Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Assembles Reparations Task Force
“this task force is the next step in our commitment as a city to advance racial justice and build a Boston for everyone”
Michelle Wu, the latest Democrat mayor of Boston, has just announced the creation of a task force to look into reparations for slavery.
Officials in Rhode Island and California are already doing this, and Wu wanted to get Massachusetts on the bandwagon.
WGBH reports:
Wu reveals members of the new Boston Reparations Task Force
Mayor Michelle Wu revealed Tuesday the members of Boston’s Reparations Task Force, setting the stage for the panel charged with guiding the city’s response to the historic impacts of slavery on the city’s Black American population.
“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,” said Wu. “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 10-member panel will be chaired by attorney Joseph Feaster Jr., former president of the NAACP Boston branch and a current member of the city’s Black Men and Boys Commission.
Here are the members of the task force:
- Chair Joseph D. Feaster Jr.
- Denilson Fan Fan, 11th grader at Jeremiah E. Burke High School
- L’Merchie Frazier, public historian, visual activist, and executive director of creative and strategic partnerships for SPOKE Arts
- George “Chip” Greenidge Jr., founder and director of Greatest MINDS
- Dr. Kerri Greenidge, assistant professor of studies in race, colonialism and diaspora at Tufts University
- Dr. David Harris, past managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
- Dorothea Jones, longtime civic organizer and member of the Roxbury Strategic Masterplan Oversight Committee
- Carrie Mays, UMass Boston student and youth leader with Teen Empowerment
- Na’tisha Mills, program manager for Embrace Boston
- Damani Williams, 11th grader at Jeremiah E. Burke High School
It seems an inconvenient historical fact is being overlooked here. Massachusetts was a free state and Boston became a center of the abolitionist movement.
From the Massachusetts Historical Society:
Boston Becomes the Antislavery Hub
Between 1831 and 1865, as the population of Boston surged from 60,000 to more than 175,000, the African American population remained relatively stable—increasing to about 2,400. The Boston abolitionist movement first emerged from this long-settled, free Black population and freedom seekers who settled here. The interracial New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded at the African Meeting House in 1832, and during the first years of its publication, three quarters of the subscribers to The Liberator were Black.
Through the pages of The Liberator, other local antislavery publications, and lecture tours by visiting American and English abolitionists, Boston became a hub of the national and international antislavery movement. The anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies on 1 August 1834 became one date that was commemorated in Boston in the years that followed. Antislavery societies also often held rallies or events on the Fourth of July in the 1830s and 1840s.
In addition to The Liberator, the words of abolitionists were printed on broadsides and sung as hymns in churches. While meetings took place around the city, the African Meeting House, which was built on Beacon Hill in 1806, provided a discrimination-free place for meetings and worship.
The city of Boston was also a major player in the Underground Railroad, a system of safe houses and volunteers that helped slaves escape to freedom.
Are we allowed to point these things out?
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Comments
Another State that never had slaves seeks to pay reparations to people who were never slaves.
Remember the one drop rule: One drop of black blood makes you eligible for reparations.
And the newly revised reparations rule: One drop of taxpayer blood puts you on the hook for paying it.
They had plenty of slaves. Massachusetts was the first colony to formally legalize slavery through legislation. Not to mention the involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. There is no US State which existed as colony or part of another colony prior to the revolution and the passage of the post Civil War amendments that didn’t in some way materially advance or benefit from the institution of Slavery at some point in its history.
And your point…. ?
Lots of Africans benefited from rounding up and selling slaves. Lots of Africans STILL own and trade slaves today.
There are more slaves today than when US had slaves.
There is no group that at some point in the history of mankind has not been enslaved, mistreated, killed, treated as lesser beings etc…every ethnicity, every race.
….but let’s focus on 400 years ago shall we
My point is to refute the claim made that Massachusetts ‘never had slaves’. That claim is false and is part of a larger false history that seems to seek to cast slavery as a uniquely American institution and one confined to the Confederate States.
Neither of those things is true. Not the claims of the USA hating race grifters nor the claims of those seeking to avoid assigning any blame to the non Confederate States as if the people of those States didn’t have anything to do with it.
Slavery was, in our modern view, an abomination. During our Nation’s founding and the years preceding our Civil War there were plenty of moral qualms expressed and political compromises made regarding slavery. IMO, ultimately the sin of slavery was atoned for with deaths of hundreds of thousands and the blood of hundreds of thousands more in that Civil War and the passage of the post Civil War amendments. That debt has been paid.
That debt has been paid.
“ the sin of slavery was atoned for with deaths of hundreds of thousands and the blood of hundreds of thousands more in that Civil War and the passage of the post Civil War amendments. That debt has been paid.”
Sin? That is a theological claim, isnt it? It is not arithmetic. How will we know when if it is satisfied, or even if it can be? $1? $1 million? 10 million lives?
What is the exchange rate in this sort of economy? Exchange is accurate in voluntary markets.
Sin?
“ the sin of slavery was atoned for with deaths of hundreds of thousands and the blood of hundreds of thousands more in that Civil War and the passage of the post Civil War amendments. That debt has been paid.”
Sin? That is a theological claim, isnt it? It is not arithmetic. How will we know when if it is satisfied, or even if it can be? $1? $1 million? 10 million lives? What is the exchange rate in this sort of economy? Exchange is accurate in voluntary markets
CC, is there redundancy there? On the lives lost 1861-1865}
Thanks for the clarification. Your original comment definitely read like many of the justifications used for reparations and alluded to the rewriting of history that slaves/cotton built America…a patently untrue absurd claim … as are all the claims by race grifters
blues,
No worries. Though. it is always interesting how touchy a subject slavery and indentured servitude in the US during the colonial and pre Civil War amendments period still is. IMO, everyone should read and seek to understand the totality of the history. Then they should look worldwide to discover how universal slavery was throughout history.
The simplistic notion that slavery in the US was unique, that it was limited to Confederate States and all victims were black and all oppressors white is false. It was, IMO, evil and there were a great many people in lots of States who were tainted until that evil was atoned for in the blood sacrifice of our Civil War.
theaqjr
IMO it was a secular or temporal sin against the principles of our Nation’s founding. One can also make an argument that chattel slavery is a religious sin though I don’t make that claim here b/c it isn’t necessary. Betrayal of the founding principles is quite enough of a reason for me.
There can’t be a mathematical counter balance reduced to crass payments. The complexity of the issue defies that. Ultimately slavery died on the temporal alter during our Civil war. The passage of the post Civil war amendments enshrined that sacrifice into our Constitution, which in many aspects is a secular religion. Our military and our public officials take an oath to is. Our school children, in some places, still pledge allegiance to it every day by proxy ‘..and the Republic for which it stands’.
“In 1780, when the Massachusetts Constitution went into effect, slavery was legal in the Commonwealth. However, during the years 1781 to 1783, in three related cases known today as “the Quock Walker case,” the Supreme Judicial Court applied the principle of judicial review to abolish slavery.”
Source: Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery, mass.gov website
Think this points out that Massachusetts had slavery. Perhaps it is worth pointing out from time to time because people issue forth from our schools not knowing this.
You are quite right. All those people are long dead. The reparations conception is inane.
Yep…sugar, rum, slave triangle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7L8cHqgWLM
yup
It was a historical fact, recounted, and one might even say) celebrated in the 60s-70s by a mural on the inside south wall of the Almacs grocery store in Bristol RI, dedicated to “The Triangle Trade.”
AKA The Atlantic Slave Trade.
I don’t believe any State benefited from slavery, they were in fact cursed by it. Held back economically, morally and economically. It was an illusion. An institution of cruelty in the hands of only 1% of the population of the slave states set the country on the course of disaster.
As far as States with large numbers of Slaves
being held back economically I agree though the moral burden is not confined there. The labor was used for intensive crops like cotton which was shipped to mills in northern States, at least the part not sent to British mills. Don’t forget the attitude of Northern industrialists regarding tariffs which were inserted to capture and retain market share from those agricultural States using slaves. Nor can we exclude the home ports of the slave ships and fortunes made by those families investing in them and parlayed into even bigger fortunes.
Northern States at the time did not have clean hands. Even if at one remove they accepted the taint of Slavery in the US by their commerce, political expediency or indifference. Plenty of folks in the North were very willing to supply the slaves, mill the cotton they produced and take the money of slave holders. To pretend otherwise is historically inaccurate.
Yes. It was profitable. Why else engage in it. Historically, it was not even immoral. For millennia, moral men held slaves. Consummately moral men held faithful slaves who were faithful because their owners were moral.
It is hard history.
Morality began when slavery ended. Next Tuesday, if Putin can get to Nigeria soon after he frees Ukraine. Monday. The Nigerian army has Bantu warheads. T-28s.
“Morality began when slavery ended. Next Tuesday, if Putin can get to Nigeria soon after he frees Ukraine. Monday. The Nigerian army has Bantu warheads. T-28s.”
??
The market dictated that.
I am OK with it if Woke Wu gets the money from Woke Harvard’s endowment.
We’d better accept the reality that MOST young people think like this immature dodo Soros installed as another lamebrain mayor.
There’s no solution for the rest of us other than secession.
How trendy.
Remember: Once you open that box you can never close it.
Take the reparations, become an indentured servant in the new liberal utopia of Atlantia, which used to be the NE part of the USA.
Refuse them and suffer the penalty of banishment to Libertia, formerly the SE USA.
Don’t even think of crossing the 30 foot wall Libertia built to keep everyone out and to keep simple posterity and the liberty to enjoy it within.
It seems like blacks are trying to establish themselves as the most worthless race in the world. How smart would it be for blacks to come out against reparations now. There’s no tidal wave, hardly any, which is the problem.
Mayor Wu’s ancestors probably never even saw a black person before they came to the USA. I know my great-grandparents had not seen a black in Russia, the Ukraine and Poland. I take zero responsibility for slavery and I feel no need to pay reparations.
Nor my grandparents before they came to the US. Not an uncommon statement, the actual degree of separation from the forebears being the primary difference.
Imagine the amount of tension building and building, with a long hot summer not that far off.
It will be a race to see which reparations team makes the most outrageous demands. Ours in California has a tremendous head start.
It will be a “race”
Is that a double intendre? If so, that’s racist.
You guys were what, 223,000 per person?? or was it 5 million? I can’t keep up. I hope the Boston team comes up with 5.2 million per person. That would be awesome.
Virtue signals are so cool.
I’m sure all five black residents of Boston salute this stunning and brave effort.
I have a friend that works for the city, and there are majority minority neighborhoods.. The irony is that the black people where she works are mostly Haitians,, families with many recent immigrants. SMH the whole thing is absurd, and illegal.
Two 11th graders and a UMass student? Spare me! I don’t care how “smart” they are.
They weren’t tapped for smart. They were tapped for their Greta Factor. Somebody has to exude the feelz that this project will live or die on. When a kid does it, it’s adorable. If an adult has to do it, she just looks retarded.
I’m sure that’ll solve the problems in the urban black community that are largely the result of the Great Society. The Burn Loot Murder “movement” has grifted millions since 2020. I expect the reparations clown shows to do the same.
Perhaps it’s time to heed Frederick Douglass’s advice all those years ago.
If you want to see what a real “Burn Loot Murder Movement” looks like, go ahead and recommend reparations, with a nice big attractive figure, and then later announce, “We don’t have the money.”
There will be lawsuits against this racist, unConstitutional action, and then it will be, “See what those nasty Republicans….”
But like everything else for the black community, most of the money will wind up in the pockets of friends and family of the politicians.
Also, make sure the reparations announcement is “brought to you by Pfizer.” Two birds.
Boston deserves Michelle Wu. They should pay for the woke Wu.
This is about bribing people to vote for Democrats.
I slightly dissent, only to observe that the intended recipients of “reparations” are likely already loyal Dumb-o-crat voters, so, this is more a bribe to keep them voting Dumb-o-crat.
Did they, or did a voting machine company “elect” her?
“Boston was also a major player in the Underground Railroad, a system of safe houses and volunteers that helped slaves escape to freedom.”
Any ancestors of blacks who escaped slavery by coming to Boston should not receive reparations because the help they received was more valuable than any amount of money.
How do “reparations” paid for by all taxpayers to a select group of citizens, based upon their ethnicity/skin pigmentation, pass Constitutional muster?
Note the ethnicity of said mayor.
From the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 through the Page Act of 1875, through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the United States has specifically and racially discriminated against Chinese, Even preceding that there was the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia negotiated by Caleb Cushing for the United States after the defeat of China by the British in the First Opium War. Cushing invented the concept of Extraterritoriality, which was quickly copied by all Western powers. The concept was that since the legal systems of China and the US were so different; Americans and eventually all Westerners could not be charged with anything they did under Chinese law. The counter to that is that Chinese in America were not covered by or protected by our legal system and Constitution. Murdering a Chinese in America was not a crime under American law.
This lasted until 1943 when the US repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep the Nationalist Chinese from pulling all their trainees here home [because of attacks on them in Colorado by the KKK]. In 1943, for the first time under American law, Chinese became legally human beings in this country. Also, with that the United States became the last western country to give up Extraterritoriality. My dad, who came here in 1928 was able to enlist in the Army in 1943 and earned his citizenship that way.
If reparations are being handed out on a racial/ethnic basis . . . maybe Mayor Wu is looking at an increase in her own bank balance.
While the facts I cite are true, I admit that there is more than a little bit of morbid sarcasm there. However, if our country goes that route, we will be in a race war/civil war before long.
Subotai Bahadur
The Reparations Olympics have begun !
Who will win gold medal for the craziest policy?
In the competitors category, we have the current favorite San Francisco – with a $5 million reparation payment for almost anyone who is black and feels oppressed.
But Boston is moving up fast amongst the competitors – and maybe a dark horse will emerge?
Stay tuned, it is sure to be a competitive category as cities work to outbid each other for most woke and soonest broke!!
I wonder if Boston will also include the descendants of the victims of the Irish Slave trade that existed or nah
I was wondering why Massachusetts was not a member of the blue cabal who are all simultaneously proposing “wealth taxes” in their respective states right now. Maybe they just intend to approach it from a different angle.
Reparations possibility keeps Black’s on the plantation
Or maybe because Massachusetts is in the vanguard, having passed a ballot question last November:
https://taxfoundation.org/question-1-massachusetts-millionaires-tax/
Um, not the same thing. The new MA law taxes income. The law under discussion taxes net worth. Florida had one of these in 1998 or so (they’ve since ditched it) as a way to tax their retiree population who no longer had any significant income but had accumulated nice nest eggs.
I looked over the list of those chosen for the force and one has to wonder if any are descendants of soldiers that gave blood to free the slaves?
Shouldn’t those who fought to abolish slavery get their cut of the action or should we just call this nothing more than Democrat insanity given the keys to the car?
This is American Marxism in practice
Inscrutable
I’m Scottish and Irish … Long before the trans Atlantic slave trade my ancestors were kidnapped some 1 to 1.5 million of my White kin kidnapped and sold into slavery all across Africa and the middle east …. I want justice for my people …. And a fat check …. From Obama
Wu is a Communist, period. Boston had managed to stay ahead of other urban American dumps like NYC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles etc, but under this Harvard fool, it will soon be joining the pack as it devolves into just another third world like crap hole.
Reparations don’t rectify dysfunctional one family head families which lead to gangmembership, and the idea that misogynistic music or athletic success as opposed to education are the only ways out of poverty
How ironic that Boston the home of abolitionism is now a target of American Marxism
Let’s discuss “redlining, the busing crisis, and exclusion from city contracting”-If a community is crime infested and its residents are on welfare-why should any bank underwrite a bad mortgage risk? Busing was a collosal failure and city contracts should be given on the ability to do the job, as opposed to political connections
This just offers an incentive to commit mass abortion, or enslavement, rather than right the wrongs that will evolve in a progressive, forward-looking state.
LOL Where will you get the money from Madam Wu? Taxes? Since you cannot print your own money you going to get a loan from the .FED? IMF?
Bankrupt your state?
These fools that keep pushing this crap do not know anything and the law of unintended consequences will bite them hard in the ass. This is getting stupid.
Whatever the affronts, they’ve already decided on the form of redress and resolution. In the immortal lyric of Spinal Tap
“Gimmie some mon-ey…”
With a lawyer in charge. Yeah, that’ll work out well..
Ha ha ha! I was thinking more of…
Are you with me, Mayor Wu? /
Are you really just a shadow of the ones that we once knew? /
Are you crazy, are you drunk, /
Or just an ordinary punk? /
Has it finally got to you?
Are you with me, Mayor…
Frakking brilliant.