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Carruthers told AIM that reparations have to include much more than financial payments.

She may have in mind not only an apology from the federal government but some form of spiritual or psychological help for black victims of the slave trade.

In this regard, the N'COBRA conference that featured Wright also included a panel discussion of "Post-Traumatic Slavery Syndrome." In a variation of this theme, the Philadelphia branch of N'COBRA had advertised a sold-out lecture on the subject of "Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder (PTSD)," described as one of the Psycho-Racial Spiritual Diseases of Americanized Africans (PRSDAA). The speaker, a psychologist, said that black-on-black violence could even be attributed to undiagnosed PRSDAAs.

While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now engaged in a fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, it was the Clinton Administration that helped to make reparations into a national issue. President Clinton had proposed a $10 million federal research program to study the problem of racism in America. It was described by the Associated Press as "a way to measure the impact of racial bias in everyday life" and was seen as potential backing for legislation proposed by Rep. John Conyers to establish a national commission to study the matter.

Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has endorsed Obama for president.

Conyers' bill to create a "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans" was first introduced in 1989. He praised N'COBRA in a statement he issued in 1999 and sponsored a subsequent event, "Capitalizing on Our Strength - Empowering the Reparations Movement," featuring a representative of N'COBRA.

The issue became so big that the CBS Evening News, then hosted by Dan Rather, did a story about the controversy, highlighting the fact that the Chicago City Council has become the fourth major city to pass a resolution calling for reparations.

Randall Robinson, the director of the group known as Trans Africa, wrote a book, The Debt, on the subject, and hosted a conference on reparations featuring such luminaries as actor Danny Glover.

One of the liberals' favorite television shows, "West Wing," about a fictional White House, also examined the controversy in the context of a controversial nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights who advocated financial reparations for slavery.

At the time, we noted (web site) that three veteran Democrats were advisers to the show. They were former Clinton White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, former Carter official Patrick Caddell, and former Senate Democratic aide Lawrence O'Donnell. Time magazine reported that Conyers' staff had sent along "200 pages of material on the issue of paying reparations to black Americans as compensation for slavery" to the producers.

Interestingly, it has now been reported by The Guardian (web site) that one of the characters in the show, a presidential candidate, was modeled by one of the Democratic writers after Obama. The character in the program wins the presidency.

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