WASHINGTON, Aug 18: Thousands of African-Americans gathered in the American capital Saturday to demand reparations for their ancestors brought in chains from Africa to build the new world.

In a city built partly by slaves hauling sandstone blocks and sawing lumber, this was the first demonstration of its kind, it was smaller in size than anticipated. But for several thousand supporters of reparations for slave descendants who had gathered from every corner of the United States, it was the first step in a long struggle they said they were determined to win.

They started gathering in the National Mall early morning, chanting slogans demanding immediate action from the US government for ‘centuries of terrorism’ against the black community.

It was here on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Martin Luther King, Jr delivered his landmark speech on Aug 28, 1963, declaring: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Speaking at the same site, talk show host Bob Law told the rally, “anything less than reparations is not justice.”

“We are owed for 500 years of terrorism,” said Illinois State Senator Donne Trotter, Democrat, Chicago. “We want to be paid and we want to be paid now.”

Reparations advocates demand financial compensation as well as the rebuilding of African-American communities and development of health and education programmes for them.

Activists told the crowd that slaves built the United States through the free labour of their “blood, sweat and tears,” and urged them to press Congress to support a reparations bill Rep John Conyers, (D), Michigan, has proposed every year since he introduced it in 1989.

“I’m tired of people saying they don’t know what reparations are,” said Dorothy Lewis Benton of the National Coalition for Blacks for Reparations in America.

“If you always take something that doesn’t belong to you, what are you supposed to do?,” she asked the crowd. “Give it back, pay a high penalty so high that you don’t do it again.” “Reparation is not a handout. Slavery was a handout,” she said.

The rally was organized by Millions for Reparations, a coalition based in Brooklyn, New York.

The rally marked the 115th anniversary of the birthday of civil rights leader, Marcus Garvey, perhaps best remembered as a leader of the back-to-Africa black movement in the 1920s.