Advocates at a city-funded reparations event Saturday urged Boston to suspend a program to build affordable housing on vacant lots in Dorchester and Roxbury that were once owned by Black families.
The event, organized by the local chapter of American Descendants of Slavery with funding from Boston’s reparations task force, was advertised as an opportunity to provide public comment to the task force as it continues its work to determine what reparations should looks like in the city. “Tell the City of Boston what reparations means to you,” organizers announced on Facebook.
Reggie Stewart, the Massachusetts coordinator for the ADOS Foundation, told attendees: “This is also a listening session which you can consider to be tantamount to testimony. So imagine that you are in City Hall and that the City Council is here in front of you and the mayor is here in front of you, because that is going to be the people that this is put in front of.”
The reparations task force has hired researchers to document the history of slavery in Boston, as well as the history of discrimination post-slavery, with the goal of finishing that work by the end of the year. While the task force has held no public meetings since March, it is partnering with community organizations to “host informational and listening sessions on the history and current challenges of anti-Black racism and local reparations efforts.”
Most of the afternoon session was turned over to a panel moderated by former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson. It focused on the imminent threat of Boston residents losing the opportunity to reclaim land their family once owned.
Boston is turning over city-owned property to developers, creating incentives for builders to construct affordable housing on dozens of lots in Dorchester and Roxbury. It’s part of the Welcome Home, Boston program that was announced by Mayor Michelle Wu in her 2023 State of the City address. But a GBH News investigation revealed that many of those lots had once been owned by Black families who lost them to tax liens or other fees imposed by the city.
The panel included Tracee Carter, Brenda Saucer and Pamela Saucer-Richardson. Their father, James Saucer, had his Dorchester property seized by the city in the early 1990s.
“Can you imagine driving around, watching people building housing on your people’s property and finding out that the city gave it to them for $200?” Wilkerson asked. “Because that’s the reality of what’s happening right now. So any real plan about how we’re going to deal with creating Black wealth has to be about protecting the land.”
Carter said that, since the GBH News article was published in July, she and her sisters have been unable to get city officials to talk to them about whether they can reclaim some of their father’s land. “Why don’t you reach out and help us to do what you said you wanted to do for reparations?” she asked.
She speculated the city figures think they will just go away, she said, but “We ain’t going away.”
Wilkerson said it is important for the city task force to continue its exploration of reparations, but that is likely to take another year or more to play out. Meanwhile, she said, the city needs to act now to prevent additional economic harm being done to Black residents who increasingly cannot afford to live in Boston.
“We have to keep this conversation going about reparations,” she said. “But we can’t let the process get worse while we’re doing it, because there’ll be nobody here. Roxbury is bleeding Black people. ... The alarm bells should be going off.”
She also highlighted concerns about city housing policies that make it impossible for low-income families to build equity when they buy homes through city-subsidized affordable housing programs. Those programs limit the resale price of the property for decades.
Yvette Carnell, president of the ADOS Advocacy Foundation, said that Black families have been denied the opportunity to pass on wealth to their descendants for centuries.
“You’re supposed to be able to inherit something. We have this great white transfer of wealth. And this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of this country,” she said. “And you [descendants of slavery] are receiving nothing. And this is not because of something that your parents did not do, is not because of something that your great-grandparents did not do, is not because of something that your great-great-grandparents did not do. They did it all, and benefited from nothing.”
