The City of Boston has nixed its report looking at the city’s ties to slavery after concerns arose around the lead researcher’s academic practices.
Kerri Greenidge, former Tufts professor, was the lead researcher on the reparations report. But after criticism regarding the accuracy of her 2022 book, she lost her professorship at Tufts.
“The City [of Boston] and [Tufts] University have reluctantly come to a decision to cancel the contract for the first volume of the report,” a joint statement from the city and Tufts said. “The faculty member who had been leading the project is no longer employed by the university.”
Tufts said in that statement that it has been unable to find a replacement researcher “with the subject-matter expertise necessary to deliver a report meeting the standard that the City and the University both expect.”
Tufts returned the full value of the contract — $335,000 — to the city, which will be redistributed for other priorities of the task force.
The report comes in two sections. The Reparations Task Force is currently reviewing a section authored by researchers at Northeastern University that focuses on history from 1940 to 2020. The other section is from Tufts and Greenidge’s research, and covered the 1600s until 1940.
Joseph Feaster, chair of the Reparations Task Force, said that a report from Northeastern is complete, but they still want to examine the earlier history.
“We’re looking at trying to find the means and methods that we might be able to employ in order to get that information,” Feaster said.
That section from Northeastern is currently being reviewed and then will be made public in the “near future,” according to the joint statement. But Feaster told GBH News that the task force wants to wait until both sections are analyzed before releasing anything.
Feaster acknowledged the impatience that has festered around the report, but said he can’t say yet when Northeastern’s section of the report will be released.
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond leads the research subcommittee for the task force, and also said that she understands the frustration around the delays, but emphasized the importance of continuing this work and seeing it through.
“The research subcommittee is exploring, are there potential options that do not require us to start from scratch?” White-Hammond said, who’s also the pastor of New Roots AME Church in Dorchester. “
White-Hammond said there were only three responses to the RFP for a report on the city’s history around reparations. She pointed out that with the current climate in the country, many people that work around diverse history and research are being attacked.
She hopes that this setback doesn’t provide “fodder to those who believe the best path is to ignore, to overlook [and] to tell people to get over the deep, deep harm that is at the foundation of our country’s history.”
“The very notion of what our history is and that it deserves to be researched and foregrounded has been under attack,” she told GBH News. “The committee is trying to ask the question, ‘What can we do that gives us the historical information and accuracy that is required to make these decisions with the least amount of delay possible?’
“We don’t see an easy path forward right now, but we are still searching,” she added.
She acknowledged how much of a setback to this process this has been, but is excited to see the city supporting work to repair that legacy of harm created by slavery.
“We can actually be a city on a hill, a shining example, which we’ve been saying for hundreds of years,” she said. “I think this a real opportunity still for Boston to do that, and I hope we will move forward with that as the focus.”
Saraya Wintersmith contributed to this report.
