Today, Monday, June 19th, the People’s Organization for Progress and a host of other organizations will host the Annual Juneteenth March and Rally for Reparations.
It will begin at 2pm at the Lincoln Memorial, located at 12 Springfield Avenue Newark.
The Annual March began several years ago to amplify the push for a NJ Reparations Bill, a law that would establish a commission to study how Reparations should be developed based on New Jersey’s history with the Slave Trade and post Slavery institutional racism.
New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish slavery. New Jersey gave birth to racial profiling. New Jersey’s public schools are the fifth most segregated in the country.
The principal co-sponsor of the March is the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) who has shaped what is now bill A938/S386, establishing a commission to study the issue and offer those determinants.
Just last week, the State of New York passed a bill through their Senate. The State of California, of all states, has already established a commission and has released a fully developed study on the issue.
The People’s Organization for Progress has supported the demand for Reparations since its inception 41 years ago.
“For the centuries of enslavement of our ancestors, nearly a century of apartheid Jim Crow segregation, and institutionalized racism, inequality, oppression, and exploitation that continues to this day, we are marching to demand passage of the reparations commission bills, A938 and S386 by the New Jersey State Legislature, and passage by Congress of HR 40 and S40 which would establish a federal reparations commission,” said an impassioned Lawrence Hamm, the organization’s founding chairman.
“We urge the New Jersey Legislature to follow the example of the New York Legislature which passed a reparations bill last week.
“We demand the New Jersey Legislature pass the reparations bill and that Governor Murphy sign it into law,” he insisted.
Hamm will be joined by Ryan Haygood of NJISJ as the principal speakers of the action among a host of other social justice and labor leaders.
Twenty six additional organizations have endorsed the march including African American Parades Organization, Black Lives Matter – Paterson, Ironbound Community Corporation, Newark Communities For Accountable Policing (N-CAP), NAACP – Newark Branch, Our Revolution NJ, Salvation And Social Justice, African Diaspora For Justice, Trenton Anti-Violence Coalition, Jewish Voice For Peace-Northern NJ Chapter, NJ Working Families Party, NJ State Industrial Union Council, and Al Awda NY/NJ Palestine Right To Return Coalition.
Earlier in the day, Haygood and others will host a press conference and ceremony on the status of the bill at Port Perth Amboy, one of New Jersey’s two slave ports. That will take place at 11am. Port Perth Amboy is located at Perth Amboy Ferry Slip, 300 Front Street, Perth Amboy.
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