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Reparations United 2023 Unity Tour - Sacramento - The Mission, the Mandate, the Method

by Khubaka, Michael Harris
Laying the Foundation For Local Reparations: A Guide for Providing National Symmetry for Local Reparation Efforts by Kamm Howard
kamm_howard.jpg
Kamm Howard is a Chicago businessman and real estate investor. Kamm has owned and managed over 100 residential units in the Englewood, Auburn Gresham, Washington Park and Roseland communities.

In additional to residential units, he currently owns retail and office spaces that houses the businesses of 17 Black entrepreneurs in the Roseland community.

Kamm is internationally respected for his reparations work. In 2014, he was invited to speak on the “new paradigm of reparations activism,” at the 8th Pan African Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Also, that year, he also presented in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the same subject.

In 2016, he was a key organizer for the United States visit of the United Nations Working Group of Experts for People of African Descent. He particularly was the co-leader to their Chicago visit, were the Working Group proclaimed it was the most organized visit in all their work globally. As a result of Kamm’s leadership and insistence that reparations be the center issue of the UN visit, the United Nations report that resulted began Its recommendations with for the United States to amend its centuries of gross human rights violations against people of African Descent, she must engage this community with reparations.

Nationally, Kamm has been a 16-year member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, N’COBRA., the longest running active organization championing the cause of reparations in US.

N’COBRA was founded in 1987 and Kamm has been the chair of the Legislative Commission for 12 years worked closely with U. S Congressman John Conyers.

Congressman Conyers first introduced a federal reparations bill, now known as HR 40, in 1989, and continued until his departure from Congress in 2018.

In 2017 as a member of the National African American Reparations Commission, a commission of 18 reparations scholars. Attorneys, clergy, and grassroots leaders, Kamm was chosen to lead the team to re-vise HR 40, the federal reparations bill.

Acting also as the lead writer of the new bill, the emphasis was changed from a study bill to a remedy bill. Codified in the new bill are the international reparations norm of full reparations: cessation, restitution, compensation, satisfaction, and rehabilitation.

In 2017, Kamm was elected to lead N’COBRA as its National Male Co-Chair. He was re-elected in 2019, for a 2nd term at their historic 31st annual Convention under the theme “400 Years of Terror: A Dept Still Owed.”

Currently Kamm is working with United States Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as she strategizes to move HR 40 through Congress for an expected fall 2023 vote in the full House of Representative.

In he Is working with Ald. Robin Rue Simmons of Evanston, Il., as she works to be the first city to deliver reparations resources to a Black community in America, having passed the United States first local ordinance to establish a reparations commission.

Because of Ald. Simmons work, which has inspired state and local legislators around the country, Kamm recently authored a manual, “Laying the Foundation for Local Reparations: A Guide for Providing National Symmetry for Local Reparations Efforts.” This document is used to inform the local reparations movement across the United States.
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