Plans to pay taxpayer-funded reparations to Boston’s black community are moving forward as Mayor Michelle Wu appointed an all-black committee to the Boston Reparations Task Force.
The group includes a former judge, a managing director of a local law school, a Mellon associate professor at nearby Tufts University, a government-paid historian, and an attorney for the Boston chapter of the NAACP.
It also includes a University of Massachusetts student and two Boston public high school students.
The first task is to compile a portfolio on the history of slavery to educate the public on the need to pay reparations to Boston’s black community, the mayor said.
“For four hundred years, the brutal practice of enslavement and recent policies like redlining, the busing crisis, and exclusion from City contracting have denied Black Americans pathways to build generational wealth, secure stable housing, and live freely,” Ms. Wu said in a press release.
“Our administration remains committed to tackling long-standing racial inequities and this task force is the next step in our commitment as a city to advance racial justice and build a Boston for everyone.”
The announcement comes on the heels of a controversial move supported by Ms. Wu to repurpose a popular recreation center in Boston’s blackest community into a shelter for hundreds of newly arrived illegal aliens.
Residents of Roxbury, where the center is located and which is named after a local civil rights leader, reacted with outrage. Protesters brandished signs outside the center on the day the illegal immigrants moved in. Some read “Shame on Wu” and “Why Us.”
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has estimated that the state is spending about $45 million a month to provide food, housing, and other services to more than 7,500 illegal immigrants. She is seeking nearly $1 billion in additional funding.
A hint of how much black activists are expecting in reparations from taxpayers came over the weekend when a grassroots group called The Boston People Reparations Commission announced a figure of $15 billion—almost four times the city of Boston’s entire operating budget.
“The wealth of this city was built on slavery,” said Rev. Kevin Peterson, the leader of the group, at a press conference.
“And the city is responsible to pay back the wealth they extracted free of charge from other human beings who died at some point in the labor for this city.”
Mr. Peterson also leads the New Democracy Coalition, the group that has staged multiple protests as part of their demand to change the name of Boston’s legendary Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil, who built and donated the building to the city in 1742, owned slaves.
Mr. Peterson has proposed that the $15 billion be divided evenly in direct cash payments to Boston’s black residents, as investments arranged through financial institutions, and to what he referred to as closing the racial education gap.
Joseph Feaster Jr., chairman of the newly-appointed Reparations Task Force, made it clear that Boston taxpayers will be expected to pay a substantial amount for the reparations.
“We are looking forward to determining recommendations for how we reckon with Boston’s past while charting a path forward for Black people whose ancestors labored without compensation and who were promised the 40 acres and a mule they never received,” said Mr. Feaster.
An attorney, Mr. Feaster is the former president of the Massachusetts Community and Banking Council (MCBC), serves as acting director of real estate for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, and is interim administrator of the Boston Housing Authority.
The Reparations Movement
Boston is the latest in a handful of communities across the United States that have embraced the idea of reparations to compensate for America’s slave trade, which ended 159 years ago.Statewide reparations have been proposed in New York and California. Illinois lawmakers are pondering proposals.
In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, became the first U.S. city to pay reparations to black residents. The $10 million payout came in $25,000 housing vouchers.
(L-R) State Sen. Steven Bradford, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, task force member Lisa Holder, and Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer hold up a final report of the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans during a hearing in Sacramento, Calif., on June 29, 2023. Haven Daley/AP
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is black, recently proposed paying reparations to African Americans living in the Windy City as a way to keep them from committing crimes.
Last May, Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-Mo.) introduced federal legislation to pay reparations to America’s African-American residents. The resolution came with an eventual request by Ms. Bush for a $97 trillion payout, which is nearly triple the entire federal national debt.
Her resolution is entitled “Recognizing that the United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.”
The proposal is in the House Committee on the Judiciary.
“This country thrived and grew through the planting and harvesting of tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton, all from chattel slavery, and that hasn’t been compensated,” Ms. Bush said.
Reparations Remain Divisive
According to a 2023 Reuters/Ipsos survey, 74 percent of black Americans favor reparations while only 26 percent of white Americans support the idea.It has been a factional subject for a long time.
In 2003, the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Gender, Religion and Class published a paper entitled “Why The Reparation Movement Should Fail.”
The author, Gregory Kane, argued that Americans are not solely to blame; Africans sold other Africans into bondage.
“Since the time of the Constitution’s ratification abolishing slavery, reparations supporters have used slavery to try to guilt Americans into paying for the mistakes of their ancestors,” Mr. Kane wrote.
“However, these supporters fail to acknowledge the significant role Africans played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was primarily the Africans who waged war on and kidnapped their brethren and sold them to Europeans and Arabs.”
Some commentators have argued that if blacks merit reparations, then other oppressed groups qualify, too, such as women, who long endured gender-based discrimination.
California attorney Barbara Grcar emphasized in a 2021 San Diego Union-Tribune article that black men gained the right to vote when slavery ended in 1865, while women didn’t gain that right until 1920.
A reparations rally outside City Hall in San Francisco on March 14, 2023. Jeff Chiu/AP
In 2019, then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called slavery America’s “original sin,” but said that reparations are a moot point because of racial progress America has made including twice electing a black president—Barack Obama.
The NAACP, which maintains a reparation proclamation on its website, says that reparations should be paid to black people born in the U.S., those who became naturalized citizens, and anyone who currently identifies as Black American or African American, physically or biologically.
“Because slavery involved kidnapping, barbarism, and the stripping of language, culture and heritage, many Black people are unaware of their specific African heritage and which country in fact their ancestors were stolen from,” the proclamation states.
The NAACP said reparations should include “a national apology, rights to the cannabis industry, financial payment, social service benefits, and land grants to every descendant of an enslaved African American and Black person [who is] a descendant of those living in the United States.”
