An introduction to the philosophical implications of the recent surge of political and ethical interest in historical redress.

An exceptional resource, this comprehensive reader brings together primary and secondary documents related to efforts to redress historical wrongs against African Americans. These varied efforts are often grouped together under the rubric “reparations movement,” and they are united in their goal of “repairing” the injustices that have followed from the long history of slavery and Jim Crow. Yet, as this collection reveals, there is a broad range of opinions as to the form that repair might take. Some advocates of redress call for apologies; others for official acknowledgment of wrongdoing; and still others for more tangible reparations: monetary compensation, government investment in disenfranchised communities, the restitution of lost property and rights, and repatriation. Written by activists and scholars of law, political science, African American studies, philosophy, economics, and history, the twenty-six essays include both previously published articles and pieces written specifically for this volume. Essays theorize the historical and legal bases of claims for redress; examine the history, strengths, and limitations of the reparations movement; and explore its relation to human rights and social justice movements in the United States and abroad. Other essays evaluate the movement’s primary strategies: legislation, litigation, and mobilization. While all of the contributors support the campaign for redress in one way or another, some of them engage with arguments against reparations. Among the fifty-three primary documents included in the volume are federal, state, and municipal acts and resolutions; declarations and statements from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the NAACP; legal briefs and opinions; and findings and directives related to the provision of redress, from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 to the mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States is a thorough assessment of the past, present, and future of the modern reparations movement. Contributors. Richard F. America, Sam Anderson, Martha Biondi, Boris L. Bittker, James Bolner, Roy L. Brooks, Michael K. Brown, Robert S. Browne, Martin Carnoy, Chiquita Collins, J. Angelo Corlett, Elliott Currie, William A. Darity, Jr., Adrienne Davis, Michael C. Dawson, Troy Duster, Dania Frank, Robert Fullinwider, Charles P. Henry, Gerald C. Horne, Robert Johnson, Jr., Robin D. G. Kelley, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Douglas S. Massey , Muntu Matsimela , C. J. Munford, Yusuf Nuruddin, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, David B. Oppenheimer, Rovana Popoff, Thomas M. Shapiro, Marjorie M. Shultz, Alan Singer, David Wellman, David R. Williams, Eric K. Yamamoto, Marilyn Yaquinto

Develops a new account of historical injustice and redress, demonstrating why a consideration of history is crucial for gender equality.

The story of how nearly 100,000 Americans achieved reparations and an official apology for one of the most shameful episodes in US history. For decades the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans remained hidden from the historical record, its shattering effects kept silent. But in the 1970s the Japanese American Citizens League began a campaign for an official government apology and monetary compensation. Redress is John Tateishi's firsthand account of this against-all-odds campaign. Tateishi, who led the JACL Redress Committee for many years, admits the task was herculean. The campaign sought an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began with an acutely divided community; for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it. And Tateishi knew that the campaign would succeed only if the public learned that there had been concentration camps on US soil. Redress is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens, and what it means to prevent terrible harms from happening again. This edition features a new preface about the lessons Tateishi's story might have for reparations efforts today.

This book explores how the politics of memory and history affected representations of the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and the passage of redress legislation in 1988.

Should the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles to Greece? Should settler societies in North America and Australasia compensate the aboriginal peoples whom they dispossessed? Should Israel have accepted Germany's compensation for Nazi extermination policies? The last twenty years have seen a remarkable surge of political and ethical interest in historical redress - that is, the righting of old wrongs. In this fascinating book, Richard Vernon argues that whatever the kind of redress that's at issue, and whether the wrong is large or small, an important philosophical issue arises. Exploring recent and high profile cases, Vernon focuses on the issue of responsibility. Responsibility isn't something inherited, like property or one's DNA. How, then, can it fall to one generation to make good the wrongs done by another? The book addresses all the main issues and arguments relating to justice, memory, apology and citizenship, and concludes by arguing for a forward-looking approach that focuses on the right of future generations to live just lives.

In this bold book, A. Naomi Paik grapples with the history of U.S. prison camps that have confined people outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Removed from the social and political communities that would guarantee fundamental legal protections, these detainees are effectively rightless, stripped of the right even to have rights. Rightless people thus expose an essential paradox: while the United States purports to champion inalienable rights at home and internationally, it has built its global power in part by creating a regime of imprisonment that places certain populations perceived as threats beyond rights. The United States' status as the guardian of rights coincides with, indeed depends on, its creation of rightlessness. Yet rightless people are not silent. Drawing from an expansive testimonial archive of legal proceedings, truth commission records, poetry, and experimental video, Paik shows how rightless people use their imprisonment to protest U.S. state violence. She examines demands for redress by Japanese Americans interned during World War II, testimonies of HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantanamo in the early 1990s, and appeals by Guantanamo's enemy combatants from the War on Terror. In doing so, she reveals a powerful ongoing contest over the nature and meaning of the law, over civil liberties and global human rights, and over the power of the state in people's lives.

"In this study Polish emigre Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the term 'genocide' and defined it as a subject of international law"--Provided by publisher.

This book examines the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. comprehensively. The Japanese military forcefully mobilized about 80,000-200,000 Asian women to Japanese military brothels and forced them into sexual slavery during the Asian-Pacific War (1932-1945). Korean "comfort women" are believed to have been the largest group because of Korea’s colonial status. The redress movement for the victims started in South Korea in the late 1980s. The emergence of Korean "comfort women" to society to tell the truth beginning in 1991 and the discovery of Japanese historical documents, proving the responsibility of the Japanese military for establishing and operating military brothels by a Japanese historian in 1992 accelerated the redress movement for the victims. The movement has received strong support from UN human rights bodies, the U.S. and other Western countries. It has also greatly contributed to raising people’s consciousness of sexual violence against women at war. However, the Japanese government has not made a sincere apology and compensation to the victims to bring justice to the victims.

Restaging the Past is the first edited collection devoted to the study of historical pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations. Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today.