Sins of the past: activists seek reparations from U.S. government and corporations with ties to slavery. (National News).

In what could be the most serious effort to get the U.S. government and certain corporations to admit to and compensate for involvement in nearly 250 years of slavery, a group of activists is planning to take both to court.

The Reparations Coordinating Committee includes attorney extraordinaire Johnnie Cochran, professors Manning Marable of Columbia University and Charles Ogletree of Harvard University, and Randall Robinson, founder of the think tank TransAfrica Forum. The group plans to file its first suit by the end of the year.

The committee's first plan is to seek monetary damages from corporations it believes it can prove owned slaves or otherwise benefited from slavery. Later, Cochran says, academia will be targeted, with universities like Harvard and Yale facing possible lawsuits that could lead to the institution of special scholarship funds for African American students. Finally, the group will seek an apology from the U.S. government. "At every point of slavery, it was protected by the writ of law," says Ronald Walters, professor of political science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Reparations Coordinating Committee's research team. "We think they need to own up to that."

The committee is comprised of legal experts and academicians, a strategy it says will be an advantage in proving that specific companies bear some liability for slavery. By identifying the companies and introducing historical documents tying them to the slave trade, the committee believes it can get around stumbling blocks that befell previous reparations suits and force the companies to pay up.

Documenting the role the government and corporations played in slavery is the linchpin of the reparations effort, says Walters. "We are providing the content for the historical side of the claim," he says. "Then the lawyers are taking it where it needs to go." Part of the committee's strategy is to bring in noted academics who can provide a wealth of factual research to document any claims made in court.

But several issues remain. Among them is determining what, if anything, America owes blacks in restitution for the legacy of slavery. Then there's the question of who would be responsible for paying up--the U.S. government, corporations, or individual descendants of slaveholders. With slavery having been abolished nearly 140 years ago, determining eligibility for payment would represent a new set of challenges since African Americans today are, for the most part, at least four generations removed from slavery.

The earliest slave sale was recorded in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. It wasn't until almost 250 years later, with the passing of the 13th Amendment in 1865, that slavery was abolished.

The committee's undertaking, however monumental, has precedence--albeit with several differences. In the late 1990s, survivors of the Holocaust successfully pressured Swiss banks into producing lists of accounts suspected of containing monies gained from the looting of Jewish households and institutions by Nazi supporters. The banks also agreed to pay $1.25 billion into a fund to provide financial aid and medical services to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors. In July 1998, Volkswagen AG admitted to using the labor of 15,000 Eastern Europeans during World War II and announced plans to set up a fund to compensate these workers. Separately, the U.S. government issued a formal apology and $20,000 to each Japanese-American held in an internment camp during the war.

An unrelated lawsuit targets three well-known names in corporate America alleged to have benefited from slavery. In March, lawyers for Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, an African American New York City resident, filed a class-action reparations lawsuit in a Brooklyn federal court against FleetBoston Financial Corp., Aetna Inc., and CSX Corp. claiming they profited from slave labor. The suit, which the plaintiff claims was filed on behalf of the nearly 37 million blacks in America, seeks restitution for slave labor valued at about $1.4 trillion, an estimate of the current value of the unpaid labor with interest.

Cochran was dismayed at the Farmer-Paellmann lawsuit. He said the failure of that suit could jeopardize future court battles for reparations. "We're somewhat distressed about that," he said. "If somebody jumps out of the umbrella and goes to trial and it gets dismissed, all you need is for one judge to throw a case out and this thing doesn't go anywhere."

Walters admits that the fight won't be easy, noting that past attempts to obtain reparations from the U.S. government on behalf of African Americans have failed. Mounting a successful case would likely hinge on avoiding claims made in the past. Suing corporate America for its involvement in slavery, however, has never been done before, and proving that companies profited from slave labor means meeting the challenge of tracing each one through mergers, acquisitions, and other structural changes over a century and a half. Then there's the conservative political climate.

One such failed attempt occurred in 1995 when a U.S. Appeals Court in California dismissed a reparations lawsuit against the federal government by two African Americans. The plaintiffs in the case of Cato v. the United States sought damages on behalf of all the descendants of slavery. In dismissing the case, the court ruled that the United States, as a sovereign nation, had immunity from such a lawsuit. Reparations, it ruled, was an issue for Congress to take up. The court also cited the length of time that had passed since slavery, claiming it would be too difficult to identify all the parties that had been damaged and would be due a piece of any settlement.

Nkechi Taifa, director of the Equal Justice Program at Howard University's School of Law, said any future reparations lawsuits would have to address the issues that resulted in the dismissal of Cato v. the United States.

Not all African Americans agree with these lawsuits. Armstrong Williams, a nationally syndicated black conservative columnist, is one of them. "The reparations movement detracts from the gains of previous generations of civil rights activists by casting a shadow of victimization on all African Americans," he said. "Many African Americans resent being typecast as victims of an institution that ended more than 100 years ago. I'm one of them."

Furthermore, granting blacks reparations would open the door for hordes of other groups that have suffered injustices in America to seek claims, says Williams. "Reparations is harmful, degrading, and a passive form of enslavement," he said. "The bottom line is if it literally paid to be a victim, countless groups would rush forward. The country couldn't afford it. We'd be bankrupt."

Cochran likened the litigation to an ongoing war rather than a battle. "We thought this was an idea whose time has come," Cochran said. "But it's going to be so hard. I think it's going to take the next five or 10 years. There'll be some settlements [and] some victories along the way, but this will be a long battle."

If, and when, that war is won, one big question will remain: What to do with any settlement dollars? Walters, Cochran, and Taifa all dismissed the notion of cutting checks to millions of African Americans. Walters suggested any settlement dollars be put into a fund that could, in turn, finance economic development and education projects. "What was taken away [during slavery] was the capacity to do institutions building. It's really in that area that most of us believe we should work," he said.

Cochran admitted that the committee had not formulated a plan on how to use any cash settlements. "We have not, quite frankly, worked that out yet," he said.

Whether Cochran and company fight this war in the courtrooms, Congress, or the court of public opinion, it's possible that these suits could represent the final chance to prompt corporations into acknowledging and accepting penance for their sins of the past.