Member-only story
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Organization Calls for Reparations
On the 52 Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization he co-founded in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called for the federal government to pay reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the country.
Slavery began on these shores twelve years after the colonial period began when a shipload of enslaved Africans docked at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. One hundred and sixty-eight years later ( 1787), when the framers of the constitution met in Philadelphia to charter a new government under the name selected back in 1776 by Thomas Jefferson, as the United States of America, slavery was all but codified. Enslaved Africans were considered the property of any white man — or white woman through inheritance — who could afford to own them.
The practice of enslaving people essentially for their labor stopped with the end of the civil war on April 9, 1865. Then a brief period of Reconstruction began; to remake the country to include the rights of Africans brought to these shores as slaves.
The Reconstruction era ended in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes fulfilled a campaign promise and pulled the federal troops out of the South. Descendants of the formerly enslaved have been losing ground ever since the federal government stopped…
