{"id":89877,"date":"2019-12-18T11:02:45","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T15:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/antiguanewsroom.com\/?p=89877"},"modified":"2019-12-18T11:02:45","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T15:02:45","slug":"the-us-is-grappling-with-its-history-of-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/antiguanewsroom.com\/the-us-is-grappling-with-its-history-of-slavery\/","title":{"rendered":"The US is grappling with its history of slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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USA TODAY<\/p>

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Dorbrene O\u2019Marde paced back and forth, trying to quash evil spirits. He had been to many former sugar plantations on this small island, but last month was the first time he\u2019d seen the dungeon.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Marde knows well Antigua\u2019s long history of slavery \u2013\u00a0Africans ripped from their\u00a0homelands, forced to work on sugar plantations for British owners. But the dungeon, with its dark inside smelling of sea salt and littered with dead crabs, stood as another visible reminder.<\/p>

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Enslaved Africans \u2013 his ancestors \u2013 would have had to climb through the small opening into this\u00a0windowless cell.<\/p>

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It unsettled him.<\/p>\n

\u201cVengeance is not something good to wear,\u201d he said.<\/p>

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Instead, the 69-year-old is helping lead a group of Caribbean islands\u00a0in demanding reparations from\u00a0countries\u00a0whose citizens profited off hundreds of years of unpaid labor.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my life\u2019s work,\u2019\u2019 said O\u2019Marde, who chairs the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission and is a vice chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission.\u00a0 \u201cI watch my Caribbean countries struggling. I watch up and down this region, the inequities. I watch the failures. I watch my governments and my people struggling against the legacies of colonialism and enslavement.\u201d<\/p>

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Dorbrene O’Marde, chairman of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Commission, talks about how sugar mills were once key to the country’s economy during a visit to Betty’s Hope, a former plantation.<\/figcaption>
JARRAD HENDERSON, USA TODAY<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Renewed interest in reparations<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

Thousands of miles north, the United States is grappling with how, and if, it will be held accountable for its own troubling history of enslaving Africans.<\/p>

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Debates about reparations have been the focus of campus forums, columns, books\u00a0and even a recent congressional hearing. Interest has also renewed with commemorations of the 400 years since the first Africans were brought to the British colonies.<\/p>\n

Not since Reconstruction has reparations been so much at center stage.<\/p>\n

Yet no country has paid money to descendants of Africans who were victims of the transatlantic slave trade, experts say.<\/p>\n

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Why Brown University decided to confront its role in slavery<\/h3>\n

Ruth Simmons was the first African American president of an Ivy League. She was also the first to request a study looking at the role university founders played in slavery. Simmons talked with USA TODAY’s Deborah Barfield Berry about the groundbreaking work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Instead, universities have taken the lead on what they call reparative justice.\u00a0Georgetown University apologized to descendants of slaves<\/a>\u00a0who were sold to pay school debts and recently pledged to raise $400,000 a year for programs to help those descendants. In October,\u00a0Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey announced a nearly $28 million plan<\/a>, including scholarships to descendants of enslaved Africans.<\/p>\n

But the model for these programs is Brown University, which issued a groundbreaking report in 2006 about its founders\u2019 connection to slavery and created a center to research slavery and injustice.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have an obligation to tell the truth about our history because we\u2019re a university,\u201d said Ruth Simmons, the former president of Brown.<\/p>\n

Other universities, she said, can do the same. \u201cWe\u2019re best at doing the research and speaking the truth of what transpired \u2026 I think the truth is always worth it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Just this week officials from\u00a0the University of Glasgow were in Antiqua, Jamaica and other islands working with the Caribbean Reparations Committee to help solidify\u00a0an unprecedented partnership with the University of the West Indies to help islanders “erode the \u00a0legacies of slavery and racism.”<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s high time we address this,\u2019\u2019 said David Duncan, chief operating officer and University Secretary at the University of Glasgow.<\/p>\n

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An unfulfilled promise<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

When slavery was abolished in 1865, the federal government promised millions of freed men and women “40 acres and a mule.”<\/p>\n

That promise went unfulfilled.<\/p>\n

The late Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, had introduced a reparations bill every session since 1989.\u00a0It never passed.<\/p>\n

This spring, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, re-introduced\u00a0legislation to create a commission to study reparations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe initial wealth of this nation was built on the backs of enslaved Africans who worked \u2026 for absolute free and suffered brutality,\u2019\u2019 explained Jackson Lee.<\/p>\n

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