What Is Owed?

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:04] Kiara Singleton is hovering intently above a rare document at the Massachusetts archives. As a historian, she's excited whenever she gets a chance to nerd out over old texts.

Kiara Singleton [00:00:16] I think documents, archival documents are amazing sources of information, and sometimes we just have to read between the lines, and other times we just need to read what is right in front of us.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:29] Looking at this set of documents, Kiara is particularly excited as she dons synthetic rubber gloves and delicately presents the petitions of Belinda Sutton, a formerly enslaved woman who sued the Commonwealth nearly 250 years ago for compensation for enslavement and technically won.

Kiara Singleton [00:00:48] So right now we are looking at, the original, pension petition that Belinda Sutton files and 1783. It's quite amazing. I mean, we do not have many documents like this from black women in the 18th century.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:04] The petition is one of America's earliest cases of reparations. Belinda, an African born woman, came to be enslaved on a massive estate in what is now Medford, Massachusetts. There, Kiara says Belinda worked for the royal family for 50 years before claiming her freedom through an emancipation option in her enslavers will.

Kiara Singleton [00:01:26] And then Belinda goes, oh, that's not enough, please compensate for the labor that was stolen from me.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:34] Belinda's demand for reparations was not the first time the state confronted how it treated black people. Two years before, two other enslaved people, Elizabeth Freeman and Clark Walker, both successfully sued for their freedom in Massachusetts highest court, leading to rulings that deemed the institution of slavery to be unconstitutional.

Kiara Singleton [00:01:56] Black people are actively challenging what freedom looks like, and they're saying, hey, if we are in the midst of an American Revolution, where where do we fit in? Right? If it's freedom for everyone, then it should be freedom for us as well.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:13] Belinda's lawsuit took it one step further.

Kiara Singleton [00:02:16] I mean, we see her saying, give me my money. We see her saying, well, you're collecting rent from, you know, the royal properties. Why do I not have my money? Where is my payment? I mean, she's so vocal and she's not backing down.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:32] Historians believe Belinda had help writing her petitions from other black and white abolitionists. The documents show a keen awareness of America's political situation when she filed them. There are lines criticizing her enslaver for being a loyalist to the Crown, and Chiara says even as Belinda was boldly asking for a piece of the profits she helped to create, she was also condemning the system of slavery.

Kiara Singleton [00:02:58] And what I think is so important to me about people like Belinda Sutton is that it also shows us that black people have always been their own political agents. They have always had radical politics, and they have always understood that the freedom that can be extended to them doesn't really matter if it doesn't extend to all black people.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:21] Belinda was awarded an annual pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, around $2,000 today, to be paid from her enslavers estate. Historical records show the royal family only paid her for two years. Belinda filed several petitions to hold her enslavers accountable over the next decade, but the courts did nothing. Eventually, Belinda died. It's unclear to scholars precisely when or how, but her cause has lived on. Even though Belinda Sutton's story tells little about her as an individual, it speaks volumes about the early experiences of black people in Massachusetts. We see one of the first attempts to characterize slavery as contrary to the concepts of freedom and liberty as America was forming. We see the early idea of a collective black experience. We see black people using their own agency to assert their rights, including the right to be paid for their work. What's more, and then nearly 250 years since Belinda Sutton suit black people in Boston and across the state of Massachusetts have continued to demand reparations. That includes a man who eventually put the issue front and center in a way that would forever change the conversation in the state and around the country.

Bill Owens [00:04:50] We have been denied our inheritance. That's how people need to look at it. We have been denied our inheritance. If you inherited, money from your, parents or great grandparents, you may be wealthy, but we were denied that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:07] I'm Saraya Wintersmith. This is What is Owed.

Mid-Roll

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:00] 200 years after Belinda Sutton, a Massachusetts state senator named Bill Owens, took up the baton and once again demanded reparations for black people. Much of this fight was a lonely journey with few allies and multiple roadblocks. But to get that chance to lead Bill Owens was lifted up by a rising black power movement and by two young men who saw him as the right champion for his time.

Jamari Kamara [00:00:27] I'm Jamari Sanyika.

Doctor Seneca [00:00:29] This is Dr. Mtangulzi Sanyika.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:32] Doctor Kamara and Doctor Sanyika are both giants in the field of africana studies. Kamara created the first africana studies department at UMass Boston, while Seneca was part of the faculty at Harvard's first African Studies department. But years before Kamara and Sanyika became the venerated leaders they are today, before they ever even met Bill Owens or had any plans for reparations. They were both politically engaged graduate students in Boston, trying to organize black people to demand more from their country. Let me explain. As the 60s came to a close, black Americans went through a series of volatile events. There were many successes.

Soundbite from March on Washington [00:01:19] We're going to walk together. We're going to stand together. We're going to sing together. We're going to stay together. We're going to mourn together. We're going to go on together. And after a while, we have that freedom. Freedom.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:30] We know from huge marches like the March on Washington and the passing of landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act, which put an end to segregation and race based discrimination, at least in theory. But there were also several tragic events that interrupted the momentum of these wins, starting with the assassination of several civil rights heroes, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Jamari Kamara [00:01:57] We had a series of urban rebellions in major cities in the country. And of course, when Doctor King was assassinated in 68, more than 100 rebellions across the country.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:08] The young black people who took to the streets were the same children who watched their elders march, fight, and sometimes die for the promise of equality. But despite all those sacrifices, it didn't seem that the country they inherited was keeping its side of the bargain. Yes, Jim Crow had ended, but America was not eager to integrate. Several major cities like Boston found loopholes to keep schools and neighborhoods segregated. The median income for black households was about half that of white households in the early 70s. And black unemployment was at 10%, double the rate of their white peers. Kamara says these frustrations led to new ideas and a new black politics known as the Black Power movement, embodied in the rise of the Black Panther Party.

Jamari Kamara [00:03:03] You know, I'm black and I'm proud was real. And it was a statement that we were able to make and to articulate. Now, there was a sense of pride in our identity.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:18] Black people were beginning to thrive politically. They had more access to polls thanks to the suite of legislation won through the civil rights era, like the Voting Rights Act. But the Black Power Movement sought to harness that political power by putting agency back in the hands of black Americans. And part of that strategy meant electing black leaders into office, who would represent the best interests of black communities.

Doctor Seneca [00:03:43] Wherever black people live. We should control those spaces in those places. That was the essence of what the Black Power thrust was saying, that that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:52] In the early 1970s, Kamara and Sanyika worked with like minded thinkers to figure out how to make this happen and more importantly, who would make it happen.

Bill Owens [00:04:02] We incorporate Massachusetts in the reparations issue because Massachusetts was among the first to enslave our people.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:14] And that's how Bill Owens political story really begins. It started in 1972 at a major political gathering in Gary, Indiana.

Doctor Seneca [00:04:23] The National Black Political Convention, which forever changed the whole national landscape of black politics in America.

Soundbite from 1972 Black Political Convention [00:04:30] Brothers and sisters, what time is it? It's nation time. It's nation plans all of its time. From Boston to Birmingham, Mississippi to Minnesota.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:44] The 1972 National Black Political Convention was essentially a black powered caucus. About 10,000 delegates representing communities across the country gathered in a high school gymnasium to unite behind a shared political agenda and strategize on how to get more black politicians into office to carry that agenda forward. Kamara says it was one of the only times where black people gathered from all levels of society to talk about their issues in this way. There were black politicians, academics, artists, activists.

Jamari Kamara [00:05:19] Some people don't believe it, but I was a young person, part of the delegation, who whose interests are now through this participatory structure being heard in that framework.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:35] Kamara says delegates broke up into working groups developing parts of the political agenda, which becomes this document called.

Jamari Kamara [00:05:42] The National Black Political Agenda.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:45] Which basically breaks down their platform into action items.

Jamari Kamara [00:05:49] And in the agenda, reparative justice or this question of reparations is raised as a central challenge.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:57] The framers talk about reparations throughout the entire document. Sometimes it's spelled out with a call for a national plan to pay reparations. In other parts, it's more baked in. In the introduction, they state that the agenda defines some of the essential changes the U.S. must make to address centuries of black struggle since the time of slavery. As delegates from different parts of the country refined these ideas of reparative justice in their political agenda. There's one man in the room who would later become one of the most important leaders of that developing agenda. Bill Owens.

Doctor Sanyika [00:06:37] Oh, yeah. Maybe the first impression that I had met a soul brother. You know, somebody from the South who was living in the North, who still acted like he was, from the South in a human being.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:06:49] I was born in Demopolis, Alabama. When he was 15, he moved to Boston, went to the city's prestigious English High, and later obtained degrees from Boston University, Harvard and UMass Amherst. And shortly after the Gary Convention, he would start his political career, getting elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. But there's one story about Owens from 1965 about Kamara and Seneca say led him towards black power politics. When Owens was 28 years old, his wife was attacked in front of one of his businesses while he was inside. News reports described the attack as racist. Owens rushed out and defended his wife with the knife, but Owens was the one who got arrested. He was charged and found guilty of felony assault. He was sentenced to 18 months in state prison. Seneca says this experience led Owens to more deeply question how the U.S. doled out justice to black people.

Doctor Sanyika [00:07:52] His being locked up in jail. I think he learned some things about the prison industrial complex and incarceration.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:58] Owens began to ask questions and seek out like minded thinkers, too. That's how he ended up attending the convention after the agenda was set. Kamara says that Owen stayed connected with Boston's local community of black power political thinkers, looking for ways to advance the agenda further. And Owens got that opportunity almost a year later, just as he was wrapping up his first term as a state rep. The city of Boston was wrestling with the state over black politics.

Doctor Sanyika [00:08:29] Black Boston was in recognition of the problem of under-representation at the statehouse level.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:08:36] Census data from the 1970s shows there were about 100,000 black people in Boston, roughly 16% of the city, but there were no black people in the state Senate. It had been that way for almost two centuries. That was until the governor at the time put pressure on state legislators to create a district that would all but guarantee the election of a black senator. So in 1973, a district was created, the second Senate seat in Suffolk County. It encompassed two predominantly black communities that had been largely represented by white Democratic politicians. Black candidates were stepping up to fill the seat. Kamara says Owens met with him and Seneca about running for the seat under the agenda from the Black Power Convention.

Jamari Kamara [00:09:27] Bill became energized, saying, I want to be a candidate to enhance the body politic of our community and to move that forward and that I'm willing to commit my resources, and time and energy to do that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:09:46] A Senate candidate who was supportive of black power politics meant that ideas of reparative justice would be heard in one of Massachusetts most powerful government bodies. His views would be part of conversations on the state budget and how elections were run, and reparations would have a champion in the Senate chambers. Seneca and Camara agreed to help Owens run his campaign. This was an opportunity to present black power politics to Boston and see if the black community was receptive. The only problem was black politics had been run primarily by one man who was expected to win. Royal Bowling senior, was a formidable opponent. The black community had elected bowling to be a state representative six times. He authored landmark legislation that banned segregation in Massachusetts schools years before Congress acted. He had strong ties to the political purse strings of the state's Democratic Party.

Jamari Kamara [00:10:54] It was assumed that Royal would win.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:10:56] Plus, he was confident.

Bill Owens [00:10:58] The main thing to give had my name on the ballot and give the people a chance to, support me as they have done, in prior years. Well, there's no other alternative.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:11:18] The race for the second Suffolk Senate seat quickly narrowed down to Owens versus Bolling. Bolling rode the coattails of his previous successes. He ran as a write in candidate after he forgot to turn in his paperwork to get his name on the ballot. News reports from the time say bowling based his campaign on handing out stickers reminding people to vote for him. Meanwhile, Owens got out in front of people and talked about the issues.

Doctor Sanyika [00:11:45] Owens went door to door and went to the clubs and went to the church. I mean, he just he just ran a masterful, direct person to person campaign with that infectious personality style that he had.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:12:22] At the end of the election cycle. The results were close, but Owens ended up beating Boling for the Senate seat by a margin of 800 votes. Owens election as the first black state senator was historic.

Doctor Sanyika [00:12:36] It was tight and it was very close, but it was the passing of the torch, in a way, from the all black politics of Boston to the new black politics in Boston.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:12:48] But Owens wasn't there just to be a token in the Senate chambers. He saw his role as advocating for black people, even if that was unpopular for his Senate colleagues. And it turned out the statehouse wasn't the only place he had to worry about. In 1975, in the midst of Owens first Senate term, the city of Boston was under federal court order to desegregate public schools. The ruling came after a judge determined the Boston School Committee was preserving segregation and violation of state law. Boston was just beginning to disperse black and white students across the city. It didn't go very well. Boston's latest racial confrontation occurred yesterday in City Hall Plaza. After months of building tension. A group of white youths viciously attacked a black attorney.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:13:41] That attack occurred in 1976 and was captured in a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph. It showed a white man wielding an American flag like a spear. The black attorney ended up with a broken nose and cuts on his face. The assault was emblematic of a bigger concern where black people safe in Boston. Owens came out in front of the issue.

Soundbite from 1972 Black Political Convention [00:14:06] People of color are not safe to come here to Boston, and we are asking people across the country of color to stay away. We must come to the realization that if Boston state officials will not protect us, we must ask for federal protection. And ladies and gentlemen, short of that, we must seek to protect ourselves.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:14:44] When Owens calls for black people to protect themselves, that message may land differently depending on your politics. If you're from the camp of Black Power, his message would be on brand. But if you're not, that message may sound hostile or threatening. This was the challenge that Owens faced when he tried bringing black power politics to the statehouse. Not everybody was ready for him or his ideas, like reparations. The world had only changed so much, but Owens wasn't backing down. One of his most public uses of power came in the midst of building a new campus for Roxbury Community College, a public institution in the heart of a predominantly black community. News reports said there was a plan to build the campus on a parcel of land in Roxbury. Despite community concerns, the spot wouldn't suit the school's future expansion. Owens championed the push to build the campus in Mattapan, a different black neighborhood, and lost. But even after he lost this argument, he fought to make sure the school would have funding to be successful.

Bill Owens [00:15:51] I held up the proceedings of the Massachusetts Senate for three days to demand that they put $30 million in that budget. Even though they said they were not going to do it.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:16:04] And to ensure that it would happen, Owens called out the governor in the press to pressure him to publicly sign the budget item. According to an article in the Boston Globe from 1980, Owens and then Boston Mayor Kevin White held a press conference on the steps of the statehouse, asking the governor to, quote, demonstrate his commitment to the education of minorities. The money was ultimately approved.

Jamari Kamara [00:16:30] Bill was not in a commendation list.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:16:35] Meaning.

Jamari Kamara [00:16:36] That he would just go along to get along, but that would stand for a set of interests and principles of the community.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:16:45] But that commitment often left Owens standing alone.

Jamari Kamara [00:16:48] I think that he found over time that as he did, that it was not always one that yielded the benefits of the political system that sometimes accommodation might yield.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:17:09] The first four terms Owen spent in the Senate seat were a series of frustrations. Kamara said that Owens was hitting a wall. He was the senator that he said he was going to be, but he couldn't get other Democrats in the Senate to buy into his ideas. He resigned from the Senate Elections Committee that he chaired because he said Democratic leadership ignored the needs of minorities. Owens told the Globe that he made over 70 attempts to talk with the Senate president, but never received a reply. This all provided fodder for his political opponents.

Bill Owens [00:17:44] He said that he is independent of everyone. There is no one that's independent of everyone.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:17:53] And ultimately, at the end of his fourth term, he became so frustrated with Democrats that he decided to cross the aisle for support and unsuccessfully ran for reelection as a Republican. He lost to Royal Bowling.

Jamari Kamara [00:18:08] Electoral politics is the art of the compromise, and if you're not willing to compromise on your principles sometimes. Then there's a lot of pushback and there can be isolation.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:18:24] Kamara says Owens felt backed into a corner. He was trying his best to advocate for black people, but he wasn't able to build support in the Senate where it mattered. And it seemed like any proposal for sweeping change, like reparations, was in vain.

Jamari Kamara [00:18:40] He wanted to win. But you can't win if you don't put it on the table and you put it on the table because it's the right thing to do.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:18:49] So that's what he did. In 1988, Owens ran again for the state Senate and won. But this time he knew that the odds were stacked against him, and he decided to push for reparations anyway.

Bill Owens [00:19:02] In 1988, I ran for election to the Senate after having served previously, and I decided that I would not go back in the Senate unless I filed a bill on reparations.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:19:16] Massachusetts would finally have the conversation, whether it was ready or not.

Pre-Roll

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:01] When Bill Owens first proposed reparations, his bill was pretty short. The whole document is less than a page of text. It called for the state to pay reparations to people of African descent for years of slavery and discrimination, and it called for the state to establish a commission to negotiate with the African descendants for how the reparations should be paid. Owens filed this proposal less than two months after he was reelected to the Senate in 1988. He had two co-sponsors. His sister, Shirley Owens Hicks, would been elected in another Boston House district two years earlier, and Byron Rushing, a black House member who went on to serve in the state House for over 35 years. Owens colleagues at the state House, however, immediately dismissed his bill. One Republican state senator said Owens bill was, quote, absolutely unworkable. Another Democratic senator said the proposal would drive wedges between people rather than bring them together. Owens tried to keep his head above the fray. His goal was just to get it to session, have reparations simply be heard at the statehouse. But when it started its way through the legislative process, it went nowhere. It never even made it to the floor. Bill Owens passed in 2022 before I got a chance to talk with him, and his sister wasn't available to talk either. The only sponsor who could recall that period of the bill was former State Representative Byron Rushing. I reached out and got him on the phone and asked if he wanted to talk about the reparations legislation. He declined to comment. The only thing he would say his decision to support Owens reparations proposal was the worst decision of his political career. Bill Owens left the Senate in 1993 and never again served in the statehouse, though he did go on to do many great things for black Bostonians, and he never stopped pursuing reparations.

Soundbite GBH Tape with Bill Owens [00:02:14] Three. Two. One check. One. Two. This isn't done on bars.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:18] This is tape from an interview GBH conducted with Bill Owens in 2001 for the station's black culture show, Basic Black, and Owen interview never aired.

Soundbite GBH Tape with Bill Owens [00:02:28] You've done this before many times, I'm sure.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:31] By this point in his career, Owens had taken reparations beyond the statehouse. He had spoken about his bill on the Phil Donahue Show. He began to travel and share his ideas internationally, and he even created a series of nonprofits to support the black community. Reparations and getting people to understand the rationale had become his life's work. Owens expressed the frustration of the descendants of the enslaved and their inability to build black wealth.

Bill Owens [00:03:01] My parents did not have slaves. They were enslaved. And in fact, we I was denied my inheritance of them because they were not even paid for the work that they did. And that's why it is so important that I receive my inheritance more than anything else.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:22] But reparations was more than his life's work. The torch was handed to him by those before him, like Belinda Sutton, who tried to pursue reparations in their own ways and lost. And Bill Owens met the same fate. But history says that Owens did much more for reparations than many people realized. He carried reparations from being a black issue to an everyone issue, and although it would be Owens last step in the process, he helped deliver the idea to its next generation.

Bill Owens [00:03:55] It was a little bit later that, Congressman John Conyers filed his legislation, and I applaud him for it because he's been continuously there, over the last decade.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:07] Yes, he's talking about that. John Conyers.

John Conyers [00:04:11] Reparations now, reparations not in the next century.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:18] The bill that Owens wrote caught the attention of the first man to present reparations legislation to the US Congress. That bill, H.R. 40, influenced by Owens work, has been introduced in every Congress since Conyers first filed it in November 1989. An Owens dream for a Massachusetts reparations commission hasn't died either.

Miranda Testimony Soundbite [00:04:41] That afternoon, Chair Eldridge, vice Chair Barbara. And to the committee members and all of you that are here today to learn, listen and actually testify.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:51] More than 30 years later, calls for reparations are again ringing from within the Massachusetts State Capitol. And the calls are coming from Owens former seat.

Miranda Testimony Soundbite [00:05:01] My name is Senator Liz Miranda. I am the state senator, the second Suffolk district. I'm here to testify in support of my bill. S1053, an act establishing a commission to study reparations in the Commonwealth.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:14] State Senator Liz Miranda, a black Cape Verdean American, is now pushing a bill to create a Massachusetts Reparations Study Commission.

Miranda Testimony Soundbite [00:05:23] We filed this bill so we can collectively understand, we can heal and we can act. We in Massachusetts need to take a long look, a sobering look at our own history, and then begin the work to repair the detrimental effects caused by slavery.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:38] Miranda says she knew it was her torch to carry.

Miranda [00:05:41] I was like, well, who's going check me? Well, you know, like the idea that I represent the black is community. Like, why wouldn't I try to file legislation, you know?

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:53] In many ways, it makes sense that Miranda would be the one to bring the issue back to the Massachusetts State House. Her journey and Owens are similar. She's obviously bold like he was and in terms of politics. Both of them were elected to the state Senate during pushes for greater black representation in the statehouse, and they both served on the Ways and Means Committee. Senator Miranda's reparations bill also echoes some of Owens framework. She says she's hoping to get the bill passed within the next year or two. And while Miranda's Senate experience may share similarities with Owens, she did find a way to carry the torch a little bit farther. That 2023 hearing for her reparations bill was a political milestone Owens never achieved as Massachusetts first. And for a long time, only black state Senator Miranda felt proud to be moving his work forward. This time with a bit of support.

Miranda [00:06:53] Maybe he was alone. Maybe he didn't have a lot of people come to defense. But I don't feel alone. It's a lonely experience being a black woman in elected office. But I don't feel alone in the push for reparative justice. And, I hope he's looking down on us. And. And his family understands that, like, he's not forgotten.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:16] If the bill does clear the statehouse and get a signature from the governor, Massachusetts would follow California and New York and become the third state in America to consider reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade. Senator Miranda says she'll continue to pursue her work with the thousands of people in her district, as well as the many who came before her with little more than the boldness to claim their right to reparations.

Miranda [00:07:43] I want to do this for Belinda. I want to do this for Lizabeth Freeman, for Walker and the thousands of others that were not named who didn't get to fight for their freedom.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:54] But the question we're following is what comes next? Once the government opens the door to a conversation about reparations? Where does that conversation lead? We explore that and more in the next episode.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:08:13] What is owed is a production of GBH news. This episode was produced and written by our senior producer Jerome Campbell, along with me, Soraya Wyntersmith. Our editorial assistant is Mara Mellett, editing by Paul Singer. Production oversight by Lee Hill. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mont. Theme song and original music by Maleek Williams. We love hearing from our listeners. Leave us a voicemail at 617-958-6061.