City of Boston looking for partners to research city’s ties to slavery

Local News

The city’s Task Force on Reparations is putting together a comprehensive report on the history and legacy of slavery in Boston from 1620 to the present.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and the city’s Task Force on Reparations are seeking research partners to produce a report on the history and legacy of slavery in Boston, they announced Monday.

The city has allocated $600,000 for the research project, according to meeting notes from the task force’s Sept. 20 public meeting.

The Task Force on Reparations was created in 2022 to study slavery’s enduring legacy in Boston and make reparations recommendations to the mayor. This report will shape those recommendations.

“To help our communities heal from the legacies of slavery and the systems of exclusion and injustice that persist today, it is essential that the City fully document the City of Boston’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” Wu said in a press release. “I urge researchers to apply to this [request for proposals] and join Boston in our commitment to deliver justice for Black residents and bring equitable solutions to our City.”

Boston’s connection to slavery dates back to at least 1641, when Massachusetts became the first North American colony to legalize the practice. A report by the Equal Justice Initiative details how Boston served as the origin point and/or final destination of hundreds of trafficking voyages during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Wealthy, white Bostonians bought and sold enslaved people, and the profits fueled the local economy. Even after slavery was outlawed, virulent racism persisted in many forms — discriminatory laws, segregation in schools and public life, and restrictive racial housing covenants among them.

To this day, Boston has a reputation as a racist city — fueled in part by memories of the city’s violent resistance to desegregation in the 1970s, and a staggering wealth gap between Black and white Bostonians.

“There’s an opportunity with this Request for Proposals not only to identify historically what has been collected and documented in the archive, in plain view, about our history, and prior attempts to erase it,” L’Merchie Frazier, a member of the task force, added in the press release, “but also to excavate a continuum of identity and a continuum of property relations–one that continues to be complex in nature as we grapple with four centuries of suffering and resistance.”

The city has divided the research project into six continuous time periods, or “units of study,” from 1620 to the present, and will choose a partner for each of the six.

Their research will focus on Boston and Bostonians’ economic growth and involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and trans-Atlantic slave economies in the earlier periods, and the economic, social, and political legacies of the slave trade in the later periods.

Researchers chosen for the project will be asked to produce a comprehensive literature review and original historical research for their time period. 

“Partners will weave together work across units of study to create a thorough accounting of the City of Boston’s role in the history and legacy of slavery spanning from 1620 to the present,” the request for proposals reads. 

The application deadline for prospective research partners is Nov. 6. See the Task Force on Reparations’ site for more information on applying.