Why DC Council Should Make The Reparations Bill For Survivors of Jim Crow, Instead of Slavery
As many have seen, Trump and the GOP have been trying to take over DC and withold billions of funding from DC. First Trump and the GOP threatened to withhold funding if DC didn’t take down the BLM Plaza.
Now the GOP has a new threat against DC. The DC Reparations bill passed the other week and almost immediately GOP members proposed a bill that withold funding from DC and other cities/ states that pursue reparations. (Name the officials)
The main argument that the GOP official is using to shut down reparations is :
“No American taxpayer should be on the hook to pay reparations to individuals for something that happened over 150 years ago.”
There are many Black people alive today, that survived Jim Crow, including my father, and all the other millions and millions of Black senior citizens in America.
One Jim Crow survivor that is still affected by Jim Crow, is Sarah Collins Rudolph, who I happened to have the honor to speak with on the the phone today (3.28.25). Many people have heard of the 1963 Terrorist Attack/ bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church that killed 4 little Black girls, by the Ku Klux Klan.
What most don’t know is that there was a 5th girl that survived the bombing. Her name is Sarah Collins Rudolph. (seen in the photo below.)
Sarah’s older sister Addie Mae Collins (in the photo above with glasses) was killed in the terrorist attack. Sarah still has glass in her eye and abdomen, due to the bombing over 60 years ago.
A more recent photo of Sarah Collins Rudolph
A must watch in your spare time.
Jim Crow was an apartheid system that was so brutal that it was one of the apartheid systems that Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany were inspired by. It was Fascism.
Most importantly Jim Crow was Genocide.
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress led by the. Black activist, singer, and NFL Football star, Paul Robeson, and another Black activist, William Patterson, submitted a document titled “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations to prove that Jim Crow was Genocide.
When William Patterson returned from London, his passport was seized to prevent him from speaking abroad, about the human rights violations of Black America. Paul Robeson’s passport was also seized. America’s retaliation towards Paul Robeson and William Patterson shows the type of Fascist regime Black America lived under, way before Donald Trump was President.
For those that would like to learn about how Jim Crow was Genocide, I recommend reading the document mentioned previously, called “We Charge Genocide”. You can click here to read it.
More evidence for proving American Apartheid (Jim Crow) was Genocide would come 20 years later. One of the more challenging aspects of proving Genocide is, if the perpetrators were intentionally trying to destroy a race or ethnic group. At the time the “We Charge Genocide” was submitted, the evidence of America’s Counterintelligence Program. (Cointelpro) towards the Black community did not become publicly known until the 70’s. The exposure of Cointelpro showed that in 1963, the FBI admitted their intent to commit genocide against Black people.
The exposure of Cointelpro, showed how in 1963, the FBI admitted to the “intent” to destroy Black America. The FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, head of the Intelligence Division, reported to J Edgar Hoover about information that would destroy Dr. King and his reputation. He said:
“if handled properly, [could] take him off his pedestal… the Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.”
By saying that they don’t want Black people to be steered in the “proper direction” shows they wanted to sabotage and destroy the Black community.
I understand that Black Americans want slavery for the past 400 years instead of only Jim Crow, but there are cases of White people today winning multi million dollar “reverse discrimination” lawsuits.
For example, a white woman was fired from Starbucks received 25 million dollars.
Black senior citizens (as a collective) who survived Jim Crow went through more discrimination than the white woman who received 25 million dollars.
Sarah Rudolph Collins, the survivor of the Birmingham Alabama terrorist attacked definitely suffered more than the Caucasian woman who received more than 25 million.
The Reparations is also not solely about racial terrorism, but stolen wealth.
In a span of 5 minutes, I was able to find the Redlined Black neighborhoods that my parents lived in during Jim Crow on the Redlining Map.
For readers who may not know, Redlining was a Blockade, that blocked Black neighborhoods from wealth and financial services. Similar to imposed sanctions and blockades against foreign countries like Cuba, to cripple their economies, this what America did to Black America.
Between 1934–1962 the American Government HANDED OUT 120 BILLION dollars in home loans to millions of White Americans, lifting them out of poverty and into the middle class.
One example of these government handouts was Levittown, NY(shown in the video). It was there that they. built 17,000 homes for ONLY white people.
The deal was zero down payment and 60 dollars a month. Black America was excluded from these wealth building/ home ownership opportunities.
I’m not expecting the GOP to embrace reparations for Jim Crow survivors. They could very well still oppose reparations, but I do believe making reparations for Jim Crow survivors, only makes our case for reparations stronger. They can say that slavery was 150 years ago and that nobody alive today was a slave or slave owner, but they can NOT say there aren’t millions of living Black seniors who are alive today.
I assume their next argument will be “ Yes they are still alive, but decades have passed, and the time limit for justice has expired.”
Sarah Collins was told “That was in 1963, the politicians today aren’t the same politicians from Jim Crow.
To that I will say: in 1988, Japanese Americans were paid reparations decades after they were placed in internment camps, in the 1940’s.
Jim Crow officially ended in the 1960’s, which was more recent than the 1940’s. Black senior citizens are survivors of Genocide in America and deserve their Reparations, just like every other ethnic group in America who received their Reparations.