BURLINGTON — The city’s pioneering effort to study reparations for its role in chattel slavery, and for the racist systems that followed, is now underway.
Convening for the first time Wednesday night, Burlington’s Reparations Task Force will dig into the largely unknown legacy of slavery, which — task force members say — Burlington, like the country, has never atoned for.
The project will make Burlington one of the first cities in the nation to engage in reparations efforts for slavery.
“We really don’t know what information we’ll find, and what that information will do to us,” Tyeastia Green, the city’s director of racial equity and a member of the task force, told VTDigger. “We have no idea what’s in the Pandora’s box we’re opening. However, it’s long overdue. And I think that there is reconciliation in uncovering the truth.”
Last month, plaques were placed in downtown Burlington to commemorate two people, Lavinia Parker and her son Francis, enslaved by Ethan Allen’s daughter in the 1830s. It was a reminder, Mayor Miro Weinberger said Wednesday, that Vermont, too, is implicated in the horrors of slavery.
“In popular imagination, Burlington seems distant from the states that are so infamous from slavery,” Weinberger said in his opening remarks. The discovery of the Parkers, he said, was inconsistent with that notion.
“If we’re ever going to move past this wound at the heart of this country, I think this is an exercise that we need to do,” he said.
The City Council first directed the city to study reparations in a June resolution, which also cut police staffing by attrition and invested funds in efforts for racial equity. A resolution in August laid out the work of the task force more clearly: It would convene five members to oversee a yearlong study into the city’s legacy with slavery, investigating the history of the institution, and discriminatory practices that succeeded it, in Burlington and the state.
The findings of the study will be used to develop proposals for reparations — for descendants of enslaved people who once lived in Burlington, as well as Black communities in the city now. It is still unclear what form the reparations will take; whether they will involve direct monetary compensation, which typically distinguishes reparations from other forms of reconciliation, or a more symbolic effort. “I’m open to all of the possibilities that may come about,” Green said.
Alongside Green, the task force members include Rep. Hal Colston, D-Winooski; Christine Hughes of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance; Pablo Bose, a professor of geography at the University of Vermont; and Rebecca Zietlow, a law professor at the Toledo College of Law.
At the meeting, the group discussed the long year ahead. They are searching, in the first weeks of the effort, for the historians and experts in the field who will conduct the needed research. “It’s a lofty goal,” Green said — one that will require several dedicated researchers.
The task force will reconvene on Nov. 25, at which point members will select a chair and consider the process for seeking researchers.
Questions loom for the task force in the months to come. The resolution discusses reparations not only for slavery, but for later injustices. As researchers delve into Burlington’s history, the task force will also have to determine what those reparations will look like, and who will receive them.
“If we think about slavery as a system, and then all of these other post-slavery systems that developed after it, like the Jim Crow laws,” Bose told VTDigger, “then how do we think about righting, not just the historical wrong, but also the legacy of those wrongs?”
Bose said he hoped the task force would also consider whether the dispossession endured by Vermont’s Indigenous people, including the Abenaki, might be included in the reparations effort. And he wondered, too, how and if the reparations effort would include Burlington’s communities of color, and Black communities, who are not descendants of enslaved people in the U.S.
“How do you imagine what something like reparations would look like for them?” he said.
Burlington has few places to look for answers. The U.S., on a federal level, has never provided reparations to Black Americans for chattel slavery. One bill, proposing a study of reparations in the U.S., has languished for decades in Congress. A similar piece of legislation in the state of Vermont, H.478, was introduced in 2019, but has since stalled in the House Committee on Government Operations.
The city of Asheville, North Carolina, said in July it is embarking on a similar reparations effort, and, after a summer of protests for Black lives, other cities are also considering such measures. Burlington’s efforts, Green said, could provide a model for other municipalities to follow.
“Whether Burlington is the first city or not — I mean, I don’t really care about that,” Bose said. “I’m much more interested in whether or not we really do a solid job of this. Of really looking at, what has Burlington’s history been?”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Burlington task force gets to work on issue of reparations for chattel slavery.