing to bring cases based on the 14th
Amendment, we urge attorneys to be emboldened by the dissents in
Fair Admission to file cases based on a violation of the
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well. And we
urge reparations activists to support these filings in defense of
the Reparations Movement. In The Civil Rights Cases (1883),
the U.S. Supreme Court held that the amendment makes it a duty
to "eradicate the badges and incidents of slavery." We should
also be emboldened by the dissents to push Congress, pursuant to
Section 2 of the 13th Amendment, to perform its duty to
"eradicate the badges and incidents of slavery." Indeed, the
lawmakers in Evanston are executing Congress's mandate to prohibit
the continuation of the badges and incidents of slavery.
The state and local governmental interference with the provision
of housing to Black residents addressed by Evanston and
Tulsa, are badges and incidents of
slavery. We call on reparations activists and movement
lawyers across the country to support the people's right to effect
reparations to repair Black communities as well as the country as a
whole. In the past, our ancestors faced unjust systems and
ultimately prevailed. Thus, we are confident that we too will
prevail.
MOVEMENT LAWYERS IN SUPPORT OF EVANSTON AND THE MOVEMENT FOR
REPARATIONS:
Shirley Traylor
Reparations Committee
National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL)
Nkechi Taifa, Esq.
The Taifa Group LLC
Eric Miller
Professor and Leo J. O'Brien Fellow
Co-Director, Loyola Anti-Racism Center
Areva Martin, Esq.
Civil Rights Attorney
Deborah A. Jackson, J.D.,
Ph.D.
National Conference of Black Lawyers – Reparations Committee
Kamm Howard, Director
Reparations United
Lisa Holder, President
Equal Justice Society
Maynard M. Henry, Sr.,
Esquire
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
Justin Hansford
Professor of Law, Howard University
School of Law
Director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center
Adjoa A. Aiyetoro
National Conference of Black Lawyers
Co-facilitator, Reparations Committee
Supervising Attorney, Reparations Research Project
Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, Executive Director
National Black Cultural Information Trust, Inc.
The National Black Cultural Information Trust,
Inc. is a nonprofit organization that provides news, information,
and resources that uplifts the collective freedom of Black
communities.
CONTACT: Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, jessica@nbcit.org
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-movement-lawyers-group--in-defense-of-evanston-and-the-movement-for-reparations-302188889.html
SOURCE National Black Cultural Information Trust