Here’s a little speech by Lady Davis reflecting her spirituality and her understanding of our need for reparations.
“As I think of our people, I feel that that great law of nature, the law that runs throughout all nature and is irrevocable, the law of compensation, we have to pay. The white man has forgotten that great law of compensation. When he committed his dastardly deeds, he thought that he would not have to pay for them. But he has had to pay for them with his blood. That is what has been demanded by God and so he will have to pay the price more and more. He will have to pay for the 300 years of slavery tat he put upon the Negro people. He will have to pay for all the money that he failed to give them in compensation for their labor. He will have to pay for the dragging and wrenching from the Negro mother’s breast of her little babe. He will have to pay for the stripes he helped to put upon the back of the Negro by way of punishment, as he said. And this accumulated debt of hundreds of years, the Anglo-Saxon is beginning to pay for and he will have to pay to the last penny. He has only commenced to pay the compensation that that great law of nature requires of all of us.
We must all pay our debts; and the white man’s debts to the world, his debts to the darker races and the people of the world, have only just commenced to be paid.”
– Honorable Henrietta Vinton Davis,
July 11, 1920 (Negro World 7-17-20)
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