Mounting the Challenges and Claiming the Victory
By Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

The Reparations Movement is like a train. The train left the station during slavery with the enslaved demanding some recompense for their, and their ancestors, forced free labor. That labor was in conditions which sought to strip them of their basic human dignity: their languages, their right to have and maintain families, their right to be free of State terror. In the 1860s it, the train, picked up those demanding passage of legislation to codify General Sherman's field Order 15 making 40 acres of federal land available to previously enslaved Africans.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the train stopped in Nashville, TN, and had to add new cars to to pick up Callie House and Rev. Isaiah Dickerson and the organization they led, The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association. They sought pensions for previously enslaved Africans, and at one time the organization counted 600,000 members. This Ex-Slave Association was de-stabilized from withinand without, and its ultimate demise came when the leadership was accused and convicted of mail fraud -- a charge that was borne of racism and a desire of the U.S. government to destroy the organization, although it was merely seeking some semblance of justice for the previously enslaved. READ MORE...