How will the 2001 Durban Conference be remembered, 25 years later?

 words by Charles Brooks

August 29th will be the day to recognize and highlight the 25th anniversary of the 2001 World Conference against Racism WCAR held in Durban, South Africa. 

Reparations events and activities will be taking place across the nation, and the globe to not only commemorate the historic world conference, but to amplify the clear demand for reparations.

The events will focus on the victories occurring on the global stage such as the 2001 Conference, where for the first time, slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was declared a crime against humanity. This laid the groundwork to the recent victory where the international community overwhelmingly agreed with the African Union’s resolution presented to the United Nations, declaring the trafficking of Africans and racialized chattel enslavement the gravest crime against humanity. 

The December 12th Movement (D12), along with the National Black United Front (NBUF) played key roles in organizing and mobilizing over 400 Black people, the Durban 400, to travel to the 2001 World Conference in Durban, South Africa, to take an active role in the demand for reparations. 

2026 opened with a press conference led by the December 12th Movement, along with several organizations and individuals involved in the Durban conference. 

They directed attention to the 25th anniversary of the World Conference, the historic declaration, the conference document known as the Durban Declaration Programme of Action (DDPA), and its significance as the catalyst to today’s reparation movement. 

Attorney Roger Wareham, December 12th Movement explained, “The Durban Conference and the DDPA set the foundation for the current reparations' movement in the US and around the world. The DDPA is almost unknown in the US because since 2001, the US government has done everything in its power to disappear it...”

Reparation events on 8/29 will provide a unique opportunity for Black folk here in the United States to redirect the global conversation currently taking place about reparations. 

In recent months, the African Union, and Caricom have been amplifying their reparations demands on the global stage with a UN resolution in March and a follow-up reparations conference, Next Steps Conference, three months later in Accra, Ghana.

8/29 is a call to action by the December 12th Movement to redirect the global conversation on reparations towards Black people in the United States. 

For months now, they’ve been working and collaborating with a number of reparations organizations, activists, and organizers across the country in planning 8/29 events and activities. 

They see the opportunity to reach an entire generation who are just coming to reparations, maybe unaware of what happened in Durban, why it’s important and how it connects to their daily lives. 

Particularly for those who are uninformed or even misinformed on the reparations issue. In recent years, there’s been an onslaught of revisionist history that frames slavery as a horrific historical event, barely deserving of an apology.  

8/29 events will provide a unique opportunity to frame American chattel slavery as a criminal activity - a conspiracy considering the extensive collaboration to build the American political economy, enabling its role as an actor in the global capitalist economy. 

It’s another opportunity to remind folks that slavery was the economic roots to the American political economy.  

While reparations provide the perfect counter-narrative to the national celebration of “America 250”, 8/29 compels what historian Gerald Horne's describes as “a confrontation with history” in such a way that dispels the myths and raises the historical contradictions. 

8/29 is another opportunity to cast a spotlight on what Saidiya Hartman describes in her book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, where she writes, ‘…this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to healthcare and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment…” 

The afterlife of slavery. 

The redlining.  The loss of Black farms and land.  Black neighborhoods, and communities destroyed for highway construction, or “urban renewal” through eminent domain. 

Health-care. Housing. Employment. Education. Voting Rights. 

The afterlife of slavery. 

Reparations activities and events are being planned to take place in several cities with rallies, teach-ins, and film screenings. Along with events in New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Detroit, Washington D.C, with organizing and planning underway in Kansas City, Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston.  

Event programming will include political speakers analyzing the recent developments, making the connections between the Durban Declaration, the recent UN resolution advanced by the African Union to the reparations work taking place across the country. An analysis that not only advances an understanding of reparations and human rights, but their connection to the global Pan-African struggle for reparations.

There will be a cultural component of performance arts that includes spoken word, song, dance, and poetry. Gatherings will hear original compositions of reparations songs by up-and-coming conscious artists or recordings by the Sounds of Blackness, Gil-Scott Heron, Gramps Morgan, or poetry readings such as “What’s the Hour of the Night? " By Queen Mother Audley Moore. 

With the minds’ eye on 8/29 and beyond, D12 and event organizers maintain the primary objective is for Black folk around the country to talk and discuss the issue of reparations, the Durban conference, and the DDPA.

To ask the question, how do you see reparations? How does reparations impact your life, your living and material conditions? To talk about how reparations can truly transform our quality of life with compensation that extends beyond cash compensation. To identify those priority issues aligned to their material reality; mass incarceration, housing, or health care. 

8/29 events intend to send a message - worldwide - of the sense of urgency that surrounds the reparations issue in the United States. 

For additional information and resources, visit their website, Durban Reparations.