American Freedmen Commission for Cambridge is called historic action by descendants of slaves
Residents gather on Cambridge Common on June 7, 2020, during a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that energized U.S. social justice efforts such as reparations. (Photo: Marc Levy)
The creation of an American Freedmen Commission to explore reparations was ordained unanimously Monday by the Cambridge City Council.
The new city department of five to 15 people, the majority of whom must be Freedmen – the descendants of people who were enslaved within the United States – now goes to the City Manager’s Office for implementation. Commission members will be paid a stipend to investigate historical human-rights violations and how to address them.
The vote was historic, said speakers during a public comment that drew remarks from several residents and activists from across the country.
“This will be the first approved commission since Reconstruction to focus on the descendants of American chattel slavery,” said Cheryce Cryer, a Los Angeles lawyer active in California’s ongoing work on reparations. “A yes vote will be historical and set a small but mighty city on an international path as a thought leader on restorative justice and create a guideline for other municipalities.”
Some distinctions are drawn between this and other reparations groups: It is not about racial justice, which is based on civil rights, but in transitional justice, which is based on human rights; and the reparations being discussed – which organizers stress is not about finding a dollar amount – is not about black people broadly.
Another California activist, Margery Melvin, said she considered Cambridge’s commission to be the first to “correctly characterize reparations – meaning you’ve correctly characterized it as being for the descendants of those enslaved in this country and freed by the 13th Amendment in 1865.”
Still, the U.S. reparations movement drew strength from the summer of 2020, when Black Rights Matter protests – resulting from a new wave of killings of people of color – also inspired more diversity among candidates for public office and a less successful movement to “defund” or demilitarize police departments.
Councillors thanked resident Saskia VannJames for leading the work on the commission proposal and educating them on its details. “I’m a descendant of slaves, but from the Caribbean. And there is a distinction between those people and American Freedmen – we are related, but we are not the same,” councillor Quinton Zondervan said. “I really appreciate Saskia’s diligence in educating us and helping us understand those distinctions and how to navigate that complexity, and ultimately to put this before us in what is a historic moment and historic vote.”
Standing up in 2021
When two reparations and restitution proposals came up in City Council meetings in 2021, VannJames stood during public comment to call them misguided. The orders were tabled in favor of getting more input from the community – a task that fell to VannJames, a policy director with the cannabis-focused Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council and the co-founder of Grow to Consume, an organization that helps black people find urban agricultural space and learn to cultivate organic food.
VannJames’ volunteerism became two years of law study, meetings and attending reparations conferences. She estimated in September that she spoke with 1,000 people in preparation for presentations to two council committees leading to Monday’s vote.
“The passing of the American Freedmen commission will help our city repair harm stemming from a racial caste system that’s impacting all of us as residents. And I believe here in Cambridge we’re ready to have conversations on human rights,” VannJames said Monday. “We’re looking at ethnic erasure, and we’re looking at a multigenerational form of a genocide, essentially. When you’re identifying people only by race and justifying it to excuse history, we have to make amends towards our history.”
Just the beginning
The officials and activists agreed that however momentous the vote might be, it was only the start of a long and likely difficult road – starting with its foundational language and principles. “Residents are familiar with conversations around race. They’re familiar with conversations around antiracism,” VannJames said. “This is an unfamiliar conversation.”
Councillor E. Denise Simmons said the commission would do important work, and that Cambridge – as a city that strives to be a model for others nationwide – was “taking a bold step.”
“This city was built on the backs of free, enslaved labor, on Freedmen’s ancestors. Here we have the opportunity to do the important work of correcting the wrongs of the past. I am so proud to stand with this council as we ordain this project,” Simmons said. “This is the easy part. The hard work is yet to come. But I know we’re all up for it.”
It is good that Cambridge is seriously considering reparations, however there are aspects of this that are pretty unfortunate, particularly the nationalist limitations.
“and the reparations being discussed – which organizers stress is not about finding a dollar amount – is not about black people broadly.” American Black people were not the only people harmed by Cambridge’s involvement in the slave trade. This is artificially limiting the repair to only part of the damage done. I disagree strongly with the characterization that this is correctly characterizing reparations.
As I pointed out in the previous article on this subject:
The role that Cambridge played in the slave trade was international, as was Atlantic slavery in general. Enslavers in Cambridge bought slaves from Africa and at very least traded with other slavers in the Caribbean if they didn’t run plantations there themselves (and many did, including the Vassal family much local controversy has revolved around lately). Limiting reparations only to “American” (ignoring also that America is two continents) descendants of slavery is not actually reconning with the full reality and cannot possibly make full amends for the harms this community has benefitted from.
This is all the more important in a city like Cambridge with so many immigrants from communities that were directly impacted by the slave trade as well, particularly Haiti (whom the US punished for freeing their slaves). If the problem wasn’t limited by national borders neither should the solution be.
I will add some supporting evidence:
“Henry Vassall was the son of a prominent Jamaican planter.” https://www.boston.com/news/history/2019/07/02/slave-owners-cambridge-streets-monuments/
“In addition to the enslaved workers on their plantations abroad, John and Elizabeth Vassall also enslaved people at their estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The practice of slavery was deeply embedded in the society and economy of the New England colonies, and directly connected to slavery in the Caribbean.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/though-dwelling-in-a-land-of-freedom.htm#:~:text=In%20addition%20to%20the%20enslaved,to%20slavery%20in%20the%20Caribbean.
Tory Row Anti racism Coalition TRAC: Caitlin Hopkins The Sugar Planters of Brattle Street
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqOeQKCvepY&t=1s
“Harvard’s financial ties to slavery are multifaceted, and the economic links between colonial New England and the Caribbean provide critical context to understand such entanglements. Trade between New England and the West Indies proved so essential to both regions that one 17th-century observer declared Boston “the mart town of the West Indies.”Go to footnote 154 detail As early as 1667 the governor of the English colony of Barbados acknowledged that “these colonies cannot in peace prosper, or in war subsist, without a correspondence with” the New England colonies.Go to footnote 155 detail” https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/report/new-england-and-caribbean-slavery
This city was also built on the backs of people enslaved in the Caribbean. Leaving them out of this attempt at repair is deeply problematic.
Is this really the best use of city resources? Would we be better served by hiring more mental health workers or teacher aides, for example?
This feels like a bad idea for a few reasons.
1) The most likely outcome here is the only people who get ‘reparations’ are the under represented minorities who are tapped to serve on the panel, and receive the stipend.
2) As soon as the financial implications of slavery are dimensionalized, we rapidly leave the realm of what a city like Cambridge is resourced to address by multiple orders of magnitude. So the outcome here will either be highly detrimental to the city budget, or functionally meaningless, and likely nothing in between.
Why open a can of worms where the outcome is guaranteed to be unsatisfactory to literally everyone?
@slaw, the point is not to exclude anybody and there is no implied denial of harm done to enslaved people in the Caribbean. This commission is simply focussed only on American Freedmen. If there is a will and desire for similar commissions for other groups that have been harmed, such commissions can and should be created.
@cantab2023, you are unreasonably guaranteeing an imagined outcome. Why not allow the conversation to take place and allow the people who have been and are being harmed to determine what those harms are and what reasonable reparations would look like? Reparations are not limited to cash payments, nor are they limited to the Cambridge City budget. It’s premature and unreasonable to shut down the conversation based on those false premises. For example, the federal government may decide to pay reparations in the future. If we’ve already had that conversation in Cambridge we’d presumably be in a much better position to take advantage of that opportunity. So no, it’s not a bad idea at all, it’s a great and necessary idea that’s frankly long overdue. For example the commission may determine that certain actions by the city government already constitute reparations and increase those activities and their funding. Etc.
It is not difficult to guess what a committee comprised of people ideologically committed to reparations will conclude. The composition of this Commission, which is a new department of the City with paid commissioners, is racially defined (“85% of them identifying as American Freedman.”) Is there another department in city government comprised in this way? Is this appropriate in a liberal democracy?
“the point is not to exclude anybody and there is no implied denial of harm done to enslaved people in the Caribbean. This commission is simply focussed only on American Freedmen.” You are literally describing excluding people. Cambridge slave owners owned people in the Caribbean. There is no reason they should not be included in discussions of reparations except nationalism, and that is not a good reason for anything.
“If there is a will and desire for similar commissions for other groups that have been harmed, such commissions can and should be created.” There should be no need for an additional commission, this commission should not exclude them in the first place.
I wish Cambridge did this first as well, It would have made connections to the Caribbean obvious and would have made it a lot harder to exclude dependents of Caribbean slaves from reparations.
Oops forgot the link: https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2024-01-24/researchers-will-document-the-history-and-legacy-of-enslavement-in-boston-reparations-task-force-announces