The Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA) will host a reparations webinar featuring Dr. Ron Daniels, the founder and president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW), a progressive and action- oriented Resource Center dedicated to empowering people of African descent and marginalized communities. IBW, under his guidance, convened and now administers the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) which leads the effort to achieve reparations for African American descendants of slavery.
The webinar, which will be hold on Fri., Nov. 19 at 5:00 pm, will be co-facilitated by Larry Gossett and Alice Ito. Gossett, an iconic civil and human rights leader, serves on PSARA’s Executive Board and the RAGE Committee (Race and Gender Equity Committee) of PSARA and is a former King County Councilmember. Ito is the Senior Advisor on Racial Equity at the Seattle Foundation. She previously was a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Community Change, a national nonprofit building people’s capacity to improve their communities and public policies, particularly low-income communities and communities of color.
Daniels is a veteran social and political activist. He served as Executive Director of the National Rainbow Coalition in 1987 and Southern Regional Coordinator and Deputy Campaign Manager for the Jesse Jackson for President Campaign in 1988. He was a third-party candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party for President of the United States in the 1992 US presidential election in California.
From 1993-2005, Daniels served as the first African American Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). During his tenure, CCR emerged as a major force fighting against police brutality and misconduct, church burnings, hate crimes, voter disenfranchisement, environmental racism, and the threats to civil liberties posed by the government’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attack.
In June of 1995, Daniels led an African American fact-finding and support mission to Haiti. As a result of the visit, the Haiti Support Project (HSP) was created to mobilize ongoing political and material support for the struggle for democracy and development in Haiti. HSP has emerged as the leading African American organization working to build a constituency for Haiti in the US.
Daniel’s column Vantage Point appears in numerous Black and progressive newspapers and websites nationwide. He also hosts a weekly issue-oriented public affairs talk show, Vantage Point Radio, on WBAI, 99.5 FM on the Pacifica network in New York.
Under Daniels leadership, the IBW has developed a 10 Point Reparations Program. NAARC also supports HR-40, the Congressional legislation that would establish a national commission to study reparations proposals for African Americans.
Led by PSARA’s (RAGE), PSARA adopted a position paper on reparations in 2020 that concluded the following: PSARA supports the need for a new truthful understanding that exposes the damage that has been done over generations to the African American community. We need a new narrative of how we describe our history and our present. There must be financial reparations that will make clear that as a country we understand and accept the wrongs that have been done in our name. Financial reparations demonstrate we want to move forward with a different concept of who we are as a nation and what it is we want to become.
For more information or to register for the event, please contact organizer@psara.org to get the registration link.
