BLACK ORGANIZATIONS MATTER

Do Black Americans Need Their Own Group? Yes, But ADOS Fails Royally

Xenophobia has crept in, and it's funking up the movement

A black Union soldier and his family during the Civil War | Photo Credit | New York Times

First, let me say that I am an American descendant of slavery, and I believe that we deserve reparations for the demonstrable practices of slavery and Jim Crow that characterize so much of the Black American experience. “Black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.”

Even though General William T. Sherman' promised descendants of slavery 40 acres, we all know how that turned out. One hundred and fifty-six years later, Black Americans are still waiting for the restorative justice White men promised. The mission of the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement is admirable and even noble.

Many Americans don't realize that reparations were already being issued in money and property but were returned after Lincoln died, ending the program. "Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it— to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America." So, it's not a matter…