A recording of this event is available on the UICHR YouTube Channel.

human rights day

For our annual Human Rights day event, we will feature the topic of reparations. Our topics will include: Japanese reparations for World War II internment; reparations for African Americans for the legacy of slavery; and recent reparations that occurred in Evanston, Illinois, for housing discrimination against the Black community. This panel will be moderated by UICHR Director Adrien Wing and include the following panelists:

Kathy Masaoka  was born and raised in multicultural Boyle Heights, California.  Coming of age during the late 60’s, the Vietnam War and Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley shaped her values and direction. Since 1971, she has worked on issues related to youth, workers, housing in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles and redress for Japanese Americans. Currently Cochair of the Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, she served on the Editorial Team for the book, “NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations”, helped to educate the American public about the camps through the film/curriculum, “Stand Up for Justice” and was part of the NCRR 9/11 Committee which worked to build relationships with the American Muslim community. Ms Masaoka was honored to represent NCRR in Japan to support the rights of Koreans and other minorities in 1988 and is currently involved with NCRR, Nikkei Progressives, Vigilant Love, the Sustainable Little Tokyo project. She works on issues such as reparations for Comfort Women and Black people in the US, the rights of immigrants and the future of Little Tokyo. Retired from teaching at an LAUSD continuation high school in 2011, she lives in Los Angeles (Tongva land) with Mark Masaoka. They have a daughter Mayumi and son Dan and grandsons, Yuma and Leo.

Kamm Howard is a Chicago businessman and real estate investor, and an internationally respected reparations activist. In 2014, he spoke at the 8th Pan African Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the “new paradigm of reparations activism.” In 2016, he was a key organizer for the US visit of the United Nations Working Group of Experts for People of African Descent that proclaimed that the US must engage reparations. In 2017, he was elected National Male Co-Chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, N’COBRA. In 2015 as a Commissioner of the National African American Reparations Commission, he led a team to revise HR 40, the federal reparations bill. In 2020, Mr. Howard authored the pamphlet, “Laying the Foundation for Local Reparations: A Guide for Providing National Symmetry for Local Reparations Efforts, " after successfully working to pass the City of Chicago Subcommittee on Reparations. Additionally, he has given testimony before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on the subject of HR 40 -the federal reparations bill. Finally, after 3 terms of national CoChair of N'COBRA, Mr. Howard started a new organization Reparations United. In its first action, he led a group of reparations activists to Rome, Italy to deliver a reparations Presentment to the Roman Catholic Church on July, 18th of this this year and later in August participated in the Global Summit of Reparations and Racial Healing held in Accra, Ghana. Finally, he recently returned from England where he gave a keynote address at the Cambridge University entitled "Toward Evidenced Based Reparations."

Matt Feldman serves as a member of the Board of Trustees and Treasurer of the Evanston Community Foundation and leads a working group in support of local reparations at Beth Emet Synagogue in Evanston, Illinois as well as participating in other initiatives in support of local reparations around the United States. He serves as Chair of the Board of Managers of Common Securitization Solutions, LLC., a technology development and operations company based in Bethesda, MD.  Mr. Feldman also serves on the Board of Directors of Recology, Inc., an ESOP-owned, waste management and resource recovery company based in San Francisco, CA, where he is Chair of the Audit & Risk Committee. He served as President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from April 2008 until December of 2020.  He  holds degrees from Case Western Reserve University and the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University where he is a life-member of the Kellogg Global Advisory Board and a member of the Dean’s Working Group on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

For more information please see our event listing.

 

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