[News] Imari Obadele "Father of Reparations" and leader of the RNA dies in Georgia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Imari Obadele "Father of Reparations" dies in Ga.

Associated Press - January 19, 2010 11:14 PM ET

ATLANTA (AP) - Imari Obadele, the former leader of the Republic of 
New Africa separatist group, has died. He was 79.

Obadele's daughters, Marilyn Obadele and Vivian Gafford, said Tuesday 
that their father died of massive stroke Monday in Atlanta.

Known as the "Father of Reparations," Obadele was a staunch supporter 
of Malcom X and eventually became President of the Republic of New 
Africa, which sought to establish its own nation in the South.

He was president when, in 1971, city police and FBI agents battled 
RNA members who were inside a fortified home in Jackson, Miss. One 
police officer was killed and two others were wounded in the shootout.

Obadele spent more than five years in prison for conspiracy but was 
not charged with murder.

Funeral arrangements are pending.
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http://www.zimbio.com/Public+Enemy/articles/138/History+Republic+New+Afrika+RNA+Including

REPARATIONS

Dr. Imari Obadele:

The Father of the Modern Reparations Movement!

Text Written By Robert C. Smith



The issue of reparations has increased attention in the last several 
months. Local and state legislative bodies have taken up the issue; 
articles have appeared in leading newspapers and magazines; it has 
been a topic of lively debate on the Internet and local and national 
television and radio programs; and Randall Robinson's TransAfrica 
conducted a nationally televised symposium on the subject. Also, The 
Boston Globe reports that Harvard's much publicized "dream team" of 
African American intellectuals are considering legal and legislative 
actions to secure reparations.

In virtually all of this discussion, hardly any mention has been made 
of Imari Obadele, the individual who probably should be described as 
the father of the modern reparations movement.

That Obadele's work has been ignored is not surprising, given how the 
mainstream media, black and white, covers African American politics. 
This coverage is frequently uninformed and almost always biased and 
myopic, focusing mainly on the familiar disputes between black 
liberals and conservatives and black Democrats and Republicans, while 
ignoring - relegating to the fringes - the powerful tradition of 
nationalism in the black community's politics.

Bishop Henry M. Turner was the first African American leader to call 
for reparations. He did so near the end of the Reconstruction era. 
The Nation of Islam has, since its inception, called for reparations, 
and the Republic of New Africa (RNA), organized by Obadele and his 
Malcolm X Society associates in 1968, demanded payment of $400 
billion in "slavery damages." However, the modern movement for 
reparations did not take organizational form until 1988, when Obadele 
and his associates formed the National Coalition of Blacks for 
Reparations in America (NCOBRA).

NCOBRA initiates litigation publishes a newsletter and sponsors 
national and regional conferences. Professor Obadele gave the closing 
argument in a mock trial at Bethune-Cookman College in 1998, where a 
bi-racial jury voted to award reparations. At its tenth annual 
convention held in St. Louis in June 1999, NCOBRA adopted the "Six 
Down-Payment Demands on the U.S. Government," which demanded that a 
billion dollars each be given to ten black colleges, that a billion 
dollars be placed in a black economic development fund, that $20,000 
be awarded to each black family, that a billion dollars be given to 
black farmers, and that all "political prisoners" be released. For 
more information, visit the NCOBRA website.

Imari Obadele is currently a professor of political science at 
Prairie View A & M University, where he has been on the faculty since 
1990. A leading scholar of nationalism, Obadele served for twenty 
years as Provisional President of RNA and is currently a member of 
the group's national legislative council. The principal aim of the 
RNA since its formation has been the organization of a plebiscite 
among African Americans in order to determine whether they would wish 
to form an independent nation-state within the current boundaries of 
the United States. Professor Obadele has written extensively on the 
right of blacks under prevailing standards of international law to 
have been accorded after the Civil War the opportunity to choose 
independent nation-state status rather than forcible incorporation 
into the United States.

In August of 1971, as part of its COINTELPRO program to "expose, 
disrupt and otherwise neutralize" black nationalist and other radical 
organizations, the FBI conducted a pre-dawn raid on the Jackson, 
Mississippi headquarters of the RNA. In the ensuing gun battle, a 
Jackson police officer was killed and an FBI agent and another 
policeman were wounded. Obadele and several other RNA officials were 
sentenced to long prison terms. He spent nearly five years behind 
bars, but as a result of national grassroots mobilization and a legal 
campaign, he was eventually freed. He immediately resumed his 
leadership work in the RNA.

But he also decided to combine his life of activism with scholarship, 
enrolling at Temple University where he earned a BA in 1981, a 
Master's in 1982 and a Ph.D in 1985. His areas of specialization 
include American government, constitutional law, international 
relations and African American politics. Before joining the faculty 
at Prairie View, Obadele taught at William Paterson College and the 
College of Wooster.

A prolific scholar, Professor Obadele has written three textbooks, 
co-edited two volumes (including The Forty Acres Documents, an 
important reference source on reparations) and in 1984 authored Free 
The Land, an autobiographical account of his work in the RNA during the 1970s.

I recently spoke to Imari Obadele.

Question: When did you first become active in the black freedom struggle?

Answer: I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and managed to join 
the Boy Scouts at 11, in 1941. My brother Milton, a Lincoln 
University student, had joined the 99th Pursuit Squadron to begin 
training as a radio operator. He was commissioned by the Signal Corps 
as a second lieutenant and then went on to become a fighter pilot. 
Milton was one of the leading black officers who fought against the 
discriminatory impositions suffered by black officers, including the 
inability to be admitted to officers' clubs on various bases, the 
frequent refusals of white enlisted men to salute black officers. He 
took his complaints to Air Force Headquarters at Mitchell Field, New 
York, and was ultimately court-martialed and given an "other than 
honorable" discharge. He completed work at Lincoln University without 
the GI Bill, was then refused admission at Temple University Law 
School, but was admitted to Yale Law School, from which he graduated 
in 1947 and subsequently passed the Michigan bar.

As teenagers, myself and my neighborhood buddies, as Explorer Scouts, 
avidly followed Milton's struggle as it was reported in the 
Pittsburgh Courier and other Afro-American national newspapers. His 
dauntless struggle -- particularly as he continued his fight against 
racism when he returned home -- inspired all of us, including myself, 
to make a commitment to ending our people's oppression and injustice. 
In Philadelphia in those early years Milton and I were instrumental 
in forming a Civil Rights group, which brought W.E.B. Du Bois to 
town, and which also led to an effort to create a boycott against the 
segregation in the U.S. military. This case -- with Devreaux 
Tomlinson of Philadelphia as main plaintiff -- never went to trial, 
but we believe that Truman's order to integrate the army in terms of 
units (not within units), as the Korean War began in the summer of 
1950, was a response to this campaign. will lead us." By Kevin Merida

Question: What led you to conclude that an independent state is the 
optimum outcome of the black freedom struggle in the United States?

Answer: My brothers Milton Henry and Lawrence Henry (a freelance news 
reporter and photographer) met with Malcolm X and shortly before 
King's "March on Washington" introduced me to the brother. The 
Detroit organization which we had formed, a civil and economic rights 
group called "The Group on Advanced Leadership" (GOAL), invited 
Malcolm X and others involved in the rights movement to speak for us 
in Detroit. Here he made his formidable "Message To The Grassroots" speech.

This was a turning point in my political life. I was married with 
four children and employed at the U.S. Tank-Automotive Command as a 
technical writer, and attending classes at Wayne State University 
when I could. GOAL was peopled by many persons, some of whom have 
become educators and political luminaries in Detroit. Malcolm's 
speech was early November 1963. Kennedy was killed two weeks later, 
and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, suspended Malcolm 
for having commented that "the chickens have come home to roost." 
Milton and myself and others in Detroit, and armed brothers in 
Brooklyn and the Los Angeles area, who were followers of Malcolm but 
not members of the Nation of Islam, became Malcolm's support, though 
we failed to stop his 1965 assassination.

Within three years our Malcolm X Society had called a "Black 
Government Conference" in Detroit and established a Provisional 
Government, named the unfree nation as the Republic of New Africa, 
and charged the Provisional Government with leading the struggle for 
independence of the Republic. The Declaration of Independence was 
signed 31 March 1968, the same Sunday that Lyndon Johnson announced 
that he would not seek re-election as President of the United States. 
Robert Williams, in exile in China, was named our first President. 
Milton was named First Vice President and Betty Shabazz was named 
second Vice President. I was named Minister of Information.

Question: How do you respond to critics who say the idea of an 
independent black nation-state is a fantasy -- completely unrealistic 
-- because it is not desired by most blacks, and not achievable even 
if desired?

Answer: Our effort is to recruit those who do believe that creating a 
state as independent as Canada is possible and will work to achieve 
it. People have a right to believe it is a fantasy. But what's new? 
The United States and its institutions have worked to make all of our 
people believe that because of the Fourteenth Amendment we have been 
"made" into U.S. citizens. Even many Black professors refuse to write 
in their books or teach their classes that New African people -- 
persons born in the United States and descended from Africans once 
held in slavery -- had and have after the Thirteenth Amendment the 
right to political self-determination.

We should have been asked -- as a group and individually -- what we 
wanted to choose as our political future. Instead, the United States, 
which theretofore had refused the application of the Rule of Jus Soli 
[an ancient legal standard that tied citizenship to place of birth] 
to Africans born in America, assumed that they could deny us the 
right to self-determination when they passed the Thirteenth Amendment 
and, then, passing the Fourteenth Amendment two-and-a-half years 
later, could impose the Rule of Jus Soli upon us. The most modest 
count indicates that over nine percent of our 40 million population 
desire independence today, despite the years of U.S. brainwashing. 
Time and events will bring the reality to the rest of us. The key is 
information and choice.

Question: Given your long-time involvement in the reparations 
struggle, what do you think of the recently highly publicized efforts 
of Randall Robinson and others?

Answer: Mr. Robinson's book [The Debt: What America Owes Blacks] has 
helped to make reparations a household word, coming after ten years 
of struggle by NCOBRA. Those who are joining the fight will 
emphasize, we trust, the importance of the 27-odd chapters across the 
country continuing their consultations with Black organizations 
everywhere to decide the forms of reparations and establish elected 
local organs to deal with the collective aspects of the payment, 
economic development, education, and release of people from jail 
based on reviews by elected community parole boards.

Question: What's your thinking on the Africa-based initiatives led by 
the OAU and Ali Mazrui? Are there connections, coordination between 
the African American and African initiatives? If not, should there be?

Answer: We in America and our people throughout the diaspora must 
work together. NCOBRA is involved in this work.

Question: Also, to what extent is there communications or 
coordination between NCOBRA, Robinson and other activists who have 
recently embraced the cause?

Answer: NCOBRA is a mass-based organization, which includes members 
like Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, the National Conference of Black 
Political Scientists, the National Conference of Black Lawyers. The 
NAACP has passed a resolution asking chapters to work with NCOBRA.

Question: Some blacks say that while reparations are owed it is not 
likely that the debt will be paid, and that a highly visible national 
debate on the issue will be racially divisive (a 1997 poll found that 
while 65% of blacks supported reparations, it was opposed by 88% of 
whites) and in the long run harmful to blacks. What's your judgment?

Answer: Many New African people, unfortunately, must have our souls 
repaired and appreciate our history. We have always achieved things 
that were supposed to be impossible. The United States will do what 
all countries do: They pay when they MUST, when paying is the best 
alternative to what else they face. What is this about racial 
divisiveness? We are supposed to allow a nation of thieves, the 
whites, to remain comfortable with the wealth and rectitude stolen from us?

Question: At this point, where do you see the movement going in the 
next several years?

Answer: Movements reach critical points. In the next several years, 
reparations will be won and we will begin to use the proceeds in the 
best manner to repair ourselves as a people and once more provide 
black genius to the world.





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