On the 52 Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization he co-founded in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called for the federal government to pay reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the country.
Slavery began on these shores twelve years after the colonial period began when a shipload of enslaved Africans docked at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. One hundred and sixty-eight years later ( 1787), when the framers of the constitution met in Philadelphia to charter a new government under the name selected back in 1776 by Thomas Jefferson, as the United States of America, slavery was all but codified. Enslaved Africans were considered the property of any white man — or white woman through inheritance — who could afford to own them.