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Date: 1/31/2023
NORTHAMPTON – An online panel featuring three guest speakers was conducted on Jan. 24 to make the call for reparations for the historic treatment of Black people in Northampton.
The Northampton Reparations Committee, in conjunction with Forbes Library, spearheaded the online Zoom session titled “Why Reparations? Why Northampton? Why Now” in front of several hundred guests to bring knowledge and awareness of the need for reparations in Northampton.
“Our goal…is to present information that will encourage our city’s citizens to spread the word about the efforts of the Northampton Reparations Committee [NRC] to have our City Council and Mayor [Gina-Louise] Sciarra establish a commission to study the historical and current harms experienced by Black citizens of Northampton,” said Thomas Weiner, a founding member of the Reparations Committee.
The committee is asking Northampton to form a citywide reparations commission that would investigate the historical and current effects of enslavement and racism against Black people in Northampton.
The committee is also calling upon the mayor and City Council to issue a formal apology to past and present Black residents of Northampton for “historic harm that has occurred and the current harm that continues to occur.”
Additionally, the committee would like the mayor and City Council to fund the commission’s research and publish its findings.
“There are both ceremonial and practical things that we can do to take action to bring social justice into reality,” said Sarah Patterson, a member of the committee and assistant professor within the University of Massachusetts English Department. “A ceremonial thing is to just say sorry…to allow the city to properly address the complicit history we have with slavery.”
According to Patterson, history shows that there were at least 50 enslaved people at the time of Northampton’s founding.
“The second part is you need practical efforts to facilitate racial reconciliation and redress, which is what reparations intend to do,” said Patterson. “The commission will provide the structure to study and make recommendations for how a fund might be used to redress the harms in systematic racism that are evident in our history.”
The three panelists invited to speak during the event were Rep. Andrea Ayvazian, who serves as the director of the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership; Ousmane Power-Greene, director of Africana studies and associate professor of history at Clark University in Worcester and Dan Cannity, co-chair of the Policing Review Commission of Northampton.
Other Northampton Reparations Committee members were there to speak, as well, including Weiner and Sarah Weinberger, a professor of social work.
The committee created a petition for residents to sign in support of reparations, and as of press time, over 1,100 people have signed.
The committee’s hope is the City Council will take this issue up at one of their meetings in February.
Why Reparations
Power-Greene said reparations have been a central theme to African American social and political movements for decades.
“There’s an impression that this is new,” said Power-Greene. “But, like many aspects of history, that’s not true at all.”
Instead, Power-Greene emphasized the fact that reparations are mentioned throughout many aspects of African American teachings, but the conversation around them became more visible after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“This actually goes back to petitioners in Massachusetts in the 1770s,” said Power-Greene. “Enslaved people are the foundation for all reparations movements and all calls for racial justice.”
Power-Greene also highlighted the fact that many institutions within Northampton, like colleges, religious entities and other city entities would be joining the rest of the world in this fight.
“This is a much broader and wider movement that we will be participating in,” said Power-Greene. “I really want to encourage everyone to [join in].”
Why Northampton
Ayvazian focused on Northampton’s dark history, where many prominent leaders – some of which have street names in the city – were in fact slave owners.
“The core group of enslavers were families who controlled the wealth and politics in this city,” she said. “The names of the enslavers will sound familiar to many of us…Parsons, Strong, Pomeroy.”
Ayvazian argued that the city must consider education initiatives that teach the community about the horrors of slavery in Northampton since many are unaware.
“We are joining a national reparations movement that has power and purpose,” said Ayvazian.
“Northampton would join communities across the country that are working towards reparations on the local and state level.”
Amherst, Evanston, IL, Asheville, NC and Providence, RI are among the cities in the U.S. who have joined this movement.
Why now
“Reparations is a complete apology, but reparations is also justice,” said Cannity, during his spoken piece. “As the old maxim goes, ‘justice delayed is justice denied.’”
Cannity’s thesis revolved around the idea that racism has been a common throughline in America for centuries. “It’s still a problem and the harms linked back to [slavery] are still affecting us,” said Cannity. “Really it’s a group project on deciding how to make this a reality here in this particular local space. Northampton’s participation in reparations as a process leads to Massachusetts as a participant in this process.”