August 29th, 2026: A Day for Reparations & Pan-African Solidarity

Background

The Politics of Reparations

Reparations is fundamentally a political demand from which everything else follows. In the final analysis, the debt owed to People of African Descent is the responsibility of the U.S. government. The debt owed is a collective, rather than an individual one. Reparations will only be won through an irresistible pressure brought by the organized masses of People of African Descent.

1. Our platform is built on the foundation set by those People of African Descent — Callie House, W.E.B. DuBois, Queen Mother Moore, Malcolm X, and more — whose work preceded our organization’s birth in 1987. But it also reflects the lessons we have learned from our own participation in this fight: it cannot be detached from the history and context of the political struggles of Black people and must resist attempts to water down Black people’s politics and the struggle for reparations.
2. While an entire political history of reparations remains to be written, it is undeniable that reparations is rooted in the political traditions of Black Nationalism and the evolution of Pan-Africanism. This is evident from the earliest documentation.

Contextualizing Belinda Sutton

The first documented case of reparations being demanded and awarded comes from Belinda Royall, later Sutton, who had been enslaved by one of the largest enslavers in the colonies, Isaac Royall Jr. More is continually being learned about Belinda Sutton, and one should read her petition in its entirety. In it, she makes the case for how her previous life was stolen from her, recounts the horrors she endured, and describes the wealth that was built from her exploitation, for which she demanded compensation.

While one might speculate about Sutton’s politics — given that, at the age of seventy, she could neither read nor write — the petition itself, dictated to the renowned abolitionist Prince Hall, reflects ideas associated with an emerging Black political consciousness. Hall is widely recognized as a forerunner of Black Nationalism through his advocacy of self-determination, Black institution-building, and racial solidarity. His politics encompassed both emigration efforts to Africa and the struggle for full citizenship in the United States. While American culture has often emphasized individualism, Belinda Sutton’s claim for reparations cannot be separated from the broader Black Boston community in which she lived. Her demand spoke not only to her own circumstances but also to the reality of the approximately 300 people with whom she had been enslaved. Organization and community building is at the foundation of the earliest reparations case in the United States.

The Black Church, Emigration, and Reparations

The founding of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia in 1816 was another seminal moment, in which African people debated and articulated the essential issues of the day. Whether to leave or remain in the United States, free Blacks in the North considered two central questions: the struggle to end enslavement for those who remained in bondage and the unpaid debt owed to African people in the United States. They also debated whether emigration would mean abandoning those causes.

Paul Cuffee’s voyage to Africa and back in 1815 served as a catalyst for these discussions, even before the founding of the American Colonization Society two years later. Major debates among Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Delany, and Frederick Douglass throughout the 1850s further highlighted the questions of emigration and what America owed to the formerly enslaved. The Civil War and the participation of African people in it disrupted this discourse. Yet the discussion reemerged following the failure of Reconstruction and the unfulfilled promise of General Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, which pledged forty acres of land to the formerly enslaved.

The collapse of Reconstruction ushered in the nadir of the 1890s, a period during which many African people remarked that racial violence, peonage, and convict leasing had become worse than slavery itself. This era also witnessed the re-emergence of the Black Church conventions (common before The Civil War) led by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who advocated both emigration and land acquisition and demanded government support for these efforts.

Twentieth-Century Reparations Mass Movements

Callie House can be credited with leading the earliest mass movement for reparations when she and others established the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in 1898. Although House is not often included among prominent Black Nationalists, this omission fails to see her politics and the consequences of them. By 1900, she had toured the country and organized approximately 300,000 formerly enslaved Africans to demand compensation for unpaid labor. The campaign for reparations in the form of pensions, combined with the organization of Black communities on a mass scale, was so effective that House was slandered in national newspapers and eventually imprisoned on fraud charges in an effort to derail the movement.

Queen Mother Moore is the most significant advocate for reparations the world has known, yet her work cannot be understood outside the context of her Black Nationalist and Pan-African politics. Inspired by Marcus Garvey’s UNIA movement in 1920, her influence spanned the remainder of the twentieth century, from her early activism through her final appearance at the Million Man March in 1995 and her transition in 1997.

In the early decades (1920–1950s) her politics was grounded in Black liberation movements, even during her membership in the Communist Party USA. During that period, she fought for the release of the Scottsboro Boys and helped organize Black Popular Front campaigns against fascism at home and abroad.

Her petitions to the United Nations in 1957 and 1959 transformed reparations into an international campaign and represent a pioneering effort that continues to shape how reparations should be understood today. Moore directly linked demands for reparations and land for Black people in the United States to broader decolonization struggles in Africa and exerted both direct and indirect influence on emerging generations of leaders. Among the most significant examples was her influence on the continued Pan-African development of Malcolm X. She was also a founding member of the Republic of New Afrika in 1968, whose leading figures included Chokwe Lumumba and Imari Obadele, founding members who later founded the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA).

Direct Ties to Durban

Queen Mother Moore’s influence on reparations encompasses mass movement politics, Pan-Africanism, and internationalism. When Malcolm X argued that Black people’s demands should be framed as human rights claims and advanced in the international arena, he was building upon both Moore’s influence and a long-standing Black political tradition.

When the December 12th Movement and the National Black United Front began collaborating in the 1990s around the political imperative of holding the United States accountable for human rights violations and charges of genocide, they began laying the groundwork for the campaign leading to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. Beginning in 1993, that effort sought to ensure that the world understood the fundamental nature of the oppression of Black people in the United States in relation to Black people throughout the African world and that these conditions were rooted in the foundational crimes of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism.

Reparations advocacy in the United States would be incomplete without this historical overview, which helps explain how generations of struggle have contributed to an understanding of the enslavement of African people and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as the gravest crime against humanity and why reparations remains a necessary demand for justice.

Lessons From the Last 25 Years

In the last 25 years reparations has become more popular than at any time in its much longer history. Part of this is credited with the victory of Durban, another part of this is a reaction to the upsurge of activism in the wake of George Floyd and the international embarrassment that the United States has experienced. With the creation of at least 50 local (municipal or state-wide) reparations commissions and task forces, and many more organizations, we must be clear that reparations must be a mass issue, fundamentally rooted in the larger Pan-African struggle.

Durban is clear that in the final analysis, African people in the U.S. must make a national demand on the federal government. The demand must recognize our historic and present day material reality in the face of a government that is hostile to African people and our demand for reparations.