AND THEY KEPT INSISTING The Persistent Journey Toward Global Reparatory Solidarity

AND THEY KEPT INSISTING
The Persistent Journey Toward Global Reparatory Solidarity

By CeeJay Marie | Scribe Diva Ink

Reparations did not begin with a United Nations resolution. They did not begin in Accra, Ghana, in June 2026. They did not begin with CARICOM's Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, H.R. 40, or the modern political debate over whether descendants of enslaved Africans are owed compensation. The demand for repair is nearly as old as the injustice itself.

In 1783, Belinda Sutton, a formerly enslaved woman who had endured nearly fifty years of enslavement, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a pension from the estate of Isaac Royall, the man who had enslaved her. Her petition was successful. She was awarded an annual pension from his estate, although records indicate she would have to petition repeatedly when payments were not made.

Nearly a century later, Henrietta Wood sought restitution through the courts. Wood had been legally freed before she was kidnapped in 1853, taken from Ohio into Kentucky and sold back into slavery. After emancipation, she sued one of the men responsible. In 1878, a federal jury awarded her $2,500 (roughly $83,500 in purchasing power today).

Then came organization. Callie House, born into slavery in Tennessee, helped build what historian Mary Frances Berry has described as the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans. Through the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, House and others organized formerly enslaved people around a simple proposition: if the United States could provide pensions to those who had served the country, what did it owe the people whose unpaid labor had helped build it?

The movement grew to hundreds of thousands. The government did not answer with reparations. House and the Association continued organizing, petitioning Congress and eventually pursuing the federal government through the courts.

And they were hardly the last. Across generations, the language changed. The strategies changed. The institutions being challenged changed. But the underlying demand remained remarkably persistent: acknowledge the harm, recognize its consequences and provide some form of repair.

By the twentieth century, that demand was moving through civil rights, Black nationalist, Pan-African and international human rights movements. Queen Mother Audley Moore brought demands for reparations before the United Nations. James Forman's 1969 Black Manifesto demanded $500 million from white churches and synagogues for Black-led institutions, including land banks, universities and media. In 1987, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, N'COBRA, was established specifically to pursue reparations for African descendants in the United States.

Two years later, Congressman John Conyers Jr. introduced H.R. 40, calling for a federal commission to study slavery, its continuing effects and proposals for reparations.

None of this was happening in a vacuum. Across Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere, the consequences of slavery and colonialism were being confronted through different political, legal and social movements. The issue reached an important international forum at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The resulting Durban Declaration and Programme of Action acknowledged slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity and addressed their continuing consequences.

Though recent developments have brought greater global attention to reparatory justice, its pursuit has been international for decades. That distinction matters.

A MOVEMENT ALREADY IN MOTION

One of the clearest examples is CARICOM. In 2013, Caribbean heads of government established the CARICOM Reparations Commission to develop the moral, ethical and legal case for reparations from former European colonial powers for Native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel slavery.

The Commission subsequently developed its Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. Its vision of reparations was already broader than a check. The plan called for a full formal apology, repatriation, an Indigenous peoples development program, cultural institutions, attention to the public health crisis and illiteracy, an African knowledge program, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and debt cancellation.

CARICOM also understood that reparatory justice could not remain confined to the Caribbean. Its own writings explicitly discussed globalizing the reparations movement and taking the issue into international institutions. And it was not alone. The United Nations, African Union, civil society organizations, scholars, activists, governments and descendants of affected communities had been pushing different aspects of the issue across national and international forums for years.

This is where my understanding of what happened in 2026 changed. I initially saw the United Nations resolution and the conference that followed in Accra as the moment reparatory justice became a global effort. That is not quite right. The deeper I looked, the clearer it became that the remarkable thing about 2026 was not the globalization of a previously isolated cause. It was convergence.

For more than two centuries, people had been pursuing repair through courts, petitions, legislation, activism, scholarship, diplomacy, regional alliances and international institutions. These efforts sometimes intersected. They influenced one another. Some were explicitly international. Yet there was no single global architecture capable of bringing these various fronts into a coherent, sustained structure.

Even the organizers of the 2026 Accra conference identified fragmentation as something the next phase of the movement needed to address. That word matters. Fragmented does not mean inactive. It does not mean unorganized. And it certainly does not mean insignificant. It means that extraordinary work was occurring across different fronts without the kind of common global infrastructure now being contemplated.

That distinction matters because it allows us to recognize what happened in 2026 for what it actually was.

MARCH 25, 2026

As discussed in my article Breaking the Silence, on March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.48, declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and the system of racialized chattel enslavement the gravest crime against humanity. The vote was 123 in favor. Three countries voted against it: Argentina, Israel and the United States. Fifty-two abstained.

For the first time, an overwhelming majority of the international community placed this declaration into the formal record of the United Nations.

For generations, reparations claims were advanced by individuals, activist organizations, communities, political movements, nations and regions. This vote did something different. It made countries take a position.

Every member state had one vote. Economically powerful member states could not influence the outcome by purchasing additional votes. Populations did not determine how many votes a nation received. Military strength did not change the arithmetic either. When the voting ended, 123 countries had placed themselves on the international record in support of the resolution. Three had placed themselves against it. Fifty-two had chosen not to take either position.

That did not establish legal liability. It established something else. Visibility.

The demand for repair was no longer being advanced only by those seeking it. It had been placed before the international community, and the international community had answered publicly. There is power in that.

THEN CAME ACCRA

Three months later, representatives gathered in Accra. This is where the sequence becomes particularly important. The June 17–19 conference was not simply another gathering to discuss whether reparations should happen. Its stated objectives included developing a Global Post-Adoption Framework to advance the resolution worldwide and explicitly “address fragmentation.”

The conference moved from technical deliberation to political endorsement. It established three proposed international bodies focused respectively on reparatory justice, restitution of cultural artifacts and the legal architecture for reparatory claims. It also called for an annual cross-regional consultative forum intended to sustain political momentum and accountability.

In other words, the work was moving from recognition toward architecture.

That does not mean the architecture is complete. It does not mean implementation has been established. It certainly does not mean reparatory justice has been achieved. But it does mean something has changed.

For centuries, individuals asked. Communities organized. Activists demanded. Lawsuits were filed. Legislation was introduced. Movements formed. Regional governments coordinated. International bodies debated. Frameworks were developed. And each generation left something behind for the next one to pick up.

That history makes clear that 2026 was not a beginning. What emerged in 2026 was something different.

I see Belinda Sutton asking the Massachusetts legislature for compensation in 1783. I see Henrietta Wood walking into federal court. I see Callie House organizing formerly enslaved people across the South. I see Queen Mother Moore carrying the demand into international spaces. I see generations of activists insisting that emancipation without repair left unfinished business. I see John Conyers returning to Congress with H.R. 40. I see Durban. I see CARICOM taking the extraordinary step of transforming reparatory justice into coordinated regional government policy. I see scholars, lawyers, organizers, descendants and communities continuing to build the intellectual, legal and moral case.

And then I see 123 lights on a United Nations voting board.

That board did not appear from nowhere.

It had ancestors.

Perhaps that is the most important thing to understand about this moment. History often looks inevitable after something happens. We compress decades into paragraphs and centuries into timelines. One milestone follows another until progress appears almost orderly.

It wasn't.

People asked for repair and died without receiving it. Movements grew and were suppressed. Bills were introduced and went nowhere. Cases were won. Others were lost. Governments resisted. Institutions refused. Generations inherited both the consequences of the original injustice and the unfinished work of addressing it.

And still, the demand survived.

That is why I hesitate to describe 2026 simply as a victory. It is something more complicated and, perhaps, more consequential. It is evidence of what can happen when an idea survives long enough to outlive the boundaries once placed around it.

Reparatory justice moved from individual petitions to collective organizing, from collective organizing into political movements, from political movements into legislative and regional frameworks, and from those frameworks into an increasingly coordinated international conversation. The road was not straight. The work was not centralized. And no single person, organization, country or generation owns what has now become possible.

They built upon one another.

The nineteen commitments that emerged from Accra deserve their own examination. So does the question of what happens when principles encounter politics, implementation, competing national interests and the difficult task of deciding what repair actually looks like.

I will get there.

But before asking what comes next, I think we owe something to the people who came before. We should know how we got here.

Because the story of reparatory justice did not begin when the world finally started paying attention. It began when people who had been harmed insisted that what happened to them required repair.

And they kept insisting.

References

· United Nations in Ghana: Ghana Leads Historic UN Vote Declaring Slave Trade the Gravest Crime Against Humanity
· Ghana Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Reparations 2026 High-Level Event and Global Post-Adoption Framework
· CARICOM Reparations Commission: The Global Reparations Movement
· CARICOM Reparations Commission: About the Commission
· CARICOM Reparations Commission: Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice
· Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: Durban Declaration and Programme of Action
· The New York Times: The Long History of the Reparations Debate
· NBC News: Calls for Reparations Are as Old as Emancipation
· Brown University: Confronting Slavery's Legacy: The Reparations Question
· Harvard Gazette: Case for Reparation Gains International Force
· NAACP: Reparations

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