um some we all have choices in life some of us choose to fit the mold but then we have a lot of us such as the gentlemen that be on this film that we don't believe in that we are chasing a different goal and we're changing the stereotype through us through our
children and hopefully our grandchildren for me it's a little bit different as i grew up because i grew up with both of my parents they uh been married for 54 years they actually retired about 14 years ago they live in
dominican republic um so a lot of the struggles that i been hearing you know i didn't i didn't go through it but me as a dad i have my own struggles um especially having three
kids with two different females um is very challenging i grew up in chicago illinois um where a lot of my friends and members of my community didn't really have a father figure around um i was fortunate enough to have a
phenomenal father um so phenomenal that he was a father to me and he also had enough to go around for the kids in my community that stereotype didn't apply to me because my dad was always there he was uh he was very uh you know loving uh
strong and disciplined but you know not in a bad way you know trying to guide us the right way my dad you know was always there just still uh actually i have a really good relationship with my dad and both of my parents my father was in and
out um funny we had we have a different relationship because i wasn't the i wasn't born out of two people coming together and choosing to make a child um i wouldn't say i was a mistake
cuz god has his own ways but it happened um my my mom actually tried to do it her own way she was i would say she was the beginning of the independent woman um i'm going to have this child i'm not going to tell him and i'm going to do it
my way one day she ran into my dad and he knew i was his son the moment he saw me in my case of course it's not um a case of being absent because i'm in my son's life you know um i'm in the home with him and that's important too i
always made a vow if i could i didn't want to be a weekend dad i didn't want to be a part-time father um i wanted to be there for everything the good the bad the sick um good health the first steps the first birthdays um even just
everyday life like just i'm amazed every day of just watching my son just grow and becoming the human being that he is the stereotype is society itself stereotype not just black men but all people all men living
in urban community as one typical type to be the to rob steal drop out of school be no good and not only that her sisters are also stereotype us that we're no good
because white society has put a stomach in our society that we're no good with good for nothing where i was raised in the 60s and 70s where i cook clean you mean and uh wash clothes and uh shopping i'm a 70s kid so i grew up in the 80s
the 90s i used to run the streets do all that i used to i did it to the fullest i changed why because i had kids i wanted to be part of the solution and stop being part of the problem i went to school i got a lot of trades under my belt electrical i mean reg nationally
nationally registered emt right now as we speak so i went from being part of the problem to being part of the solution and that was also to show my kids that it's possible to change and be that role model figure my kids will never have that that misguided information that i
had to learn from older guys in the neighborhood and i always make sure that they know the love of dad and i'm going to tell you the right thing to do it may not be the thing you want to hear but it's always going to be the right thing to do and to make sure that if there's a pothole in front of you you're not going
to step in it my job is to tell you hey there's a hole right there go around it even if i have to step in as your dad you don't have to step in that is one thing i am trying to teach my godson that he is not just a pocketbook that he is more than just that he is his mind
body and soul he is the essence of what a man should and will be with the guidance of the men that is in his [Music] life and make those rainbows in my mind
when i think of you some steps when i got my baby's mother you know it comes as a package deal and i accepted them we was together for about 12 12 good years so i raised them so i consider them mine so that's why i don't say step kids i say they're my
kids you know that's what a real men do i got four boys and one girl with all ages 20 17 14 got a 9year-old and a seveny old two kids of my own that's 39 and 37
uh i'm raising my two great nephews who justice is nine years old and josiah is 14 i have four children uh my my first son 20 he's my son not my biological but i raised him and then i have three age
nine six and eight so we got our hands full it's a zoo every day i call it i stepped in as a father because unfortunately my godson lost not just his father but his mother uh both at two separate years um his father went first
and then his mother went two to three years later um all before first grade i'm a single father um i say that probably because it took a lot for me to learn how to do this you know and i had nobody around to show me
or to help me so i had a 2-year-old feeding him with a spoon and i had another baby in arm trying to warm up milk and feed them at the same time so um it was difficult but um i think by now i'm pretty good at it i'm pretty i'm
proud of myself in that way your kids's not the first one to fail off the team will get a f your kid's not the first one to be undecided what they want to do with their life your kid is not the first one to be too spoiled and not have
any idea where you came from um is they're not the first they won't be the last all you can do is try to be the best man you can be how do you kind of sneak in to say that you love your son or your kids you
don't speak of it you just say "listen i love you." it could be the last time you get to say "i love you." that would be my message to all dads it could be the last time the time you don't say "i love
you." that's the purpose i take in life treat it like it could be the last time the way that i just slip in and say i love you is either we'll make a handshake or like we'll do a tik tok dance with my daughter you know i just sneak in love you or maybe before they
go to bed i just tell them that i love them yeah every time i have a chance and um every time i see them [Music] um yeah mostly every time i have a chance to say it it's very important to me to share
that with them sometimes you have to put yourselves in the child's perspective of of needing a hug or needing someone to tell you "i love you." and remembering as you were a child of those feelings and of that mindset what that
felt when someone told you that they loved you especially your dad or your mother so um dads who are just struggling to vocalize i think you just kind of need to be a little empathetic and you know do it and and be consistent
with it you know cuz kids at this age they don't know subliminal messages you know they can't say "hey you know what did i just witness my father whispering "i love you." or he kind of said it in a jokingly way you know i i remember my father used to tell me he loves me all
the time at seven and i didn't know i mean i did i guess i felt a little embarrassed because you have these roles like the men are supposed to be the strong silent type or you know the mothers are supposed to do that but as i get older i just appreciated him just
being honest and saying "hey i love you it just it means the world to you my son was diagnosed with autism at age two and i just remember feeling hopeless not knowing what to do what it meant if
there was a cure which a lot of people think it is it's a lifelong thing um and it's a journey but i just remember him being two not being able to talk and him turning three not being able to talk and then it started getting concerned and
concerned and concerning by the time he was five there was still no words but he was smart he knew what he wanted he knew um how to do certain things and that would frustrate him to know what he
wants but not be able to express it and i could just remember us trying to figure it out we did sign language didn't work too well um just little gestures we try to do uh pictures didn't work too well tried to schedule
everything out to where everything just made sense to how he needed to do it it's didn't work as well and then i remember one day me and mom decided to ask the teacher he was in love with technology he was just excels at
everything technology and we found out that there was a way that he can have a communication tablet and i can just remember day one day one he was putting together full synthesis and it was like i was the
proudest moment of my life and he can talk to me and that was how his communication was we got a good thing whenever we'll lose our way cuz we both
know who we are who knows about tomorrow we don't know what's in the following [Music] i always explain to my wife that when
she does certain things people say she's a black woman handling her business right if she fails it's because she didn't have if she fails or she's struggling it's because of i'm not good enough so thank you um for taking a look at
this um these couple of images that i put together you know um i'm usually writing a script training actors going for sets take one take two editing you know
putting stories together but you know the power of the human story i think is something that i try to just uh just touch on and be able to just listen to some some people who really wanted to just pour their heart out about uh their experiences being fathers and and their
experience of having fathers so at the time when uh when we was writing the editing process the uh reparations committee uh gave me a couple of finishing funds and i used it for the eding so i really want to appreciate this committee for for doing that and uh
giving me a chance to show a piece of uh what we put together thank you very much bill come back up thank you for the huge round of applause and allowing him to showcase his talents and also his lived experience and stories and uplifting fathers in our community we have like 10
minutes to ask questions and we wanted to move everybody along and then miss um is it dorothia clock dorothy clock she'll be coming up next okay did you have any questions for drill anybody yes ma'am
yes you need a microphone okay cool i don't have a question but i have a comment that was really awesome thank you for that you know i really loved it thanks i would like to say thank you as well
and i wanted i have a question like yes ma'am how many hours did that did you put that together you know um i had a um i was working with the the tra elementary school uh with another film
that i was doing and i'm really um childhood friends with the principal of the tra serita thomas and she decided okay jabro she knows i'm flying always flying around the world shooting films um here and there and she said well
jabro can you just spend about a week with uh some dads and really what it took was me sitting down with them at least twice um for them to tell their stories because everybody's not ready to be on camera you know and then number two everyone's not willing to tell their
story on camera it's very very vulnerable to certain people so i think a lot of the time was them getting to know me and knowing that i'm going to just not going to glaze over what um what was the heart of their
story and let's say the heart of u jeff's story was um you know he he had a son with autism and he drops his kid off every day at school and every day uh he's always getting back like a report that his kid is acting crazy in school
and for him to have to still uh hold his head up give his son a hug every day knowing that it's something going on mental in his in his in his child's brain but he's so happy to see him every day it you know when i spent that week at that school it was just
like something to watch and a lot of it didn't make on make camera because i i wanted to have some privacy from what it was so there was a lot that i captured that i just didn't want to put on camera we kind of stayed with the uh with the interviews because you know you get into filming children and stuff like that but
i spent a good uh week and a half with them ma'am yes yeah hi my name is cassie quinnland but i just the thing i wanted to say is my god it's so incredible how so many cliches go throughout the whole society
and hang on forever yes like the absentee black father i mean that's just one of them that's like somebody did sociology at a certain stage and things that get published at a certain time and then everybody remembers them forever and you know people in the midwest will
come up with that same quote and they never even met you know every african-american or seen it and the opposite of that is just as you said it's not just whether you're uh first of all nobody even seems to notice that in slave times nobody was allowed to marry
for heaven's sakes yes and so why do you hold anybody to that particular standard people actually learn how to take care of each other without being married um and partly what you're saying that basically a tenderness that's what i found when i drove my school bus in busing and the whole notion of mothering
and care was completely different you know the kids would get on my bus and they knew how to take care of their brothers and sisters they knew how to iron their own clothes they just you know and i'm like you got to be kidding me i never saw i'm a different culture so you know anyway just just to say that
and also sometimes these these horrific stereotypes and when the saddest thing about them is that when somebody says them especially people who don't know they think this is must be true because i've heard it before you know and it's it's it's astonishing so i really appreciate the the work that you that
you did thank you thank you thank you like we we have a pride about it you know we're probably like when i was growing up it was like in the 80s before i think when i was even before a teenage you would always hear someone saying like that kid ain't mine that kid ain't mine you know you would but i think it
some some type of switch happened i don't know when it happened i just don't know when it happened but at some point in time you would never heard that anymore you would always hear um fathers that i knew that were going to stick up for raising their children and try to go above and beyond uh to
raise their child you know i i was with my child's mother for about 24 years and we just didn't work anymore and i i was willing to pretty much die in this relationship i was going to die in this relationship i didn't care i don't care
how upset i didn't care how unhappy i was i was going to stay there so i could see my sons every day and i was willing to do that i was dead set willing to do that until i realized kind of that listen i you know i got to be happy too
and it took me everything it took me everything to um just you know remove myself from the situation but stick so close because like i told you my my father ended up having to leave my
situation when i was sick so and i held him kind of accountable for that not really knowing all the things that was happening in the panther party and how deep he was in at the time i held him accountable to for that for like for until like two and a half years ago so
not maybe so two and a half years ago i basically forgave my father for that and then i was able to kind of move on but i talk to my children every single day i see them every 3 weeks it's beautiful i make sure that i'm not going to be
anything like that what the stereotype is so it was like a personal thing for me anybody else any other questions okay all right well thank you so much guys i really appreciate you guys taking the time out to watch this and
uh we will see you guys follow follow my words hello sounds to me like you can hear me okay my name is dorothy clark and i am co-president of the lauren greeno house
in jamaica plane oh thank you very much and my co-president andrew hatcher is sitting here uh we have been on the board of lauren greeno house for quite
some time i've lost count of how many uh years the house is a very special place particularly in the j in the jamaica plane community we always are scheduling activities and
events to get people to come to the house be it a history program uh some sort of arts engagement music programs so we like sharing our house with the
public so i do invite you to come visit us uh especially this summer when uh we start our thursday on the lawn program which is every thursday um starts about 4:00 3:00 4:00 and it's just a fun time where you
can get dinner hang out on the lawn and relax but for this particular event we came together whether we wanted to do something about or or for the whole discussion the city's discussion
about reparations and what to do with that so uh we were fortunate enough to get a grant so thank you very much for doing that and we
talked what can we do what how can we get people to our uh house here sit down talk about issues what do we exactly want to talk about so we met on march
23rd it was a sunday afternoon and we had a good group of people with us first of all we looked to history and we had a co-presenter who's uh couldn't be here
tonight because he's working in teaching christian walks is his name he is a uh phd student at harvard in the education department and this is the sort of thing that he studies all the time
educating black people uh studying black educators digging deep into those issues that we need to teach ourselves about
so christian was the lead for the most part in this program and we started well that's christian right there so we started with a couple of questions
um first we or started with a couple of facts actually telling our participants that slavery was codified the first colony in the what
would be america slavery was made law in massachusetts first place and it was sort of the first place to abolish slavery notice how how i'm
wavering on that because the state of massachusetts didn't just come out and say "okay no more slavery this is done." everyone back then seemed to be um into gradual
u abolition or gradually getting rid of the institution of slavery and that was in 1783 and it was based on a ruling of the massachusetts supreme judicial court
where it looked at the constitution that had been written a couple of years before and the constitution basically pointed out that everybody should be
free and it took the courts and some other people a while to realize that and they kind of like it was a light bulb going off for some people so but that of course was not really the
end of slavery that was not the end of discrimination that was not the end of bondage it was not the end of many ills they kept going on
uh people found ways or i should say colonizers found ways around to get around enslaving people holding them in some sort of bondage so in our discussion
on march 23rd we started with those two facts and then the question why if slavery had been abolished taken off the books in
essence in 1783 why are we still talking about its persistent effects and sometimes it can be hard to know how to deal with those persistent
effects even difficult to uh recognize them point them out but they are there and we're seeing uh kind of let's say a resurgence of that mentality that kind
of thinking so one of the things that our uh moderator our main moderator christian walks discussed with us was the word
anti-lackness kind of as opposed to racism now a lot of people use the word racism um it does sum up a whole lot of social political legal ills that people
of color must face must deal with notice the term i used there people of color when you think in terms of antilackness rather than using the word
racism we're talking about a particular kind of discrimination inequity that particularly affects black people
so we've got there's a whole lot of racism racism is very much like a catchall phrase uh various people lots of people e different ethnicities um colors ethnic back racial background
experience racism but racism has different levels so we got into a discussion during our session about using the word
antilackness and it it it was a very interesting discussion it's a very powerful word i think for some people it might even be a frightening word christian took us through some of the
history of the word black and how it has come to mean awful things you've got black male you've got in terms of um well black males and
black male uh extorting money from people things that are called black are typically um bad associated with the devil associated with evil associated with
filth uncleanliness and then you've got that opposite white which is typically associated with purity with goodness with light and these are words definitions
that stay they have been in our language and they have been in communications in other languages for centuries and will they ever really go away how do
we get them to go away when we focus on anti-blackness we're talking about the specific discrimination that affects black people
yes there is uh racism against asians um people of other backgrounds latinos all sorts of but it's different when it comes to being
black and it is based in this idea that and it's an old idea and it was once held to be scientifically true that black people were
inferior could never rise to the level of creativity or intelligence that the white race could and so there we have this this
historical view of what that which is black yeah we had an interesting discussion kind of almost sort of heated at times um
because one person pointed out well they felt that the word racism was far stronger than the word anti-lack and so that that became our really lively
discussion of the day and it was good it got difficult at some moments which these kinds of discussions are going to do they're going to get difficult they are not easy they
um should not be easy i think well they're easier for some people than they are for others um what makes them difficult we haven't gotten to the heart of that yet if we had had you know several more sessions
in order to speak about this perhaps we would have gotten to that but our main takeaway or one of the main takeaways was looking at racism as it affects
african descended people black people um and then looking at all other racisms as being offshoots of that
now that is kind of one thing i'm sure you've all heard of critical race theory um that is one thing that actually critical race theory does although i haven't heard that term very much in the media these days thank
heavens maybe they're going somewhere and studying what it actually is but it is valid and as a result of critical race theory coming into being in the early 1970s
um developed by black scholars notably derek bell of harvard other groups that are discriminated against have come up with their their um crits their criticisms as
we call them so focusing on our history what the history of black folks has looked like is very important once we start trying to
accommodate all other groups that uh are discriminated against we kind of lose the view the fact that black people are uh lost in that so keeping that focus on
that talking about reparations you have a question mr what i was going to say is i was going to open it up for questions if you don't mind oh sure i just want to ask if anybody has a question you can stand up at the mic over here please thank you ask your question yes thank you sorry
about that mr but my question is i know it wasn't uh you presenting the material but what did he learn the most from the residents at the luring house and then like what was the final like product like not saying
black not saying negro not saying the different levels of you know blackness i don't know antilack final takeaway it was a great talk and we need to have more of those we need to bring
more people together one of the interesting things we saw was that um who's your audience who do you draw to these types of events who comes out
for this and you know we advertised pretty uh widely but you can't engineer your audience so it has to be people who are interested in the topic
who are interested in working out these issues that come so definitely more conversation because we don't talk together enough
we have your next question here hi miss grace how are you good evening good evening good evening um i just want to say that um when you were talking about black that the judge wears a black robe jesus was
black the black madonna and child is revered around the world and more black power to you thank you for that can we give miss dory a round of applause for doing her presentation thank you thank you thank
you so much mr um blue hill sc is it beacon hill the next hi how are you hello um my name is crystal rollins jackson and i am uh president of the
beacon hill scholars uh i i'm i'm from roxberry and uh my family really instilled in me the the um the importance of of family so i i really thought i knew my family pretty
well uh but i started going to these uh meetings and workshops at the african meeting house on beacon hill and there was somebody there who was doing some research and she said
well i i'm researching your family and i was like my family so it turned out that i had family on beacon hill who were black abolitionists and that started my you know interest in knowing more about you
know where i come from and who my who my family is and so out of that um evolved uh first it was the history nuts and then it turned into beacon hill scholars and many of the people who were members
of that were people who actually lived on beacon hill and were um very interested in who was living in their houses so we like to think about talking about black abolitionists and their white allies because it was more
of a collaborative uh way of being and they worked very hard together to end slavery so i can't see my notes so i'm going to just so um the founder of this was horus
seldon he he passed away in 2017 he was an activist historian he started uh community change which teaches white people about their racism he he was he was ahead of his time and so go to the
next slide this is just a short clip of a film that we did with michael king welcome welcome to abolition acres and we were standing
approximately where the present walk that we take comes to city hall plaza and that's close to where david walker had been and is on brad street and i said "abolition david
walker and what about mariah stewart and what about my friend william lloyd garrison?" and i said "we could do the three of them and make that a feature of what i would call abolition acre."
so this is just a snippet of a 17minute film that was we worked with michael king to create this um marilyn richardson who's a scholar on mariah stewart and um former uh representative uh byron rushing is also featured in
this film but it's not really about the film i just wanted you you to get a sense of of horus and his determination of teaching people about uh this small area where there were so many black activists working to to end sta slavery
and so we knew that we couldn't capture his energy because it was endless so we decided to create a uh a walking tour and we've been working on this for several years uh and so we we just have
been coming to some dead ends and so now we decided that we would create a virtual tour um you could actually do the physical tour but it's um an audio and uh it will be housed on our website
and this is just the page of the of the website uh it's not published yet we've been working on it for several well not several years but a few years now gathering the information and we want to make it a resource it's i think it's so important considering what's going on
these these days about information and who gets the information and how you distribute the information so this is this is this is the um the perspective of the black abolitionists and focusing on on their story as well as the history
of slavery and there'll be a timeline uh and this virtual tour you can go to the next slide and so this is this is the tour where you can either click on directions and get an
actual script and walk uh the tour or you can click on the map and see all the the spots where you can go to um or you can listen to the audio and next
slide and so these there are 10 stops this is the first five and uh we um were very happy that we got money so that we could hire a sound engineer so we don't actually have finished product yet it's with the sound
um engineer and so um there's a clip or audio clip that you could could you play that for stop three [Music] that's seven but that's okay you can play that one first it doesn't really
matter this one is mariah stewart is a trailblazer she is believed to be the first black american woman to lecture in public about women's rights especially black women's rights and against slavery she is also the
first us-born woman to address racially mixed audiences of women and men something considered scandalous even blasphemous at the time such is the horrible idea that i entertain respecting a life of servitude that if i
conceived of there being no possibility of my rising above the condition of servant i would gladly heal death as a welcome messenger appeal to the colored citizens of the world walker first publishes his
appeal in boston in 1829 it is an impassion cry to black people to resist slavery to educate themselves and to unite against oppression if you are anxious to ascertain who i am know the world that i am one of the
oppressed degraded and wretched sons of africa rendered so by the aberitious and unmerciful among the wives if any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave or murder me for
the truth know ye that i am in the hand of god and at your disposal i count my life not dear unto me but i am ready to be offered at any moment for what is the use of living
when in fact i am dead but remember america that as miserable wretched degraded and abject as you have made us in proceeding and in this generation to support you and your families that some
of you on the continent of america will yet curse the day that you ever were born so that was an excerpt from uh david walker's appeal and so i'm i don't really have too much more to say uh we
should have this finished and posted on our newly launched website i think by the end of may and so i i hope that you'll look forward and you'll take the tour and you'll you'll look through our website and um and just um enjoy the
information that's available to us thank you can we give her a round of applause does anybody have any questions for bluehost scholars any questions you want to step up to the mic i was asking if anybody had any questions for you oh okay yeah for q&a
thank you so much for presenting your project we really appreciate it um next is american descendants of slavery we have mr reggie stewart who's presenting i'm sorry well do you want to we can ask her
at the end yeah yeah we have a q&a at yeah jess when you launch your website how will we know where are you going to advertise it well we i one thing we could commit to is if we know we can announce it at this
meeting um so maybe if you can get that information to us we can announce it here and put it on the website before the june meeting just send an email to reparations and update um partnership project on let people know thank you so
much good evening everyone how are you doing my name is reggie stewart and tonight i'm coming to you in my capacity as the former state coordinator for the massachusetts chapter of the
advocacy foundation i know people who know me nowadays know that i wear a lot of hats but this is the only hat that i am wearing tonight all right let's see if our hooker is working
all right these are our partners we had aformational and listening session on reparations on october 26 of last year uh that is the mission statement for uh the fiscal sponsor of the event the ad uh empowerment project
you can find us at adosmpempowerment.org uh this is the mission statement of the advocacy foundation uh i won't read that all today but you can find that on the website adosfoundation.org uh these are uh the different focus points of the
adosaf black agenda again you can find that on adosfoundation.org uh this is the mission statement of the massachusetts uh state chapter and this is our let's see these are the focus points of our
black agenda you know dealing with wealth income home ownership lending discrimination renting discrimination housing insecurity black entrepreneurship and black employment and again this is where you
can find more information on uh these organizations adosfoundation.org and adosfoundation.orgma and this is where you can find us on social media uh at our session we talked about
uh definitions and timelines of reparations and how we anchored that discussion we asked uh the question what is reparations within the context of the united states of america and we went through a timeline
of litigation policy and advocacy from the period of slavery all the way up to the legalized end of jim crow visa v the uh fair housing act of 1968 uh these are the different
uh you know points in history that we covered this is another one of them again all the way uh going up to 1968 uh we discussed uh modern uh reparations legislation uh of course the
uh late great senator uh bill owens uh whose legislation here in the state of massachusetts the first of its kind led to uh what we now know to be hr40 and we have the late great john
conurs who ushered that in uh who has uh who ushered it in in every single um congressional session until he left office and then the late uh great sheila jackson lee uh picked up the torch and
introduced that until her passing and now our our our honorable congresswoman from the seventh district ayanna presley has picked up the torch and this is the ordinance uh that is the
reason why we are all here today and uh this is more uh as as far as modern leg legislation uh this is senator liz miranda uh who um sponsored a bill for reparations as did state
representative brandy fluker oakley now uh brandy uh fluker reed uh and they're at it again with this session so be sure to call your uh state rep and state senator to move this issue
forward and we were visited by our great uh district 7 counselor uh tanya fernandez anderson and for the record councelor anderson still loves you and supports you oh we talked about october 1989
uh the charles stewart incident we talked about the the bennett family uh who boston apologized uh to but has yet to make whole and we covered joseph bennett's uh organization
uh uh helping you know young men and and other returning citizens uh help get a fresh start i just saw him the other day he's still working uh we talked about uh the elephants in the room regarding the reparations
debate and of course the first one is you know what in the hell is and how did we get here that's top of mind for many uh we dealt with one of the uh co-founders uh iet carnell uh who was here for the session and gave remarks uh
and she began a discussion in 2010 around uh lineage and identity the other co-founder antonio moore uh focused in on wealth inequality in a way that
hasn't really been explained before especially uh in the context of uh the consequence of slavery and the calcification of wealth especially from 2000 until the present day and what we also talked about was the
origins of this movement online where we uh had a discussion about hookworms in the south and we found out who represents that district and once we found
out where she was had a lot to say so we go on we just keep going until she says "i yield i call on speaker ryan to work with the dems on an infrastructure
package that addresses the crisis we are facing and references the story that uh i bet had covered on her show earlier really shows you what happens when people organize and speaking of organization uh we covered the uh angela
project 2017 18 and 19 uh where both iet and antonio organized clergy uh leaders uh politicians from around the country and especially uh parts of the baptist
convention which had uh membership in the millions uh to speak on wealth equality and eventually in 2019 reparation so when you see the way that exploded that's the origin
story and again when we are talking about wealth inequality and policy uh and the importance of lineage and we see these two figures here who gave us policies like
this and in actions like this and they try to trigger you in terms of your identity with displays like this of course with in the room the answer is going to
be nope not doing it and so what we saw with representative su in alabama uh plays it plays out again because this was happening you had a political
movement for reparations birthed out of and anchored in a unique and specific understanding of lineage and identity in the united states wealth inequality and the urgent need for targeted
policy and this comes right around when uh her first uh attempt plummeted you see a a spike in reparations conversation around 2019 uh as we get to
the third angela project and activism online there is a correlation here despite what the party higher-ups may tell you so when she pokes her head out same thing happens not doing
it not doing it not doing it that's so that's how we got here we also dealt with uh the party and their media machines inability to accept what was happening or understand what
was happening so they say these are russian bots and we have other people like harvard uh try to pick up that torch uh uh anchored in a misunderstanding
uh that others tried to uh to promulgate but they're kind of quiet now slavery reparations advocacy group files defamation lawsuit against harvard and so if you go online and you look for
the people that had those things to say uh and even harvard and people like uh move on.org and some of the other people connected to that they're all quiet now uh but the overall message uh that brings
to the table is that i don't work for you i don't work for the democrats i don't work for the republicans i don't work for outside foreign actors i don't work for philanthropy we work for the people and so we go to what
form should reparations take and we revisit the timeline but within that discussion of the timeline we noticed a pattern that throughout from slavery all the way up
till the end or the so-called end of jim crow in ' 68 we have monetary compensation referenced 10 times land reference five and other forms of redress uh referenced three times
and so the conclusion is that uh direct payments are the most materially significant uh part of any reparations program and yes reparations goes beyond a check it can take many forms but
without that transfer of wealth you cannot call it reparations within the context of the united states and we went over our reparations framework from the advocacy foundation uh talked about what we're
asking for reparations for more of the things that we're asking for and these are the five essentials of repair administrative financial land education and mental health we went on to who would be eligible for reparations
and we see all of uh other beautiful black people who are newly arrived so naturally the question becomes uh what about them but we have to keep that in the context of when slavery
began and so-called ended and when most of our brothers and sisters from the diaspora arrived and so this is where we find uh the international framework uh useful
because if if you weren't here for slavery and you know you're you know there's no stolen wealth to repay within the united states or or compensation or rehabilitation or satisfaction but you can stop what you're doing to those newly arrived you
can stop you know harassing them if you're the police you can stop following them in the story you can stop uh renting discrimination you can stop lending discrimination you can stop uh unequal
uh treatment of our children in schools so that's where we do that and all of that you know i'm not going to read all of that but pretty much the uh ancillary benefits especially in terms of compensation would be felt immediately
uh once that transfer of wealth hits the descendant community uh said differently uh if the wealth gap closes for me today uh i'm coming for all the roti i'm coming for all the chicheró uh for my cape verdians i'm
heading straight to cesaria so that wealth is going to make its way around uh we also discussed uh racialized tax taking this is james saucer jr this is some of all that he
owned and it was taken through tax foreclosures through urban renewal some of you may recognize that street and his children are still here and what's tragic about this is that
this very same property that was stolen by the city is now being presented to the people of boston as a fix for the racial wealth gap so you steal land from black people and sell it
back to developers and say "here is your redress." insane and so what we concluded is that in the same way that boston mayor bigalow uh in
1851 upheld the institution of slavery by uh enforcing the fugitive slave act uh in a similar way our current mayor upholds the vestigages through her housing policy
we also had a special panel of oral histories of urban renewal where we heard from former state senator diane wilkerson and and uh members of the saucer family and some other
folks and here we were in july 2023 asking for a pause on this land giveaway and again in 2024 we're asking yet we are met with
silence the whole time the mayor says here's how we close the racial wealth gap uh but in terms of closing the racial wealth gap assuming uh this is the approximate number of african-american households in the city
to close the wealth gap would be a little over 14 billion only problem is that's three times boston's operating budget so obviously it's not very feasible that boston would be able to come up with
those funds in enough time that we need but i know someone who does and that's where we should that's where we should uh have our focus but that doesn't mean that there should not be a response to
this uh because there is something that boston can do to uh ameliorate the vestigages of slavery and this is how you can get involved and this is how you can fund the reparations bill and uh i'll take questions at this time
give reggie a huge round of applause for the us application if anybody has any questions please step to the microphone please step to the microphone if you have questions please thank you what's up brother how you doing i'm good you know when you started talking about the urban renewal you're talking my
language so um i was going to just um not really a question but um the urban renewal quite hurt me thank you all right thank you um the it is
actually a federal issue the um i95 and i695 that caused the urban renewal were federal projects 95% of it was paid by the federal government with a 5% match by the city of boston so i just wanted to give you that clarity on that issue
oh absolutely yeah it was it was a federal program but the the city complied and the city owns some of that land that was taken so we can certainly do uh have an inventory and a study on that and uh and through the housing
policy within the power of the the city they can address some of that but you're absolutely right the the grand scheme and the grand fix is absolutely federal and i and i appreciate your for no no no and i agree with you but i'm just trying to say that even if you want to look at
it as far as like this was the project that was done um like i think the city of boston paid $75,000 for all the destruction west end um and everything so i'm just trying to say that they have we don't want to we're not going to let the city off the hook trust me i know
but i'm just saying the um that the overarching issue and because of the size of the problem and the money that's required in order to um solve the problem it can only be solved like you said by federal absolutely because i'm
i'm pretty sure the the houses and businesses that were destroyed exceed that $14 billion that that it takes to close the wealth gap appreciate you brother next person please say it loud i'm black and
proud um i i have questions i wanted to know one uh your presentation does it just based on housing um and i wanted to say um in your presentation um our
people uh first of all that the black community in boston um from roxbury into dorchester was a thriving black community i grew up in as a child um we had black businesses and
black stores so just like tulsa the black community was destroyed and right now 60,000 black people have left the city of boston um i want to make that
point and i want to link that point to um black people in the city of boston also file to incorporate our black community as a separate city from boston uh so i want to make that point
that's uh needs to be addressed and um i also want to say that [Music] um the harms done to black people in this city in terms of the destruction of
the black family has to be addressed and the destruction of black males in the city and black fathers uh the city of boston removed trades out of all the junior high schools as a result black
males are the only black males in the world today without trades without the ability to feed their families um and feed and clothe their children uh so that is a uh that needs to be addressed
also crack and guns were dropped in our our community the amount of black children that was stolen from their families and placed in foster care parent we we we cannot overlook the destruction of the
black family as the worst horrible holocaust in the world i'm sorry to say yes absolutely well to to answer your question uh why housing um we while we
did cover uh the the history of reparations advocacy we went all the way back to uh belinda sutton's petition and we ended with the uh uh the fair housing act of 68 but when we got to the housing
discussion it really seemed to uh to to to energize the audience so that's kind of where it kind of led and and it and it kind of seems that this is something that black people in boston really really want to deal with while we
want to cover slavery but as the brother pointed out earlier a lot of these projects and policies were federal but for a lot of people it's personal because a a whole lot of the children of the people whose homes and
businesses were those children are still here and even some of the people who own those businesses and homes are still here so they they want a fix for that today yes yes so housing has to do with the family because the families live in
the houses y as well so the family also needs to be included but i i really appreciate all the work that you did it is it is phenomenal i'm not criticizing your work i'm just oh no i'm just urging that we also need to focus on the
destruction of the black family because we need to rebuild the black community so i just want to uh mention that and i also want to say uh god bless the guscott family because they owned this
property that the city of boston took by imminent domain so the city of boston took this building from a black family the guscott family and then they turned around and named it after our famous city councelor uh bruce bolan big up to
bruce bolan and the guscott family thank you thank you so i just want to make a quick statement we started late and i'm going to make um concessions for that but we have one more presentation okay so i just want to make sure that you guys have a specific question i'll be quick yes um i want to know this uh
first of all the research that you've done is that on the website uh well well there uh u i i guess we could request that the uh the task force if they want to put these slides up you know feel free and uh there there's also a uh i i
submitted to the to the city a recording of the entire listening session and again if the if the task force and the city see fit they're absolutely free to publish that and you know if if y'all wouldn't mind publishing that you know so that the people can access all the
searches there the other thing was that when i was a grad student at beu um i was part of the um the african-american students who did research over this urban renewal and that never got back what we wrote up
because we we went around and interviewed people who were in the process of being displaced that work didn't get to the city although it got to be you do you do you still have it no oh so can i make a statement everybody
who is a community partnership has a contract with the city of boston it was paid a grant or either received um a contract from them to perform services the city of boston owns the property and we'll be using it and us making our recommendations for operations and that was the whole purpose of us being able
to engage with the community and having them do the project so they could have input on our recommendations so they will be showcased we just didn't want to showcase them before they did the presentation so she asked a question i just want to go to the next person did you have a question real quick or do you have a
statement i have a statement okay can you wait till the end for the statement so that we can let marlin go i'm going to give like maybe five minutes for people to make statement at the end you don't mind it's just related to what he was talking about is it a question or a statement it's a statement related to what he was talking about so we we can
have community um statements it's just that we want to make sure that each each presenter was supposed to get 15 minutes and we are now at 20 that's fine but we want to make sure that this gentleman does his presentation and then people who want to stay can stay but but then we will have at least gotten all of our
presenters followed through on what what we told them in terms of when they get to present does that make sense yeah yeah we're all good okay thank you reggie thank you so this is mr marlon solomon he is from the afroameric afroamerican cultural
initiative can i take this off i don't want to be trapped behind the podium well how's everybody doing i'm not going to sit here and it's dark y'all might fall asleep i need y'all to stay awake all right anyway so i can introduce myself
until they hook it up so my name is marlon solomon i am the founder and senior project engineer at the african-american culture initiative we are bostonbased nonprofit we do work in um cultural engineering of like spaces
like hubs right cultural hubs so like an african-american chinatown so to speak right oh you need my pin all right hold on no i'm black and i'm proud there we
go all right so like i said yes um i'm i'm a senior i'm an engineer i'm a civil engineer my work primarily has to do with restorative project management which is a field of study that we are working on independently we we don't have nobody we are the organization this
is an african-american organization um and so restorative project management is about building community um through infrastructure development and looking at so basically we are um working on
projects in our community that actually are doing reparational work now we are not waiting for anybody there's no need to wait for anybody we do projects that involve low tech very inexpensive
solutions in order to achieve the goals that we're looking for so the first thing that i wanted to just really talk about so what i always start my talks off with what should what don't we know that we should know all right they've been erasing history for as long as
we've been here right and in that question means that there are things that have been erased from our cultural memory that we may not know how to enact right not saying because we're not trying not because of anything but just because of certain information gets lost
in a time all right so when we think about the culturally eraser that is happening in our communities remember what's the saying if you don't know where you're coming from you don't know where you're going right so um i was very pleased to hear about the mandela
city i find that piece of boston history to be tremendous all right because that is an expression of african americans wanting the number one cultural artifact which is land a place to practice a
place to be a place to grow right a place to have uh family and when you when this happened and yes it didn't work out but to me it says we want to be free we want our own spaces all right
now how can we articulate what was erased it's quite difficult right because in the end of the day you can you only know what you know all right people have been trying to erase our history for over about three 400 years right why do they continue
today because they've been successful and they're just going to continue doing it cuz they know if you don't know where you're going you can't know if you don't know where you're coming from you can't know where you're going so they're not going to let you know where you're coming from so but we have dr maluna coringa
that went in 1966 created a cultural development right he started something he went to africa and he gave his first impression of what he saw and realized that there was cultural voids that were happening in his place with his people
with things that have been lost into time and memory cuz we were we were we were black before we got here on these shores we have family and community and empires before we got here all right so what we do is a little bit like quanza
2.0 all right we are do deep research on cultural development using artifacts and things that are handed down intergenerationally so now i'm an engineer so they couldn't put me in front of people and i'm not going to show you some maps so this is the 1938
boston redline map and this is where we are right in here all right now this map combined with this little craay thing that cray thing is the plantation y'all that was the area created by the boston bank urban renewal group in order to
keep us in a certain location they now took off all the trolleys and all the transportation to that area so we would be isolated and it started when they removed in 1987 the orange line from right here and moved it to roxberry
crossing bypassing all the communities down here and down washington street right so this is the current 2025 city of boston displacement map this was released last month may 19th okay so
this is as good as data now i want you to look at something look at this and look at this and east boston is has the highest amount of displacement 97% of displacement now why am i bringing this up because to me and to
all the work that i'm doing and all the data that's coming in all right the number one issue about reparations is we can't have any more displacement in boston in the city of boston going back to 18 uh 18 1700s to 1850 we moved
from the north end to the west end in 1910 or 1900 1910 we moved from the west end to roxbury 60 years later in the urban renewal that got knocked down then we got put in that little craay which is
down here and you can see it's spreading all the way down here all right now they're about to put white stadium in they're going to put millions of dollars of investment into a place that has been disinvested for over 60 years what do
you think is going to happen especially around the largest landmark a golf course a zoo lovely green spaces all those buildings around there are the same as um boston common and the boston
redline map shows that they had the same amount of money so if you put white stadium there oh and you remember there's a little bus lane around columbus a right where does it stop it stops right in front of white stadium they're connecting the orange
line to to there and they're not done there they're also connecting with the new um blue hill a y'all know that blue hill a they're connecting blue hill a directly to yuki named it white stadium so that when you're coming from wherever you're
coming from to go to the concerts to go to the um i don't know the the the soccer stad want to watch some soccer and when you want to watch the soccer you got to go through the and they want to make sure that there's a clean path for you to get there but what's going to happen is that this place is going to be
completely too high for the um for people to rent and the rent's going to go quick cuz the place is actually supposed to be rich now i wanted to show you our cultural hub this is i'm now showing you a picture of aerial photo of the of this area back in i think the 50s
before the place got knocked down this is where technocational school is well this is where the school is oops this where the school is but this is the field this is where the last house on oak bernav was anybody remember that
right okay so this is vernon street right used to connect right from here right by that foot locker all the way to tmont all right so this is the hub there are businesses i mean i'm not going to pretend to know what tell you what you guys already know but this is the
cultural hub this is an african-american version of chinatown okay we're talking about um jazz clubs businesses you name it it's in this community the police station there was a dentist there black dentist now remember what would have happened if those people had been allowed to stay
for the last 60 years developing like everybody else we wouldn't need no damn reparations and we wouldn't have to beg anybody for it either so what did we do we did an event so i'm trying to find
history so how do i do i create um events we invite a lot of people to the events and we get stories because guess what if you're looking for cultural memory you got to have somebody that was there to remember it so a lot of my um friends they're um what i call seasoned
se um citizens and um that's from my um oh and i didn't say this i'm half african-american my mother's from the great state of commonwealth of virginia my dad's nigerian so i kind of an african-american i grew up in africa and the thing we do in africa we train our
kids to attack the knowledge in our seniors i'm not playing with that i'm not like they we they we teach them to investigate and crack because guess what in africa there was no written language so we have it's only oral so that means that when i see my senior i'm going ah i
need to get that information so what i do i bring people together in community you know we have julia um councelor julia mahia um there and reverend kelly who is in the civil rights movement this my main man lou furer my guy this guy is a freedom
writer like no doubt and then we have ebony gil bringing in the young boston urban archives um but among from that we now take that information that we get from these informational sessions and we have the african-american academy which is a summer program that teaches young
people the african-american history and turns them into tour guides we have tours we have to take this history and we have to make money from it i'm not sitting here waiting for no damn reparations all right so what did i do i get the new we have new guinea joy
that's north end and west end once upon a time in nubian square the road map to beloved community which is the kind of joint lives of the african-americans and jewish communities that did live in unison and were separated and pitted against each other by redlinining and
urban renewal now um we teach our kids how to be advocates because you know these days you got to be on social media even if you're doing the tour guides we're bringing people into our community to spend money all right and to go to our restaurants and to learn the history of our people on our
land i also do a lot of digital um a lot of digital storytelling i'm releasing an um our two-part documentary in junth about and that's that's reverend chanty moore he'll give you a good story about uppy black folks in roxbury back in the
day he's a hundredyear-old he's a hundred-year-old roxberry resident lives right there on shamid um miss um helen guilford that's the coast cafe if you know anything about about boston riverside coast community 70% african-american back in
the day all right so we're talking about i'm getting history these um eva and walter clark they were the two siblings and they're the children of the clarks that lived on the last house on oak burn a and for those who don't know when they leveled the whole place they owned a home so they couldn't level their house
without negotiation and let's just say mama was a bit stubborn she wasn't trying to sell nothing right so that's um a little bit about that but now i want to talk about the the the program that we do one of the projects that is near and dear to my heart like i said
i'm bicultural and this organ this program is the first program i ever did with the african-american academy we um give away a free dna test to african-americans in boston every year right and this is not the 23 and me we go to an african-american company called
african ancestry they'll tell you your tribe and they'll tell you you're not because you have to understand africa those countries are fake news too all right that was only a hundred years ago so i mean what is it nigeria that's why when they tell you the 23 me they give
you 2% this and a half a percent that you can go to blazes with all that cuz we want to know the tribe when we get the tribe we even connect you with people from that tribe in this country now until you can talk to them because we're still oral tradition people and we
should never let anybody forget it so we're we um we have a mission statement here i'm not going to go over it but our mission is to establish cultural rights and reparations for african-americans through reconnection education and repair of cult systemic cultural erasure so we study things that i'm telling you
tus and northeastern don't even not even looking at how many of us how young okay if you were under the age of 10 and your parents give you the talk and about racism and african-americans i mean about being an african-american you found that they say "you black little
boy you better watch your step." how was you can raise your hand if you were told under the age of 10 you were given the talk or if you've given your children under the age of 10 whether they're they're black for their safety that's the data i want and that's the data i
need from y'all to help me contribute so i can continue to develop curriculum say why is that important i used to teach at boston day and evening academy all right just down the street and you would be surprised how they try to teach our kids
that are coming from tough environments that have already been told to talk and they're talking to them like they're little kids like "hey little boy i know you're screaming at me but i'm like "you better talk to that boy like he got some sense." they're crippling our kids because they're scared to tell them
to sit the their butts down and listen they want to be you know oh you know this poor kids like they're coming and giving you know kids in africa uh handouts so anyway reparations services and advocacy i do believe that they every african-american is deserved by
reparations to have a trip to africa or at least of the black country you cannot understand how it feels unless you are in the majority and i that's why i do advocate for african-americans in particular because let me tell you what while my
other brothers and sisters from the caribbean i love them to death but you know what you had your land let me say that again you had your land we are on african-american cultural
land right as we speak and as i'm talking to you right now the land is a turf so we also believe in education we talk about we need to um increase the the food and the amount of cooking skills we have in our communities so we can i mean you we keep on talking like
it's just oh give people food we need the recipes those are those are what was lost y'all should chase my jalaf rice honestly you don't know what you're missing all right then um diasporan global unity and um okay i don't want to go over everything but because i know
i'm running out of time how am i doing for time all right two minute i got more okay hold on so now the great escape i don't call it the great escape all right that's i mean so i don't call it the great migration all right that's a bunch of bs who cares where we were going is
what we were running from all right and that's the issue if you hear these things you have to you have to turn those narratives off because to sit here and say that we're running towards a greater life in the north when we were running from
lynchings we were tired of seeing bodies hanging from trees and guess what when we left they were trying to call us back they were trying to get us back it's not like they just let us go what kind of migration is that all right so we need to connect
ourselves to our southern roots as well it's very important for this story so these are some pictures that um that you know we've been doing this project for about seven years like i said 2018 um these are some of the winners um this is
um these two young ladies tested positive for bameik of cameroon and then this is their their culture guide who actually was um took them out and gave them somewhere to eat from their culture and stuff and cooked they had time with their family so these are real projects
all right these are our winners michelle she couldn't be here today um uh shireen jessica stacy so every year melanie giovanni and winston and then we have a couple of people here and that are and
in fact our own dear antonyia we have some people here um gabrielle and samantha hey y'all hey justina sorry all right my bad and and and um they are here because they're in the the new
competition that we're doing the giveaway we're going to give it away in um in um um junth so you can please copy this qr code they're looking for a donation because we want to give all of them dna tests that's a new format we're doing and start this level of discovery
for them so um without further ado i hope you enjoyed uh what we had to say today but remember y'all this is african-american engineering you cannot sit and expect people to design um places for you all right now let me tell
you something people can i cannot dance listen to me very well though let me bring my nigerian accent so you can understand the words i'm saying all right now i'm telling you people that cannot dance will not build dance floors in your community people that have no seasoning in their food are going to
give you those little tiny cabinets to put your seasonings in then my mama got cabinets all i mean seasoning halfway across the whole room because they didn't design it for your amount of seasonings they designed it for salt and pepper and a little butter
i'm killing myself so please support our organization all right y'all stop laughing over here y'all making me look bad but um yo no i mean but for real we have a real work to do and this is reparations you can get involved with now you don't have to wait for the
report to come out you i mean we're already working i'm training my work staff this year i'm already training young people to be tour guides this year not next year not two years not five years when is the reparations gonna come out
anybody want to guess we can put some wager on it 10 years okay who thinks it's going to be 10 years 15 years okay 15 years we get reparations we got two going ones 20
years you see look at this we haven't got i'm not even going to go far i'm going to start crying if i have to say 50 years before everybody put their hands up and the research so we got to do this now we can't wait for anybody okay you can see what's going on so thank you very much for your time and
uh i'll take any questions give marin a huge round of applause i just want to make an announcement thank you do the q&a for marin i'm i'm allowing it to go until 8:30 because actually we didn't start until 6:30 i have three announcements to make real quick no problem just ask him his questions and
let's keep it rolling uh for your um cultural connections are you doing tours back to the native land you mean native american culture no no from oh no to africa well um no thank you ghana
nigeria cameroon right right right right right well you know we have to crawl before we can walk so we're going to start with roxberry first um and then we're going to do boston the boston trail of tears i call it though um um no um of course um i do
want to open up uh uh uh our headquarters in ghana um because of as you know the black star has to do with marcus garvey and they truly recognize african-american culture is the only real country that really does that they have a right to return but you know
where you going to get that information right so we we need to um like let people know that this is accessible right and we need to create the infrastructure to educate people so they know okay you can go back to africa you know because the first thing is i don't know nobody in africa i understand
because i don't know nobody in china either so i'm not moving there right right so you need we need but they're reconnection services right even buying a home right things like that if you because you'll be surprised at the big property you'll buy in in africa with
the money you're making here if you want to retire right you can go join um um um wb right you know and these are the things that we um you know we believe are part of this reparation y'all please
it's more than just a check uh if you're looking for the pursuit of happiness like i said if you can't artic if you've never experienced it you can't really understand it right you know how can you articulate something you've never experienced like me trying to tell any
of your my my beautiful mothers in the house today that oh i know how to i' i've read a book about you know giving birth it can't happen sit your butt down marlin this lady right here want to speak and this lady right here i'm going
to ask a question yeah go ahead good okay actually i'm glad i'm glad that you here you spoke first i'm excited to hear what you're doing thank you so much this i'm okay all right thank you can we put the lights on now that we can hear yeah we can we can put the lights on you're
echoing okay anyway go ahead all right i am an immigrant i understand that immigrants have a role immigrants teach wonderful wonderful things i was a i i was the first on the other side i drove in busing and and you know i'd learned a therapist said "well if you want to
learn about this culture where go learn." so i learned from black women to the history of black women i also joined the uh i also drove the beu shuttle bus i was the fir and the black gospel choir was on the bus and i said "my god where'd you get that music?" my father used to play drums in the basement in
canada and to let some of that music in the from the dixie land but anyway i so i went to their practices i was invited i was the first white person to join them um because i was at so many practices one day somebody said "when are you coming?" and i said "i don't know who me." anyway but the point is
after time more and more people came more white people more immigrants after a while the exact same choir with the exact same music almost right but it was different it's immigrants doing it they imitate i
imitate we all imitate african-american culture and you watch america you watch uh the voice people can do it i need to say this but well okay the thing that's confusing the world doesn't know the difference between an immigrant black american and an african-american black
american right okay so i love what you're doing as long as to me i love immigrants and they need to keep identifying themselves as immigrants instead of saying like kamla did in the beginning that she was a usual black woman i recognize her mannerisms i grew
up in montreal the same place that she went to school i recogn those are all my mannerisms the way she act that was the question i just want to get you a question it was kind of a statement it's just about the eras oh sorry thank you but anyway the eraser happens you know
when people imitate and there's nothing wrong with it it's just that we have to watch out because by now all the institutions use white mechanisms to hire people to whatever look at the movies industry and with cynthia riva say playing artha franklin what how did
that happen how did that even happen you know it's it just should never have happened and it should never have happened you know daniel leo and all the rest of these people playing martin luther king why this is insane okay
no no no problem i'll respond to this by saying that okay i don't even i get what you're saying and you're completely right and african-americans do have a specific special place in this place but i just want to say so why how would i separate a jew from another white person
ask them a little more the irish okay so that's the same thing we do for african-americans well i know but how can we say it in more publicly when it's taboo to mention anything i don't know well in in our community it's not taboo i know not in your community but it sure is in the suburbs they aren't talking
about anything well there's not much black anything going on in the suburbs well okay i don't really it sounds like can i just have this lady speak because she exactly thank you and and also i was trying to praise you and say thank you for what no no i i appreciate it thank you so much i appreciate it that's more
of the culture saying changing their habits it has nothing to do with blacks so right this is not even a black issue this is all about culture this is not about race at all go ahead i just wanted to um i guess i don't i just i didn't hear any talk about the projects mission
hill jamaica plane orchard park um i didn't hear a lot about that and we were like in fishbones i grew up in mission hill and we were surround we're surrounded by all the hospitals wentworth and um all we're surrounded by
everything especially in mission hill my sister i want to apologize for not mentioning them but i kind of like because i had a little bit of time but i showed that area and all those i mean that was the area that those places were so i apologize for that but go ahead sorry um so i i just i i guess i just
wanted to put that out there but i did want to know how i can reach you i'm not going to hold up oh no no we have we have information there no problem we'll get you and she can take a yeah asia is with me so we'll get that information yeah i i definitely wanted to include um there there needs to be some sort of
segment or something about the the project i mean there's families you can go like we have a mission hill reunion every year and there's families if someone dies we're there and that's where we you know we need to come together because it's very important
i've learned so much about the during the research of these communities i used to i learned that we used to send in this very community you would send young women to go and pick up the children while the older women are working and then they are taking care of the children and they're cooking for the
whole block is that not true something like that you know what i'm saying like this is well i mean not the block but the but but yeah yeah what i'm just saying is i i look i romanticize our history i'm not scared to do it um i
just i wanted to end with with us being in these projects yes ma'am we were they trespassing were passed out and that's how a lot of our men went to jail they were arrested they you know charles
stewart didn't just yes deal with the stewart family he dealt with that whole community right you know um that's all those are very no um one of the things that i found and i can't really prove it because there's no evidence but i do know that rap founded 50 years um and
it's i believe is a lot because of um connalies and all those locations there was no place for young people to practice music so they sat on the corner and they listened to their artifacts and their you know the the old records and they created rap so and that's 50 years
and that happened right after the urban renewal and i just didn't understand and the reason why i asked that question is because i never understood how a people that basically were the best musicians god has ever created and we um instruments is our thing so why would we
create a music without using instruments unless we just didn't have access to them so i think that the projects is a very thing important thing to study and the trauma of being in open wide community and spaces with connections and family and a whole like
infrastructure of support and to go from that to boxes created to house people you know and keep them out of the way so i completely agree with you and i think that um i would talk to you and because i do a documentary i think we can there's some material there yes my
sister yes thank you thank you for your presentation and thank you thank you for highlighting the projects um oh yes that um were hubs for black americans and those strong relationships from orchard
park columbia point yes mission hills yes and the black the black family is about families right uh that's what it's about you know you know jones family these our culture is all about families
yes you mess with one you're going to have to mess with that whole family so that that's the way we came up now the black community here in boston we were a thriving black community right um
thriving we had summer things for the teenagers right at all the park yep that was attended 500 600 black youth right we had everything we needed in our community and you and another thing
that's failed to mention is the black church the role the black church has played yes go ahead okay the role that the black the longtime black institutions prince hall the oldest black the oldest black institution in
america uh the carver the george washington carver oh yes sir okay the paththenia temple elks home on shamad aptist yes so we we we um have a lot of
uh lot of good history add something at this point so i need to really shut people down but like i said i i actually extended it to 8:30 no problem yeah what i'm going to suggest is all these ideas that you guys have we've been begging people to put in an email and the reparations task force that email
address is reparations boston.gov put in your ideas as to what you think should be a part of reparations send it to the task force it goes to khaled it's on the record and it's what we get to talk about i just want to make one or two statements on
behalf of our um chair mr fisa he's not here i just want to say that i listen to the community one of the things that they asked was if we have a consistent calendar throughout the year we have that calendar pale is our project manager he can only upload one month in advance at a time so you will not see a
whole calendar for the whole year who will see the next month's event the next month's event is may 12th we're going to do the same thing showcase the project um community project partnerships like we did tonight um and then after that we'll go back to talking about the um
actual research consultants in june so next month i'm really expecting this room to be full because community keeps telling me antony they're not including me they're not including me i have these conversations these ladies have worked very hard with me with khali to make this happen and this is the community
input the project the people who came here tonight are the community that's what they said and if you want something different put it in writing but at least support them because they are the ones who answered to the contracts and to the grants and they did the projects and they did the work so if you want
something else to be known or to be spoken about send an email but also support them so this is a part of community engagement and so the city wanted to see actually what the community had to say and so you have to respect each person's input their
projects and the and the work that they put in to be here today so we're going to do this again may so i just want to say even though they're they may not be posting it it's going to be the generally the second monday of each month so we're trying to put it at the same time so that you have a advanced
notice and you generally know so october is the one month where that won't be true okay good great these these dates are up please please now we have it so that you can plan in advance i know getting something at the last minute um doesn't work but this way now you'll
know in advance um the only one um is october 14th that is not going to be the date it's going to we're going to have to change it because um that is uh indigenous people's day uh so we have to figure out if it's up or up or down already changed oh that's the one that's
already changed okay the 8th so it's not the second tuesday it is the 14th it is the 14th it's the 14th it's the 14th he already changed it okay so i want to thank everybody again for coming out tonight i really appreciate everybody coming here thank you for supporting the other people that did the projects in
the community and please remember to send your emails and then come again on may 12th thank you so much have a wonderful evening everybody one last thing i'm sorry i don't want to take no food home make sure you take all the food take it with you
share share with the community yes yes yes take all me next week