*Black Lives Matter activist Bree Newsome called out white Americans whose families stole land and property from Black Americans post-slavery.
“Amazing how white people commit atrocities in one generation & then they just disappear from existence,” she said in a series of tweets calling for reparations.
“No descendants, no names, no current wealth or land holdings that can be identified as a result of the atrocity. Only Black survivors exist with living memory, apparently,” Newsome added.
“White violence has driven Black migration across the country and led to significant loss of land and wealth, but we can’t identify to whose hands specific plots of land and subsequent wealth was transferred? The current class of wealthy white people have no connection? Hmm,” she wrote in a second tweet.
Newsome famously scaled a flagpole to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capital in Columbia.
READ MORE: California Task Force on Slavery Launches Study on Reparations
Amazing how white people commit atrocities in one generation & then they just disappear from existence. No descendants, no names, no current wealth or land holdings that can be identified as a result of the atrocity. Only Black survivors exist with living memory, apparently.
— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) May 31, 2021
“We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together,” wrote Newsome at teh time in an essay for the Blue Nation Review. “We made this decision because for us, this is not simply about a flag, but rather it is about abolishing the spirit of hatred and oppression in all its forms.”
As it turned out, Newsome took it upon herself to bring the flag down as she arrived at the state Capital with James Tyson on June 27, 2015. As Tyson stood watch, Essence noted that Newsome climbed over a fence and scaled the 30-foot Confederate flagpole. Police who arrived mid-way through her climb and ordered her to come down ultimately halted Newsome’s efforts.
“Y’all really think there aren’t white people alive today who know the details of certain lynchings either firsthand or because it’s family lore and still have souvenirs, land or money from it in their possession?” she wrote on Twitter onMay 31.
“The United States of America owes us more than they can pay,” she said in the interview. “The reality is modern white civilization — we’re talking the past half-millennia — is built upon Black enslavement. The thing I caution against is allowing the white establishment to go through a process where they feel they paid reparations to us, but they’re still continuing to feed from us and build their civilization off our degradation,” Newsome said during an interview with Complex last year.
“We cannot have Jeff Bezos having hundreds of billions of dollars. That cannot happen anymore.” she added. “We can’t have someone like Donald Trump inherit wealth and then become the president of the United States just because he inherited wealth. That cannot happen anymore. That’s what they’re going to be most resistant to. They’ll give us a little cash. They don’t have a problem giving us a little cash if they have to.”
