I may state to all our friends, and to all our enemies, that we has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And then didn't the large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? . . . I say they have grown rich, and my people is poor.

--Bayley Wyatt, a freedman from Yorktown, Virginia in Roy Finkenbine (ed.), Sources of the African-American Past (London: Longman, 1993), p. 88.

The case for reparations is based on four premises:

• Millions of slaves and their descendants are owed money for forced removal from their homeland in Africa;
• People of Afrikan descent require compensation for the loss of their culture;
• People of Afrikan descent are owed for the work their ancestors undertook for free;
• People of Afrikan descent deserve compensation for the acts of segregation and discrimination, sanctioned by the countries, that perpetuated long after slavery had been abolished.

As Robert Westley, Professor of Law at Tulane University noted in 2000, “It’s not just the recently freed slaves who were harmed, who were discriminated against, who were economically disenfranchised, but it was also their children and their children’s children.”

Listed below are supportive documents, recommended reading and letters from the Global Afrikan Congress.

Documents of Interest
The Inconvenient Truth About Wilberforce
The Wider Historical Context of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Legal Basis of the Claim for Slavery Reparations

Letters from the Global Afrikan Congress
Click here to see the letters from the Global Afrikan Congress

Recommended Reading
Click here for a list of recommended literature