Heralding reparations for slavery as the “next step in the black freedom movement,” four local leaders encouraged Northwestern black students on Thursday to join the controversial battle to compensate descendants of American slaves.

The four panelists – African-American studies Prof. Martha Biondi, Chicago Ald. Dorothy Tillman, journalist Salim Muwakkil and attorney Lewis Myers Jr. – made the case for slavery reparations to a predominantly black student audience in McCormick Auditorium on Thursday night.

At the two-hour forum sponsored by Sigma Gamma Rho, Biondi said the battle for reparations would compensate blacks for more than two centuries of abuses.

“Reparations challenges head-on the dominant narrative of American freedom,” she said. “It has a concrete and humanistic plan of genuine social transformation. We can never ‘go beyond race,’ as some people want to do, until we come to terms with the economic enslavement and American apartheid.”

After decades of regarding the reparations movement as extremist, America’s black middle class has offered support for the movement, panel members said. In the next few years, the movement’s supporters said they plan to file a class-action lawsuit, using international human rights law to make their case in federal court or before the United Nations.

Although Thursday’s panelists strongly supported reparations, the divisive issue has polarized whites and blacks nationwide.

Proponents said they regard reparations as a human rights issue similar to giving money to Holocaust survivors. But opponents of the movement argue that no single group is responsible for slavery and that it would be impossible to determine who is eligible to receive benefits.

In recent years, city councils in Chicago and four other cities have passed resolutions that favor reparations and ask that the issue be studied in more depth.

“America owes us a debt,” said Tillman, who helped push the resolution through the Chicago City Council last year. “We’re not asking for a handout. We built this country with our blood, our sweat, all the things that happened to us. They’re a fact.”

The controversial issue again surfaced this year when conservative pundit David Horowitz attempted to place an anti-reparations advertisement in college newspapers nationwide, sparking a heated debate about the interplay between free speech and racial sensitivity.

The ad, titled “Ten Reasons why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea – And Racist, Too,” gained national attention after the student-run newspaper at the University of California-Berkeley, The Daily Californian, apologized for running it.

Muwakkil, a senior editor at In These Times magazine and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, said the publicity over the Horowitz ad has catapulted reparations to the forefront of the national agenda.

“By vehemently declaring his right-wing opposition to reparations, Horowitz has helped to deepen the American left’s understanding of the value of reparations as a policy option with true revolutionary potential,” he said. “Until his shrill entry into the reparations story, the left was decidedly non-committal on the issue.”

Although some proponents support cash payments as a form of reparations for slavery, the four panelists said they would rather have the government support black businesses to compensate for decades of discrimination.

Biondi said the reparations debate has gained momentum in the last year because blacks increasingly perceive that they are losing ground on gains made during the 1960s civil rights movement.

“It comes from the collision of two opposing forces: the right(-wing) effort to undermine and dismantle civil rights gains and the continuing push by African Americans for economic advancement,” she said. “The rise of the reparations movement is inextricably connected to these events. But it is not a defensive reaction. It is revisionary and proactive and aims to take the struggle to another level.”

Myers, who represents The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, said he plans to use international human-rights decisions to put the United States on trial before the world.

“I’m not likely to think that I can argue the case in front of the Supreme Court and we’re all going to have a Cadillac or a mule and 40 acres,” he said. “We have to frame the case as a human rights case. The United Nations is a forum that we have to use.”