Boston’s Revolutionary Spirit of Reparations
By Julia Jorati and David Montero
In 1773, a group in Boston led by Felix Holbrook submitted a revolutionary petition to the Massachusetts governor and legislature. Holbrook was an African-born black man who had been enslaved by a Boston schoolmaster since childhood. The petition asks the government to free all enslaved people in the province and pay reparations in the form of land to each of them, for the injustice they have suffered. Holbrook’s petition, which was taken up twice in the legislature, did not result in reparative compensation, but it firmly embedded the appeal of reparations within the moral fabric of the nation. It did so by invoking the natural right to liberty and to private property, pointing out that slavery violated both of these rights. It showcases that, among the many revolutionary ideas to which Boston gave birth, including liberty, democracy, and self-rule, was also the principle that black people were entitled to reparations because of enslavement. Indeed, the pursuit of reparations is as old and as American as the nation itself.
This is history that must be amplified, protected, and harnessed, because Boston’s pivotal efforts to address the legacy of slavery may be facing a crippling setback. In January, Harvard University abruptly fired the staff of its Slavery Remembrance Program without warning or explanation, which has thrown the university’s commitment to addressing the history of slavery seriously into doubt. At the same time, a recent Boston Globe article outlines how the city’s own Reparations Task Force, which the mayor appointed two years ago, could face a similar fate, due to pushback and potential lawsuits from conservative forces, including some galvanized by the Trump administration.
These developments underscore two things: not only that this critical work must continue – indeed, the fact that conservative lawmakers are determined to silence this history only amplifies its importance – but that this work must continue independently, regardless of whether Harvard and the Task Force continue to support such investigations. The city has an opportunity – and a moral obligation – to be a model for acknowledging its troubling past. To do so, it must fearlessly embrace all sides of its history: namely, as a pioneer of reparations and abolition, but also as a city singularly enriched by the injustices of slavery.
Our own research highlights why, in addition to Holbrook, several other black people in the region advocated for reparations in the eighteenth century. In Dartmouth, a group of black people that included Paul Cuffe petitioned the state legislature for reparations in the form of a tax exemption in 1780, arguing that slavery had prevented black people from building generational wealth. A married couple in Cambridge, Anthony and Cuby Vassal, demanded reparations in the form of land the same year, arguing in a petition to the state legislature that their former enslavement entitled them to a portion of their enslaver’s estate. Similarly, Belinda Sutton petitioned the legislature for pension payments in 1783, arguing that her unpaid labour had enriched her former enslavers in Medford for fifty years, giving her a right to some of the wealth she helped generate. Sutton and the Vassals were awarded pensions, providing precedents for the state of Massachusetts paying reparations to black people for the harms of slavery. The more general calls for reparations in the form of land or tax exemption failed, however.
This is just the beginning of the debt that Boston owes to black people. Our research uncovers that the Boston region, even after Massachusetts abolished slavery within its own borders in 1783, profited extensively from slavery in the US South, financing and enabling it throughout the nineteenth century. It did so through its leading bankers, like William Appleton, Nathaniel Goddard, and Amos Lawrence, who lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to plantations throughout the South; through its commercial ships, which carried millions of pounds of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco to the world; and through the region’s textile mills, which, by purchasing as much as 100 million pounds of Southern cotton a year, created a major domestic market on which slavery thrived.
The revolutionary work of slavery reparations began in Boston long ago. Even if Harvard refuses to continue investigating its own ties to this history, as others have already done, other researchers must carry on, illuminating why and how Harvard can make restitution to the descendants of the people it enslaved. Even if the Reparations Task Force is forced to shut down, committed groups and stakeholders must continue advocating for reparations payments, carrying on the work that Felix Holbrook began more than 250 years ago. More than ever, researchers, teachers, artists, churches, and storytellers must continue pushing Boston to acknowledge its history and to fulfill its revolutionary role in seeking justice for the harms done through slavery to black Americans.
Julia Jorati and David Montero are fellows at Slavery North, a research initiative at UMass Amherst that supports research and research creation on Canadian Slavery and Slavery in the US North.
Julia Jorati Bio
Julia Jorati is Professor of Philosophy at UMass Amherst. Her research focuses on philosophical debates about slavery in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She received an MA from the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2008 and a PhD from Yale in 2013. In her most recent books Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century and Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford University Press 2024), Jorati surveys the philosophically most central portions of antislavery and proslavery texts composed between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and the Americas, with a focus on the role of race. In doing so, she explores the association between blackness and slavery during this period and examines how common it was for white people to view black people as naturally destined for slavery.
David Montero Bio
David Montero is an investigative journalist and author. Formerly a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a documentary producer for PBS FRONTLINE, his work has twice been nominated for an Emmy-award. Montero has written for Time, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Nation, and many others. He has received the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, the Investigative Reporting Fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, the International Reporting Project’s Health Fellowship, and several grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. He is the author of Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network (Viking/Penguin 2018), which explores how bribes paid by Fortune 500s, amounting to nearly $1 trillion a year, have devastating effects throughout the developing world; and, more recently, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations, published by LegacyLit/Hachette Books in February 2024.
Learn More about Slavery and North American Universities…
Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
Roanoke College (Salem, Virginia)
McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)