| Civil rights activist Randall Robinson is among those honored at the 14th
Annual Essence Awards. Fellow honorees include neurosurgeon Keith Black;
educators Hans and Ivan Hageman as well as Charlotte Austin-Jordan, Frances
Davis, Dee Sumpter and Yvonne Pointer, mothers who have become community
activists after their children were murdered. Rounding out the group are
tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams and actor Samuel L. Jackson. All were
honored for their courage, tenacity and commitment to advancing the best
interest of the black community. The show, taped at The Theater in Madison
Square Garden, is scheduled to air on May 24 on Fox. Steve Harvey and Cedric
The Entertainer hosted the affair.
As the founder and president of TransAfrica and TransAfrica Forum
(organizations dedicated to influencing U.S. policy toward Africa and the
Caribbean), Randall Robinson has helped to transform America's policies
towards the former white-minority ruled South Africa and Haitian refugees.
More recently he has focused his attention on reparations for African
Americans. With the 1999 release of his book on the subject {The Debt : What
America Owes to Blacks,} he sharply outlined his position on this
historically volatile domestic issue.
"No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free
bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile
environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the
gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow. Lines, begun parallel, and
left alone, never touch," wrote the 58-year-old Virginia Union and
Harvard-educated lawyer.
In economic and social terms, Robinson describes the debt as the difference
between white wealth and privilege and black poverty and oppression. He
argues that the imbalance is rooted in slavery and says, "Until America's
white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive
unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people."
To black Americans he asserts that we most learn that the demand for payment
is not for charity, but "simply for what they are owed on a debt that is old
but compellingly obvious and valid still."
Robinson provides examples of the continuing hostility towards black America
246 years later. He linked the 1994 Senate resolution that passed 97 to 0 to
condemn Khallid Abdul Muhammad, a private citizen, "for a hateful speech made
to a group of college students," to the body's silence on the 1997 torture of
Abner Louima by a white New York City police officer and the 1999 killing of
Amadou Diallo by four white police officers from the same force.
Like Robinson, many organizations including the more conservative NAACP and
the National Bar Association, have also recently joined the more radical
National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) to call for
the passage of H.R. 40.
In every legislative session since 1989, Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI)
has introduced H.R. 40 the Commission to Study Reparations for African
Americans Act. (H.R. 40 is symbolic of the phrase, "forty acres and a mule").
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