From the AFP:

PARIS — Historians and anti-racism campaigners are to urge the countries that oversaw and profited from the Atlantic slave trade to recognise it as a crime against humanity, opening the way for reparations.

Next week, activists are to send a letter to the leaders of Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain asking them to recognise the trade as an historic injustice a century and a half after it ended.

They have already convinced France to do so.

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The European Memorial Foundation for the Slave Trade will launch the appeal at the French Senate on May 10, backed by the French historian Louis Sala-Molins and John Franklin from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

“There are several reasons for this, including its symbolic value, to restore the memory of this crime against humanity,” Karfa Diallo, chairman of the foundation, told AFP.

“There’s also a question, shall we say, of justice,” he said.

The continuing problem of racism in a Europe that now has an ethnically diverse population that could be precisely traced back to the 16th and 17th century texts justifying and codifying slavery, he argued.

“Racism and discrimination persists in Europe. Young people of Caribbean and African ancestry are victims of it. And we know, historians have shown this, that racism was born in this story.”

Diallo’s group was founded in the former French slave port of Bordeaux in 1998.

It has found allies in other cities of Western Europe that grew wealthy on the profits of the trade, from Bristol in England to Porto in Portugal.

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OPINION: Skip Gates Is Wrong – America Still Owes Us Reparations

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From AOL Black Voices:

Last week, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., made the controversial claim that black Africans were as much to blame for slavery as white Europeans and Americans. According to Gates the implication of Africans makes the messy issue of reparations for the descendants of slaves even messier. But is he missing the point?

In Gates’ mind, the people who profited most from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (Europeans and Americans) are no more or less guilty than those who first sold slaves into captivity (the African elite). That’s like saying the people who referred clients to Bernie Madoff are just as guilty as the man who made billions off of his marks.

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In Gates’ New York Times op-ed “Ending the Slavery Blame Game”, he reminds us that “90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders.” The debate over reparations, Gates argues, is at best irresolvable because black people were just as complicit in the slave trade as were white people. But following this logic misses two main points: one, that identifying the original sinner doesn’t absolve all other guilty parties of their sins; and two, the profits gained from the original sin are alone grounds for some form of compensation.

For years, Gates has made it his business to shed light on the fact that the institution of chattel slavery was made possible, in part, by early Africans who both enslaved other Africans and sold them into captivity. Whether or not his motivations for this historical muck-raking are purely scholarly or more about assuaging the guilt of white America is still up for debate. However, he does provide a necessary counterpoint to the lopsided view of history many black romantics have.

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OPINION: Africans Are As Much To Blame For Slavery As Anyone

Not So Fast, Senate: How Slavery Reparations Might Work

From the Daily Comet:

A bill before the legislature would require some of Massachusetts oldest banking, financial and insurance companies to look deep into their history – and the histories of subsidiaries and predecessor companies – to uncover links to the slave trade, as a condition of doing business with the state.

It also would authorize the secretary of state to produce a book documenting to what extent the state, since the times of the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, benefited from slavery, whether through taxes or economic growth.

RELATED: Not So Fast, Senate: How Slavery Reparations Might Work

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Byron Rushing, D-Boston, said understanding that difficult history is key to any future discussion of apologies or reparation claims tied to slavery. He said most people underestimate the economic significance of slavery to the growth of the country and the state.

“Part of the problem is that people are ignorant of what slavery actually was,” he said. “Most people’s views of slavery are attached to abolition – not the ongoing horror of slavery, but the end of slavery.”

The focus on Massachusetts may seem misplaced at first. The state was the first to abolish slavery, recording no slaves in a 1790 federal census, Rushing said. Massachusetts also was a center of abolitionist activity in the years leading up to the Civil War.

A monument to the famed 54th Massachusetts regiment, the band of black soldiers who charged entrenched Confederates during an attack on South Carolina’s Battery Wagner, sits opposite the Statehouse.

But while the state distanced itself from slavery early in the nation’s history, some Massachusetts residents and institutions continued to profit from the trade up to and even after the Civil War when the trade continued to flourish outside the country, Rushing said.

RELATED: OPINION: Should Black People Be Grateful For Slavery?

One prime target is insurance companies that offered policies to slave owners covering their slaves.

Massachusetts isn’t the first state to consider untangling its historic economic ties to the slave trade.

California passed the nation’s first law forcing insurance companies that do business with the state to disclose their slavery ties. Illinois passed a similar insurance law in 2003, and Iowa has also begun requesting the same disclosures.

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