Early Recommendations to the Boston Reparations Task Force

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Former Tufts University Professor James Jennings Began Recent Discussions About Boston Reparations With His Editorial in Commonwealth Magazine in 2021, years before the Boston City Council followed his leadership. He appears here at a New Democracy Coalition Reparations Conference at Boston’s African Meeting House in 2021 (Ken Rivard Photo)

New Democracy Coalition Media

In the late winter, this year, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced the membership of the city’s Reparations Task Force. The rollout punctuated nearly 4 years of grassroots activism that called upon the city to account for its complicity in the transatlantic slave trade where Africans and Black Americans were sold in Boston as human chattel, exploited of their labor and victimized through centuries of structural racism.

“I recognize that there were persons who have come from other countries who are here…What the reality is, the devastation and the insidiousness that was rendered upon Black people is well documented from the slave trade,” said Attorney Joe Feaster in an interview following his appointment as chair of the task force

Much of the effort leading to the announcement of the task force, however, had been strategically executed by Black community advocates in Boston like the late State Senator Bill Owens who introduced the first reparations bill in the nation in the the modern era.

From his hospice bed, Sen. Owens followed the Boston reparations movement he helped launch beginning in the 1980’s and encouraged activists following him to remain focused on redress for the descendants of slaves on the state and city level. Contrary to the current debate about the reparations movement in Boston, efforts on the issues were being advanced by organizations well before its introduction in the Boston City Council and prior to gaining support from the mayor’s office.

Owens mentored activists attentively as they successfully sought a reparations bill filing on the state level in 2018 and used the name change of Faneuil Hall, a building named after a slave trader in Boston, as proxy for ramping up citywide discussion over slavery in Boston.

Interviewed before his death, Owens admonished that a grassroots strategy toward achieving reparations was imperative. He told a reporter this during a lengthy recorded interview:

“A reparations movement in Boston will be the final result of community organizing and getting what’s due to Black people who have faced centuries of racism in the city of Boston. Reparations is about giving us justice at the end of the day,” said Owens, while in the hospital, nearly a month before he died.

Former State Senator Bill Owens, called the father of the modern national reparations movement, poses during one of his last interviews on politics. He urged for grassroots organizing around Boston reparations. (New Democracy Media Photo)

The first reparations victory in Boston emerged when activists working with The New Democracy Coalition secured an unprecedented apology from the Boston City Council and Mayor Wu last summer.

The city council’s resolution opened a pathway toward racial reconciliation by way of acknowledging the harm committed against Black Bostonians. The measure also pledged to address anti-Black symbols in the city, like Faneuil Hall.

Reflecting the reparations-related success connected to the anti-Faneuil Hall Movement, a majority of Bostonians now believe that the name of the historic downtown building should be changed according to a MassInc Poll, indicative of how Boston residents are slowly changing and moving toward accepting reparations for Blacks as future policy.

“We said from the beginning that changing the name of Faneuil Hall was explicitly related to a reparations movement in Boston. There is no divisibility between the claims we made in 2017 about the Faneuil Hall name change and the cause of reparations in Boston for African Americans,” said Rev. Kevin Peterson.

“The reparations task force named by Mayor Wu was a courageous act. No doubt about that. But let’s be clear by noting that the foundational work began with calls from community activists who have been grinding away on the issue of racial repair in Boston at the grassroots.”

Dr. David Harris, speaking at the New Democracy Coalition Reparations Conference. Harris has said the [Blacks] must the lead at identifying the “need as well the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies that affect them.” (Ken Rivard Photo)

The work of the activists and a growing multi-racial coalition of community organizers is not over, added Peterson, even as the city-driven reparations task force has commenced.

Peterson proffered: “While members of the city’s reparations task force are equipped for the work of studying the impact of anti-Black racism in Boston, it is equally important that steadfast community organizing remain a priority. The task force will mean very little if there is not room for additional credible voices in the Black community where people are currently weathering the assaults of poverty, anti-Black symbols in public places and blatant forms of violence that can not be disconnected from protracted racist policies.”

A number of solutions are now emerging which can substantively inform the work of the task force and give guidance to the trajectory of their work.

Five preliminary solutions that could inform and provide gravitas to the task force are noted below:

First, expand the current task force by at least 6 more members to represent indigenous organizational leadership in Boston’s black community which have been for years focusing on the reparations work on the ground. The organizational leaders and activists who generated original force behind the moverment are not on the task force. Their input can add the necessary experiential depth and community-based knowledge related to nuanced discussion and dialogue on Boston reparations. The insight gleaned from a two-day retreat led by Aziza Robinson Goodnight on reparations in 2021 could serve as a font of knowledge to the current task force.

Yvette Modestine Served As One Of The Writers Of The Reparations Taskforce Legislation In Boston. She Speaks At The NDC Panel On Boston Reparations (Ken Rivard Photo)

The value of the task force is realized through including the voices of black Bostonians who live in Boston and who have been struggling in the trenches over recent years through street protests, community canvassing, rallies, press conferences. These voices are salient to the goal of capturing true experiences and legitimate sentiment.

Second, focus on reparations as a process that will heal the entire city. True reparations will rely upon the capacities of people of diverse races and background who are committed to proving themselves at demonstrating their best efforts social at repair.

Third, address the harm and ongoing injury in real time. This task force should not wait until the end of a two-year process to announce a comprhensive pathway forward. For instance, the task force should immediately make recommendations to change the name of Faneuil Hall or address crises such as the death disparity rate that now exists between whites and blacks in Boston.

Equally, the task force could take immediately steps to sanction businesses or banks in Boston that have historic ties to the slave trade in Boston. Those institutions, such as Chase Bank, for instance, should be made to report how they were historically tethered to the slave trade in Boston and forced to announce diversity, equity and inclusion plans immediately. Other cities, like Philadelphia and San Francisco, have done this.

Fourth, announce plans that concretize the city’s apology announcement last year by committing to a formal apology ceremony stating its contrition. A public ceremony related to the apology would serve to broadly apprise Bostonians about the serious work toward acknowledging the horror of past racist practices against Blacks in Boston.

Fifth, the task force should announce its support of the grassroots demands for a Transatlantic Slavery Monument or memorial museum. Currently in Boston there stand effected significant memorials to the Holocausts and the Irish Famime — both tragic events which happened in distant lands. Yet, there is no substantial memorial to the African slave trade, part of which transpired on the shores of the Boston Harbor.

“We said from the beginning that changing the name of Faneuil Hall was explicitly related to reparations movement in Boston. There is no divisibility between the claims we made in 2017 about the Faneuil Hall name change and the cause of reparations in Boston for African Americans,” — Rev. Kevin Peterson.

Other important solutions will certainly surface for the task force, including the creation of the Boston Reparations Bank for the purposes of funding housing purchase opportunities in Boston for Blacks. Black students graduating from Boston Public Schools can also be provided full scholarships for career job training of college. These solutions can be entertained and implemented as the task force conducts its work and not emerge as later recommendations from the committee.

It should be noted that for almost a decade, task force member David Harris and the Charles Hamilton Houston institute for Race and Justice have been promoting a concept known as Community Justice, which, in his words, is represented by the premise that “those most affected by public policy must be front and center in the identification of need as well the design, implementation and evaluation of [reparations] public policies that affect them.”

For Harris, one of the primary injuries to Black people and other marginalized groups, is the denial of the “two foundations of citizenship: membership and participation.”

Harris adds: “These denials have been reinforced by the refusal to acknowledge the voice of the governed and resulting in silence as non participation.”

The task force members are off to a promising start. Their mission is clear.

But they must not be hampered by the absence of grassroots inclusion from activists in Boston who have already proven themselves as more knowledge than most in the city. Hence, the task force would do well to pay close attention to leadership in the communities who have been directly harmed and participate with those Blacks in Boston who have, so far, already provided clarity and legitimacy on this issue.

Rev. Dr. Kevin C. Peterson, DHumLitt, is the founder of The New Democracy Coalition. He serves as affiliate faculty at the Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University.

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The New Democracy Coalition of Massachusetts
The New Democracy Coalition of Massachusetts

Written by The New Democracy Coalition of Massachusetts

The New Democracy Coalition, a Boston-based organization which focuses on civic literacy, civic policy and electoral justice.

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