NORTHAMPTON — Activists in Northampton are calling on the City Council to establish a reparations commission that would examine the city’s historical links to slavery and racism, as well as address current racial inequities in areas like housing and employment.
“The small number of Black residents in Northampton are impacted by racism, including the lack of affordable housing, access to transportation and educational inequality,” wrote the group, calling itself the Northampton Reparations Committee, on a change.org petition for the city to establish the commission. “We believe that repairing past and current harms will help us build a healthy, diverse Northampton.”
The push for a reparations committee for the city mirrors successful efforts in Amherst, which created the African Heritage Reparation Assembly in 2021 to study the effects of historic racial inequality in the town and propose solutions to ameliorate those economic differences. The Amherst Town Council has committed to spending $2 million over the next 10 years from cannabis tax revenue for the reparations program.
“I’ve been drawn into this conversation by way of my experiences as an African-American woman, who cares a lot about how we can build reconciliation and further our goals of racial unity,” said Sarah Lynn Patterson, an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the seven members of the Northampton Reparations Committee. “We see this project really in the spirit of collaboration and giving African-Americans here in Northampton a way to engage in the civic process.”
Although long a bastion of political progressivism, Northampton remains largely racially homogenous, with the most recent census numbers stating the city is 87% white. The committee’s petition notes that Black residents only make up 2.1% of the city’s population, and 21.9% of them have earnings under the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Other members of the committee include Sara Lennox, professor emerita of German at UMass Amherst, Sara Weinberger, professor emerita of social work at Western New England University, and Tom Weiner, an author and former teacher at the Smith Campus School. Patterson is currently the only African-American member of the committee, though the petition calls for at least 50% of the proposed commission to be Black residents.
In a column published in the Gazette last week, Weinberger noted the impact that reparation payments made by Germany to one of her relatives, a survivor of the Holocaust, had on the family.
“Nothing will ever heal the trauma my family endured as Polish Jews,” she wrote. “Reparations, however, was an acknowledgment of Germany’s wrongs, an action that went beyond apology. Reparations are crucial to righting the historical wrongs committed against Black people in the U.S.”
In addition to Amherst, other places across the country that have adopted local reparation measures include Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. A bill introduced in Congress by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, known as H.R. 40, also looks to explore the impact of slavery and racial discrimination through the United States’ history and recommend subsequent reparative measures.
“There’s controversy about whether to have local efforts while there’s desire for a national effort,” said Weiner. “We’re seeing it as augmenting.”
Weiner said he and Patterson have had discussions with City Council members Jamila Gore and Garrick Perry, the two people of color on the council, to eventually introduce the proposed commission. He said current plans were to introduce it sometime around mid-January to early February, to roughly coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A kickoff event to be held around that time is also planned.
