Sources & Extracts

Review these ideas and then use the BACK key in your browser to go back to the page you were on.

There have been a number of calls for reparations from black organizations. For example, in 1969 a manifesto was presented at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, Michigan. The manifesto was directed at white churches and synagogues. It read, in part, as follows:

We the black people assembled in Detroit, Michigan for the National Black Economic Development conference are fully aware that we have been forced to come together because racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies, our labor. . . .We have helped to build the most industrial country in the world.

We are therefore demanding of the white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism, that they begin to pay reparations to black people in this country. We are demanding $500,000,000 from the Christian white churches and the Jewish synagogues. . . .This demand for $500,000,000 is not an idle resolution or empty words. Fifteen dollars for every black brother and sister in the United States is only a beginning of the reparations due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed and persecuted.

The manifesto went on to indicate how the reparations were to be spent. It proposed the establishment of a Southern land bank, four publishing and printing houses, four audio-visual networks, a research skills center devoted to the problems of blacks, a training center for community organizers, support for welfare rights, the establishment of a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund, and a black university.

Reference: There is a copy of the manifesto in an appendix to Boris Bittker's book The Case for Black Reparations.