CLEAR Leaders Speak about Reparations at Martha’s Vineyard Town Hall
The powerhouse song, “Time for Reparations,” by the Sounds of Blackness opened a town hall about reparations on Martha’s Vineyard on July 30. Professor Margaret Burnham, faculty co-director of Northeastern Law’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) was the featured speaker; Dr. Deborah Jackson, managing director of CLEAR was a panelist. The event brought together people from across the country in an audience that included academics, lay persons and social justice activists.
The first half of the event was a conversation featuring Burnham and Tulsa social justice activist Kristi Orisabiyi Williams, a descendant of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.
Burnham told the audience about the work that Northeastern’s Reparations Team is doing for the City of Boston Task Force on Reparations, explaining that cities such as Boston have a responsibility for reparations due to policies and practices that excluded Black people from jobs in the police force, fire department, and other areas responsible for delivering public services. These local governments are accountable for delivering reparations for such injuries. Burnham talked about how the Northeastern team is contributing to researching these harms during the period of 1940 to the present to report back to the City of Boston’s Task Force on Reparations. The city is also working with a research team from Tufts University to cover the periods from 1620 to 1940. The task force will use the information from both research teams to make recommendations to the city on what repair should look like.
As of 2023, Boston is one of 11 United States municipalities or states that is focused on the topic of reparations for the descendants of slaves. The late Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) filed a bill in Congress annually, starting in 1989, for the study of reparations, an effort later continued by the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to establish “The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” also referred to as HR 40. In 2023, HR 40 was cleared to be taken up in the House, and the Senate through the work of Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ). No vote has been taken yet in either the House or Senate to establish the commission. (In 2019, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to pass a resolution delivering reparations.)
For Burnham, who is also the founder of Northeastern Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, reparations has a personal aspect in terms of the work she has done to obtain justice for the families of people killed during the Jim Crow era, when violence against African Americans frequently included murder. CRRJ’s work also focuses on researching efforts to disenfranchise African Americans from seeking electoral representation or other representations of equality.
Burnham related the story of Lewis Allen, who lived in Mississippi. He had witnessed the murder of an NAACP member by a white politician. In addition to his misfortune of being able to identify the murderer, Allen tried to register to vote, and was incorrectly thought by the white community to have cooperated with the FBI on the murder investigation. After receiving threats to his safety, he planned to move to Michigan. However, the town’s sheriff (as was later confirmed) shot and killed Allen on his property the day before he left town. Burnham said she wants to see reparations delivered to the families of people like Allen and see “a measure of justice for Allen’s six children, many of whom are still alive.”
Kristi Orisabiyi Williams shared that she had a great-grandfather who was a slave belonging to the Creek tribe, and walked with the Native American tribes on the Trail of Tears when the U.S. government’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 relocated them from their tribal lands to territory that is now Oklahoma. In 1866, when designated tribes received land allotments, the “freedmen” who had been incorporated into the tribes also received land allotments. Williams explained that the Greenwood neighborhood, which contained what was known as the Black Wall Street, was created from those allotments. Jesse Franklin, who Williams referenced, was an example of an African American who was formerly enslaved by the Creek tribe, and was considered an African Creek and who rose to be on the Creek Supreme Court.
Williams said that at the time of the Tulsa Race Riot the neighborhood of Greenwood covered 40 city blocks and that at one time there were 55 Black townships in Oklahoma. The Greenwood neighborhood, she said, was the result of the land allotments.
Presenting that backdrop of this history as a context for current events, Williams talked about an Oklahoma law, HB 1775, passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor, to restrict public school students K through 12 from learning or discussing race and gender, ultimately contributing to suppressing uncomfortable historical truths.
The stipulations of the law include the following for public schools:
Concepts that may not be taught to students, included in curriculum or instructional materials, included in employee professional development, or included in diversity, equity, or inclusion plans:
- an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,
- an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex,
- any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.
In addition to the law and proposed and actual book bans, Williams became infuriated that, as she put it, “officials don’t want to teach anything to make white kids uncomfortable [about history].” Adopting the mindset that “we have to control our narrative,” she subsequently started a library of banned books and started a teaching a community-based class on Black history on weekends. Williams encouraged the town hall audience to act and to do the same in their communities to counter actions to erase Black history.
A panel discussion followed the Burnham/Williams conversation. In addition to Dr. Deborah Jackson, panelists included Vanessa Hall Harper, a council member of Tulsa; UMass Boston Professor of Africana Studies Jemadari Kamara; and Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribal Elder Kristina Hook, who said that she wanted to participate in the event to “seek entrance to the reparations conversation” to learn how to approach the idea of reparations for her tribe.
Town hall attendees came from other parts of the country, including Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio and Washington, DC. Attendees received information on how to track reparations resolutions in other cities.
The town hall was organized by Nkechi Taifa, an attorney and the director of the Reparation Education Project.