Diversity Dialogue featuring Lawrence "Larry" Watson

Join the Henry Whittemore Library and the Center for Inclusive Excellence on Thursday, February 15 at 3:30 as we host Lawrence “Larry” Watson, activist, musician, and public official.  We will be focusing our discussion on the topic of reparations.  Registration is not required but is encouraged!  

Learn more about this topic by checking out some of the resources below!

Books

• From Here To Equality: Reparations For Black Americans In The Twenty-First Century by William Darity and Kirsten Mullen

From the publisher: Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household has in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, they offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen - slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination - makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.

• My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle For Ex-Slave Reparations by Mary Frances Berry

From the publisher: Historian Berry resurrects the forgotten life of courageous pioneering activist Callie House (1861-1928), ex-slave, widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five who, seventy years before the civil rights movement, headed a demand for ex-slave reparations. House was born into slavery in 1861 and sought African-American pensions based on those offered Union soldiers, targeting taxes on seized rebel cotton (over $1.2 billion in 2005 dollars) and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. The Justice Department banned the activities of her town organizers and falsely accused her of mail fraud; the federal officials had the post office open the mail of almost all African-Americans, denying delivery on the smallest pretext. Though African-American newspapers, most of which preached meekness toward whites, ignored or derided Mrs. House's Ex-Slave Association, the movement flourished until she was imprisoned; deprived of her spirit, leadership and ferocity, the first national grassroots African-American movement fell apart.

• The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice edited by Darity, William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, and Lucas Hubbard

From the publisher: A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars-members of the Reparations Planning Committee-who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward. The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the massive black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice.

Article

• “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic, June 2014) This article requires a Framingham State University login to access

Videos

• AMERICA REFRAMED: The Cost of Inheritance (Original Air Date: PBS 1/8/24, Available through 4/30/24)
• The Origin of Everything: The History of Reparations (Original Air Date: PBS 12/9/20)
• The National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) website has a large library of videos and other resources on the topic of reparations.

Websites

• The City of Boston’s Task Force on Reparations
• History and Facts About Reparations in the U.S.: List of documentaries and resources on the history of reparations from PBS.
• National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC): “NAARC is a group of distinguished professionals from across the country with outstanding accomplishments in the fields of law, medicine, journalism, academia, history, civil rights and social justice advocacy.”
• Reparations in the United States: An Historical Timeline of Reparations Payments Made From 1773 through 2023 by the United States Government, States, Cities, Religious Institutions, Universities, Corporations, and Communities By Allen J. Davis, Ed.D.  (University of Massachusetts Amherst Library LibGuide)
• Reparations4Slavery: Website featuring information and resources on the topic of reparations in American.

Podcast

• WGBH's What Is Owed? Podcast: "Boston - like many cities around the US - has begun to wrestle with the notion of paying reparations to Black people to make up for 400 years of enslavement and economic exclusion. But in Boston, this debate is layered in history. It was here that slavery was first legalized in the American colonies; it was here that founders of American independence are buried alongside the Black people they enslaved; and it was here that legislation was introduced in the 1980s that became the model of a national bill calling for reparations - a bill that is still on agenda in the U.S Congress.

  In What Is Owed?, a new 7-part podcast, GBH News political reporter Saraya Wintersmith seeks to understand what reparations might look like in one of the oldest cities in America, uncovering the lessons for a successful reparations framework through the stories of its architects, past and present." (description from the WGBH website)

Check out all the great events happening this February at the CIE!