#337: We're Still Writing Black History

It’s time to check in on a complex and ongoing process we shared with you in Podcast Delivery #308 – reparations for the descendants of formerly enslaved Black people in America.

For those that didn’t take Black History classes growing up:

Forty acres and a mule were promised to former slaves in the United States.

A Special Field Order was issued on January 16, 1865 during the American Civil War, intended to redistribute coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for Black settlement. Each family was to receive forty acres of land.

The mules were actually an afterthought, but the phrase “forty acres and a mule” persists to this day and remains a symbol of the unfulfilled promise of land redistribution after the Civil War.

So, what’s the latest on the pursuit of reparations and the reconciliation of the rampant historical injustices that led to the modern-day systemic discrimination?

We’re headed to Boston, the capital of the first state to legalize slavery, to find out in What is Owed? from GBH News.

There has never been a clearer or more insidious danger to Black people in America than racism. It fuelled enslavement, led to the American Civil War and to this day continues to tip the scales against Black people over and over again.

One year ago, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu appointed an official Reparations Task Force to research the impact of 400 years of slavery and economic exclusion on the city and to issue recommendations to address the legacy of harm to its Black residents.

What is Owed? explores a variety of reparations frameworks and host Saraya Wintersmith starts by zooming in on Boston as a number of other cities across the US begin to make sense of everything related to reparations; from the logistics and qualification measures to what it means for cities to pay a nation’s long-overdue debt.

The process of paying reparations is not without its hurdles and the seven-part series will unpack multitudes; heading to Ghana – the starting point for the enslavement journey for many Africans, and then to Austria – the place of the most significant reparations efforts to compensate Nazi regime survivors after World War II.

Have a listen and share what you think 👇 below.

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