Viola Fletcher and her brother Hughes Van Ellis’s acquisition of Ghanaian citizenship is a significant milestone in their long and remarkable lives. As survivors of one of the worst race massacres in American history, their journey to Ghana represents a symbolic homecoming and a powerful reminder of the resilience and perseverance of the African spirit.
As state and federal lawmakers grapple with whether or not the State of California — and the United States as a whole — should take a closer look at what it owes the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States, a group of Black California activists are getting ahead of the conversation. They are distilling the case for reparations down to why African Americans deserve to get paid for centuries of free labor and the Jim Crow laws and other forms of state-enforced discriminatory practices that followed. They are also specifying which segment of Black Americans should get those payments.