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First Ever Case Filed By African Americans Seeking Reparations for Slave Trade
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| Paellmann, a
woman whose ancestors were slaves, seeks reparations
from three U.S. corporations
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By Steve Smith, IOL Correspondent in Washington
WASHINGTON, March 30 (IslamOnline) - A lawsuit by millions of descendants of victims of the slave trade in the United State is aimed to bring some change into the U.S. society and guarantee reparations for decades of one of the world's largest human sufferings, lawyers said.
The case, filed on Tuesday and could top one trillion dollars from companies
with historical ties to the pre-Civil War slave trade, is targeted against corporations for damages in a U.S. federal court.
The action is the first of its kind and may start a wave of similar cases.
One of the groups behind the case is 'N'COBRA', which has been rallying African- Americans to take action particularly in the southern parts of the United States. The group says it may file the suit next year while another organization; the Reparations Assessment Group (RAG) has spent 18 months preparing a class action suit.
According to RAG plans, taxpayers and corporations could face "possible multi-billion dollar settlements." The group includes Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree. Ogletree has reportedly said: "We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized, raped, murdered, and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own."
"We want a change in America,” he told journalists.
Although there have been no “slaves: or “slaveholders” in America since 1865, many African Americans complain that they are still not being fairly treated by “White” Americans and are still seen as inferior to them.
The suit filed Tuesday by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a young African-American attorney, names CSX, a Virginia-based railroad company, the U.S.'s biggest insurance company, Aetna, and a leading banking firm. All three companies said they would fight lawsuits and said they expected to win.
"We do not believe a court would permit a lawsuit over events which,
however, regrettable, occurred hundreds of years ago," an Aetna spokesman said, noting the company issued an apology for its role in the slave trade two years ago when Farmer-Paellmann brought the issue to its attention.
"The practice of slavery constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans' life, liberty and African citizenship rights (and) cultural heritage and it further deprived them of the fruits of their own labor," the lawsuit stated.
Brought in U.S. District Court in New York, the suit says that those
companies "unjustly enriched" by the slave trade, though. It demands
for an accounting of the companies' profits related to the slave trade,
reimbursement of profits to the descendants of African slaves, penal
indemnity and more.
Reparations campaigners say that whites today profit from slavery,
while blacks suffer from it as they are still rotating in a cycle of poverty.
It is often said that America was "built on the backs of slaves."
This case’s defendants argue back that America became the richest
country in the world “not because of slave labor, but because of the Industrial Revolution begun in the slave-free North.”
They also argue that blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites
owned slaves -- to work farms or plantations and those blacks should be sued as well.
The lawsuit is modeled after the precedents registered in cases brought on behalf of Japanese-Americans detained after Tokyo's attack on Pearl Harbor, and Jewish and other survivors of Nazi atrocities.
Associated with RAG are a number of lawyers involved in the Holocaust lawsuits, which netted some eight billion dollars for the plaintiffs.
The first African slaves arrived in what is now the United States in
1619, and the practice broadened quickly, chiefly in the south, where the topography favored plantation agriculture. Some eight million African slaves were brought to the territory before slavery was abolished in 1865.
While the institution of slavery tended in North America to reinforce
feelings of racial superiority on the part of the whites, some writers
have argued that the treatment of slaves there was more humane than it was in the Catholic or Latin countries.
Slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early
19th century had disappeared. The small Northern farmer feared slavery as a system of cheap labor against which it was difficult to compete.
Freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule," as well as safety
from U.S. troops and courts of law. But the vast majority of former slaves
had to fend for themselves, which became particularly hazardous after federal troops were withdrawn from the southern states only 12 years after emancipation.
Many blacks became sharecroppers, victims of debt bondage and the
terror of the Ku Klux Klan.
In the late 20th century, the idea of compensating American blacks for their enslavement through some form of reparations won widespread support from African-American organizations and greater notice, although little support, from the broader society.
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