It’s been three months since the panel charged with examining the possibility of reparations for Black Bostonians last held a public meeting, according to city records. That’s despite adding a new member and briefly taking in applications for community partnership grants in the time since its last meeting in March.
At a city hearing to assess progress on Thursday, Task Force on Reparations Chair Joseph Feaster defended the panel as following the letter of its creating ordinance.
“I see the task force role is to do what the ordinance told us to do,” said Feaster. “I continuously hear the issue of community engagement, transparency — my contention is that both are being addressed.”
He argued that community engagement should increase once city-hired researchers produce a report for the task force to evaluate.
Several of Feaster’s colleagues said the panel needs improved internal cooperation, more community engagement, and better relations with Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration.
Feaster pushed back on calls to increase community involvement.
“The issue of engagement with the community is most important once we have the baseline,” he said. “Other than that, we can have a nice conversation, but it I’m not sure to what extent it would be informative for us.”
Other task force members and the public disagreed with that perspective, and implied that oversight from the Wu administration bogs down their functioning.
“We are having conversations of exploring what autonomy looks like for the reparations task force members and power dynamics when it comes to the relationship between the city, the staff and reparations task force members,” said task force member Carrie Mays. “I want the community to know that you are heard ... and that, I as well as the rest of the task force members in the city will do our best to implement those concerns.”
When asked to assess the panel’s community engagement efforts to date, Mays said, “I think that we need to do better. And there’s a lot more work to be done.”
Task force member Chip Greenidge agreed about the need for more community involvement.
“I’ve been a total proponent of the community being involved in this process. ... My requests have been overlooked and not even heard,” Greenidge said. “And, so therefore I tend to send out my own critical emails to get the word out — which really shouldn’t be totally my job, but this should be a, a job of the city staff.”
Greenidge, who publicized the city’s seven-day application for community partnership grants in a personal newsletter, added that the task force is restricted by various forces that keep it from functioning smoothly.
“We need to be able to be autonomous ... and at times, I feel like it’s not autonomous at all, like we have lots of different thumbs on the scale at times,” Greenidge said.
Speaking on behalf of Wu administration, Equity and Inclusion Chief Mariangely Solis Cervera contended the city’s oversight function is necessary.
“We’ve had many conversations to address those feeling and concerns and realities,” she said. “The decision was to create a task force within government. Therefore, it is our responsibility to ensure that it happens.”
Members of the task force also revealed they attended at least one retreat where a hired facilitator attempted to mediate between task force members and city officials. A retreat was cited as the reason for the latest canceled meeting.
The task force was formed in February 2023 and had a rocky rollout, as documented in the GBH News podcast What is Owed?
Several hearing-goers criticized the task force harshly, calling it lackluster and unorganized given the weight of the issue.
“Logistically speaking, the Boston Reparations Task Force is a national joke,” said Reggie Stewart, a Black Dorchester resident, who pointed to the panel’s general lack of meetings and virtual access.
“And when I look around the country, I see detailed accountings of reparations, meetings, recordings, documents that are easily and fully accessible in cities like Asheville, North Carolina; Evanston, Illinois; Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco, California,” Stewart said.
Edwin Sumpter, a member of the Boston People’s Reparations Commission, a community advocacy group formed in response to the task force’s general lack of public engagement, said many question whether the task force is serious.
The group’s leader, the Rev. Kevin Peterson, also called for the removal of former state Rep. Byron Rushing from the task force.
Rushing was tapped by Mayor Michelle Wu in May to serve in one of two openings created when original appointees resigned.
Earlier in the month, the grassroots group cited Rushing’s paraphrased comments as told on the What is Owed? podcast as indicative of bias and sending “mixed signals to those hoping for a realistic opportunity for reparations in Boston.”
Rushing, who declined to appear on the podcast, is noted as saying that his decision to support a 1980s legislative push for reparations in Massachusetts was the worst mistake of his political career.
“His bias should disqualify him from service on the task force. We demand that Mayor Wu rescind his appointment,” Peterson said.
The grassroots group has also called for Boston to budget $15 billion toward reparations for descendants of slavery and other, socially conscious priorities and called for white clergy in Greater Boston to draft an atonement statement and encourage greater advocacy on the issue from the religious community.
