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Slavery's Price

By AAN Staff
february 21, 2002  10:02 am
Slavery's Price
Sometime this fall, a group of the most influential black lawyers in the country -- including Harvard's Charles Ogletree and O.J. Simpson's attorney Johnnie Cochran -- are expected to walk into a federal courthouse and file suit against the people of the United States. The Hartford Advocate's Alistair Highet looks at the arguments for and against reparations. "What the lawsuit will say is a matter of conjecture, but it is expected to go like this: From 1619 until 1865, the white people of this country enslaved more than four million people of African descent who were bought and sold in this continent like farm animals. The white people of the country made a lot of money from them. Now the descendants of these Africans want some of that money back," he writes.