An African minister and a group of individuals recently filed a class action discrimination suit against Democrats and President Barack Obama. Rev. Wayne Perryman filed the lawsuit in federal district court demanding an apology from the Democratic Party for centuries of racial oppression.
This is Rev. Perryman’s second attempt to seek long overdue justice. In 2005, Perryman filed a lawsuit regarding a similar concern, which went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In that case, the Democrats admitted their racist past, but refused to apologize. But the court let the Democrats off the hook due to a legal technicality of “standing,” since Rev. Perryman had not suffered personally from the alleged passed discrimination by the Democratic Party.
According to the press release, “blacks from the West Coast and the East Coast joined together and signed one of the most comprehensive legal briefs ever prepared on racial discrimination, then filed their brief today, Sept. 12, at 9 a.m. PST in U.S. District Court in Seattle (Case No. C11 – 1503). The plaintiffs, who refer to the defendants as ‘Father of Racism,’ allege that as an organization, the Democratic Party has consistently refused to apologize for the role they played in slavery and Jim Crow laws and for other subsequent racist practices from 1792 to 2011.
“Rev. Wayne Perryman, a former Democrat himself and the lead plaintiff in this class action lawsuit, said he was inspired to file this action after seeing the recent movie, The Help. The movie takes place in the region that was exclusively controlled by Democrats for more than 150 years (the South). Mrs. Frances P. Rice, the chair of the National Black Republican Association is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Mrs. Rice is a resident of Sarasota, Fla., and has lived in the South most of her life.”
In the brief, which provides a historical timeline from 1792 to 2011, Rev. Perryman suggests that an apology or reparation would not be an issue currently, if the Democratic President Andrew Johnson had signed into law Senate Bill 60. Since Johnson’s veto of Senate Bill 60, the door for reparations involving racial injustices remained closed for over 120 years. Moreover, he asserts that Congress opened that door with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which mandated that Japanese internment victims were deserving of both an apology plus $20,000 each in reparation pay. In addition, Perryman indicates that in 1993, the victims of the Rosewood, Fla., massacre received an apology and reparations from the state of Florida. Also he noted that in 1997, President Clinton issued an apology to the victims of the Tuskegee Experiment and paid the African American victims a total of $10,000,000 in reparations.
Rev. Perryman is a Seattle minister who was responsible for getting the Encyclopedia Britannica to apologize and remove the “Curse of Ham” theory from all of their publications — a theory that was employed by Southern Christians and Democrats to justify slavery and their mistreatment of blacks. –torrance stephens, Ph.D.
