A standing-room-only crowd listened attentively Tuesday night at the University Law School as three legal experts called for slavery reparations — compensation for descendants of black slaves.
Charles Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law Professor and this year’s Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, said there is a “blistering racial divide” in the United States because slavery and racism has never been properly discussed. His keynote address to a crowd of nearly 250 was part of a forum on slavery reparations sponsored by the School of Law.
Ogletree is part of a team preparing a massive reparation lawsuit, and he said the other lawyers, each of whom has career court winnings in excess of $1 billion and is working pro bono, “will have more data than Brown vs. the Board of Education — or any other case involving sociology in American history.”
The lawsuit will be filed early next year and may exceed $1 trillion, but Ogletree said the money is not as important as “a timely and frank discussion of slavery issues.”
Professor Ibrahim Gassama said he is trying to ensure that this reparation movement is different from previous incarnations and agreed the money is secondary.
“The reparation movement is first about repair, which is a modest goal,” Gassama said, but he cautioned, “continuing silence and hostility would push this outside the mainstream, and then reparations could represent revolution.”
Gassama criticized political columnist David Horowitz for his 10 points of criticism against reparations and advertisements against reparations in college newspapers, while Ogletree said the advertisements “energized students and made them realize reparations are a serious issue.”
Reparations have historical precedence. In the 1940s courts awarded reparations to Japanese families in internment camps during World War II, and an international court recently awarded reparations to Jewish families whose ancestors worked as slave labor in Germany and Austria during World War II.
“What makes this unique is the multitude of parties, both people and institutions, involved,” Ogletree said. “We are not just taking action against the government, but also institutions and individuals who directly profited from slavery.”