A tiny group of local activists has declared that the city of Northampton should establish a reparations fund to overcome the legacy of slavery and racism. The City Council seems to agree with the general concept and plans to create a committee to fill in the details.
A problem with this initiative is that the proponents and the council have either ignored the need to establish Northampton’s guilty actions for which the reparations are now owed, or they have completely misconstrued Northampton’s history.
Let’s consider that history.
Consider Sojourner Truth. She, who spent many years talking to audiences throughout the North about her own experience as a slave, came to Northampton in 1843 to join the Northampton Association for Education and Industry. According to the Historic Northampton website, Truth felt there was no other place that offered her the same “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul.” It was in Northampton that Truth came into contact with abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips.
The city maintains the statue of Sojourner Truth, and it awarded $150,000 in CPA funds in 2009 to support the David Ruggles Center as a testament to our ongoing pride that Northampton was a key stop on the Underground Railroad
Was the Northampton Association or the Ruggles Center guilty of slavery and its legacy?
How about the people of Northampton who supported Lincoln, who fought for the Union and the end of slavery, and the soldiers of Northampton memorialized on the monument downtown for having given their lives for this cause?
Do these people bear the guilt of slavery and its legacy?
Our city was on the morally right side then and we can be proud of our efforts toward racial equality ever since. Northampton never imposed Jim Crow laws. Rather, it has long committed itself to equal access to city services regardless of race. It complies with all federal and state programs to level the playing field for minorities in procurements, and it bends over backwards to find and hire minorities for city positions. The city routinely exceeds the state’s goal for affordable housing.
Our residents elected representatives who voted for the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s … and then re-elected them over and over again.
Does this sound like a community that is guilty of crimes for which it must pay reparations?
The obvious answer is that it does not. Had the petitioners brought this to an actual court instead of the City Council, it would have had to fall back on the same argument used by Rudy Giuliani in claiming fraud in the 2020 election: “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”
The courts didn’t buy it from Giuliani, and no fair judge or jury world buy it from the supporters of Northampton reparations either.
Northampton’s relatively small Black population is also not the source of shame that some seem to suggest. Our demographics are not a testament to systemic and pervasive racism, but to the fact that we never had the type and scale of employment that would have attracted significant Black migration from the South in the last century.
The latest census, by the way, also shows that Northampton has even fewer Pacific Islanders than Blacks. Do we owe reparations to them, too?
(Actually, that group might have a stronger case. It was, after all, Northampton’s own “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” Jonathan Edwards who inspired legions of New England missionaries to go forth and knock the Hula out of native Hawaiians for 60 years.)
Look, what’s really going on here is that the reparations crowd thinks that Northampton is so progressive that it will just embrace the measure anyway.
That is a horrible idea. It is to say that though Northampton has long stood resolutely against injustice for Blacks, the city must now accept injustice against itself. No, we must not. We did not enslave anyone and we have not perpetuated its legacy. Northampton is not guilty as charged. We should be proud of that, and we should not demean ourselves by now acknowledging a crime or accepting this penalty.
Shall we also name names in a witch hunt?
Councilors, don’t fall for this. The basis for reparations is not our city’s guilt, and the proposal is not even a sensible or virtuous city response to other people’s guilt. The funds we might pay in reparations to highlight some fuzzy and indirect view of victimhood, should instead just go to a real accelerator of equity: greater early childhood intervention, particularly for those most disadvantaged during the schooling interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quality public education is our true civic obligation and is our best means to level the playing field for all.
We also must do what we can to ensure that businesses continue to offer the employment opportunities conducive to broad prosperity. Here too, the passage of Northampton reparations would be completely counter-productive. The City Council may not see it, but any sensible business person would: “Invest in Northampton? You mean that city paying reparations? Forget that! That city is nuts.”
Marc Warner lives in Northampton.
*This column was updated on Dec. 28 to correct a factual error regarding the history of slavery in Northampton.