Activists urge slave reparations

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 (UPI) -- Supporters of reparations for slave descendants rallied on the National Mall Saturday to demand immediate action from the U.S. government, saying African-Americans are owed for centuries of "terrorism."

"We came to be counted," talk show host Bob Law of New York City radio station WBAI told the rally, billed as "Millions for Reparations."

"Any thing less than reparations is not justice," he insisted.

"We are owed for 500 years of terrorism," said Ill. State Senator Donne Trotter, D-Chicago. "We want to be paid, and we want to be paid now."

Reparations advocates demand compensation for slave descendants, although there is no consensus within the movement on the type or amount of payment. For many advocates, compensation should include financial payments as well as the rebuilding of African-American communities and development of health and education programs.

Activists told the crowd of about 3,000 demonstrators, much smaller than anticipated, that slaves built the United States through the free labor of their "blood, sweat and tears," and urged them to press Congress to support a reparations bill Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has proposed every year since he introduced it in 1989.

"I'm tired of people saying they don't know what reparations are," said Dorothy Lewis Benton of the National Coalition for Blacks for Reparations in America.

"If you always take something that doesn't belong to you, what are you supposed to do?," she asked the crowd. "Give it back, pay a high penalty so high that you don't do it again."

"Reparation is not a handout. Slavery was a handout," she said.

The demonstrators arrived in Washington from all parts of the United States, chanting "Reparations" and waving banners urging what they called long-overdue compensation.

The rally was organized by Millions for Reparations, a coalition based in Brooklyn, New York. "The demand for reparations for African people is just and simple," reads the Millions for Reparations Web site. "Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations. And our people still suffer from the vestiges of their enslavement and colonization. "

The rally marked the 115th anniversary of the birthday of civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, perhaps best remembered as a leader of the back-to-Africa black movement in the 1920s.