NORTHAMPTON — The city is moving ahead with plans to create a joint commission to investigate racial harms against Black residents and workers in Northampton, making a statement as part of a nationwide conversation on reparations in the country.

The City Council unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday that, in addition to creating a commission, calls on the city to acknowledge and apologize for past actions and legislation that entrenched systems of racial discrimination and segregation in the city.

Other communities, including Amherst, Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, have created their own reparations initiatives in recent months.

“It is rare to make a meaningful change in the place you live, and as a transplant to this area, I just relish this,” said Ward 4’s Garrick Perry, one of the resolution’s cosponsors and one of two African American members of the council along with at-large member Jamila Gore. “This really is a resolution to start a commission to look at some of the harms, and then look at ways in which we can fund initiatives, and ways that we can build our community. Because at its heart, this is a community-based resolution.”

With the passing of the resolution, the mayor’s office and the resolution’s co-sponsors — Perry, Gore and at-large councilor Marissa Elkins — have until March 30 to present to the council what the commission will be charged with, who will be on it and a general timeline for its planned objectives. It is not currently known how many members will make up the commission. A similar seven-member commission exists in Amherst, known as the African Heritage Reparation Assembly, or AHRA.

The resolution cited the nearly centurylong history of slavery in the city, followed by a diminishing of the city’s African American population, past discriminatory zoning policies and a present-day lack of diversity as the reasons to pursue reparations.

Though the city was a center for the abolitionist movement before the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the country, the resolution notes that Northampton has never had a Black mayor, and that only one Black person, former building commissioner Anthony Patillo, has served as head of a municipal department. It also notes that only three Black people have served on the City Council.

The resolution is not without controversy, as many of the speakers during 90 minutes of public comment discussed the issue. Several African Americans stated that the commission should not refer to the resolution as serving “reparations,” saying that the word should only be used for a federal reparations program, to go only toward African Americans who are descendants of slaves. Instead, the resolution should refer to “atonement,” they said.

“Reparations must be lineage-based, versus skin-color based for anyone of any lineage that did not experience state-sanctioned violence and terrorism,” said Alysia Cutting, an activist and radio host from Springfield. “I ask you to cautiously consider the language that you do not use the word reparations, but that work be done to repair the harm done to the ethnic descendants of these crimes.”

Amilcar Shabazz, a professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who serves on AHRA in Amherst, took an opposing view, saying such requests were unfounded.

“You go to the dictionary and you look up atonement, it says reparation for a wrong or injury,” he said. “Yes, lineage is an issue you should pay attention to, but we need a national effort to give people the resources to get their genealogy done.”

Perry noted that the resolution only contains the word “reparations” once, in its preamble in the context of a quote by author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“There is a national conversation about reparations, and we wanted to make sure that we focused this resolution on our community in Northampton,” he said. “Not only just looking at the history of Northampton and the harms, but also looking at the progressive activism that Northampton has had.”

In addition to local initiatives across the country, there exists a bill in Congress, known as H.R. 40, that would create a commission to study potential nationwide reparations. The bill has been introduced every year since 1989, but in 2021 it made it out of committee for the first time.

“We need to use this [resolution] as an opportunity to further our studies and actions to address the harms of racism,” said Gore at the council meeting. “It’s important we address these issues at the local level, and I think this resolution is a good start.”

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.

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