What is Owed?

GBH News and The Emancipator — a digital magazine that reimagines the nation’s first abolitionist newspapers for a new day — convened a discussion to consider how Boston might change in the decades after reparations are enacted.

Boston’s Mayor and members of the reparations task force speak about the progress made so far, the challenges going forward, and what they think reparations could actually look like. ————- Credits: Host, Producer and Writer: Saraya Wintersmith  Senior Producer: Jerome Campbell  Editor: Paul Singer Editorial Assistant: Mara Mellits  Production oversight: Lee Hill  Mixing and Sound Design: David Goo...

We’re talking about the “R” words. Race. And Reparations. With Ibram X. Kendi, founder and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. ————- Credits: Host, Producer and Writer: Saraya Wintersmith  Senior Producer: Jerome Campbell  Editor: Paul Singer Editorial Assistant: Mara Mellits  Production oversight: Lee Hill  Mixing and Sound Design: David Goodman & Gary Mott  Them...

As Boston begins its first steps into considering reparations, we look at the city of Evanston, Illinois - which is already doing it. Evanston is the first city in the U.S. to enact municipally-funded reparations legislation. Robin Rue Simmons is a former city alderman who led the passage of the bill, which began disbursements in January 2022. In this episode, Rue Simmons and her collaborators tal...

Although reparations has been historically fought for by Black people, the duty will be ultimately carried out by the government. To understand this role, we look at one of the biggest reparation efforts launched in history – repaying survivors of the Nazi regime. In this episode, we focus on the reparations paid by the Austrian government in response to WWII and how the nation prepared itself bef...

One of the biggest challenges for a local reparations effort is determining who should get repaid. Historically, the idea of reparations has been tied to the forsaken promise of 400,000 acres the U.S. government was going to give to formerly enslaved people due to the atrocities of slavery. However, the harms endured by Black people have not been confined to that period. We start the episode at Ca...

We look back at the history of efforts in Boston to explore reparations, particularly through the lens of Sen. Bill Owens, the first Black member of the Massachusetts Senate. At the end of the 1980s, Owens, inspired by activism he had seen in Detroit, introduced a bill to pay reparations to Black descendants of enslaved people. That bill is credited as being a model for national legislation introd...

Boston, a city entrenched in the history of the American Revolution, creates a task force to explore the city’s history of slavery and economic discrimination and to consider reparations for Black citizens. The effort is delicately balanced to navigate political challenges – and yet it is immediately beset with delay and mismanaging, leading some city residents to wonder whether Boston is really s...

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 ensl...