Navigating a course to reach a binding reparations settlement for the American sin of slavery that fueled the economic rise of Boston was never going to be easy. Mayor Michelle Wu and the City Council deserve credit for establishing the Reparations Task Force in 2022. The ordinance creating the panel set a deadline for the end of 2023 to complete research underpinning future recommendations by the group. A recent setback to the reports commissioned by the task force will further delay the reparations effort but we urge the city to continue its worthwhile work. Justice is delayed for now but that doesn’t mean it should be denied.

The current holdup involves one of two research contracts commissioned under the task force’s $500,000 budget allocation. One study by a Northeastern University team under the direction of distinguished former Judge Margaret Burnham has completed its report of Boston’s role in slavery’s legacy from 1940 to the present. The other, by a Tufts University group led by historian and author Kerri Greenidge, was abandoned — unfinished — and the $335,000 contract sum returned after allegations arose of shoddy scholarship in a Greenidge book about the Grimke abolitionist family. Greenidge was placed on leave in 2025 and left Tufts earlier this year.

It’s important that the task force get it right and base its recommendations on a thorough review of how Boston prospered and profited in the period from 1620 to 1940 — the timeline of the scuttled Tufts report — from human bondage and its lasting legacy in the Boston economy. We know that the unpaid labor of African slaves and their descendants helped build the city and tend to its homes and businesses.

We know that Boston investors made fortunes underwriting slave-related businesses. Merchants who profited from sugar cargoes tied to slave plantations in the Caribbean endowed Boston churches and parishes and financed the growth of Harvard University. Proper Bostonian families who filled the pews of elite sanctuaries like King’s Chapel built their Beacon Hill mansions on revenues from turning cotton picked by human chattel into fabric woven in their New England textile mills.

Boston was also complicit in limiting opportunities for African Americans in the post-World War II period — the subject of the Northeastern report — by turning a blind eye to housing segregation, redlining, educational inequality and discrimination in public employment and contracting. According to Joseph Feaster, the well-known local attorney who chairs the Reparations Task Force, no date has been set for the release of the Northeastern study, which is under review. As for the 1620-1940 study, he told the Banner, “We still need a study of that period of time, and we need to determine whether we can complete it in order to satisfy our obligations. This task force has been working for four years, but this has been going on for 400 years. We will not be rushed.”

In the meantime, several private efforts have moved forward to not only acknowledge the participation of local institutions in the slave economy but also offer some measure of reparations to those impacted by the sordid trade in human beings. The Episcopal City Mission, a nonprofit affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, last week announced the distribution of $2.75 million in reparations payments to 25 Massachusetts organizations devoted to social and racial justice and community building. Recognizing the extent to which Episcopal churches in the Bay State benefited from slave-related donations, Episcopal City Mission Executive Director Arrington Chambliss called reparations part of the group’s mission to following Jesus.

“There is no reconciliation without repair given the history that necessitates this work,” said Chambliss. “This moment is not an ending but an important step in a much longer journey toward truth accountability and repair.” Recipients included City Life/Vida Urbana, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, the Museum of African American History and United American Indians of New England.

Reparations payments from groups like the Episcopal Diocese have tended to be small, far short of the billions of dollars demanded from grassroots organizations like the Boston Peoples Reparations Commission, which has put a $15 billion price tag on a proper compensation payment to benefit the descendants of slaves. The commission has proposed to split the sum three ways: $5 billion in cash payments to Black Boston residents, $5 billion toward new financial institutions and $5 billion to address the racial education gap and for efforts to fight crime.

One of the largest local reparations proposals came from Harvard University, which pledged a $100 million commitment in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. But that effort has become bogged down in controversy over the scope of identifying descendants of those enslaved by Harvard-affiliated households and the university’s financial battle with the federal government.

The idea of reparations is as old as scripture — going back to exhortations in the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy for slaveowners to share their wealth with former slaves — and just as contested. Proposals offered by Congressional Black Caucus members, citing payments to Japanese internees during World War II and the cancellation of land grants to former slaves after the Civil War, have never gone beyond efforts to establish a study commission. Sponsored for years by the late U.S. Rep. John Conyers, legislation to create a federal commission is now being carried in the House by Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

To succeed, the work of the Reparations Task Force needs vocal support from a broad swath of Bostonians committed to restorative justice. In this era of President Trump and his allies in full attack mode on diversity, equity and inclusion, the reparations fight needs every ally it can muster. When Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” he was quoting Rev. Theodore Parker, a radical abolitionist who thundered against slavery in his Boston pulpit. Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, who heads the task force’s research committee, channels King and Parker in her belief that reparations can become a reality in Boston.

“We can actually be a city on a hill,” she told GBH News, “a shining example, which we’ve been saying for hundreds of years.”

Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner