Boston’s Reparations Project Has Hit an Unexpected Snag. That Doesn’t Make Reckoning With Our Past Any Less Urgent.

The state of the city’s long-awaited report on Boston’s racial history has been a long-simmering mystery in City Hall for months.

As in, where is it?

City officials were as surprised as anyone when a story dropped on The New York Times website Friday night declaring that Tufts historian Kerri Greenidge, one of the report’s main researchers and writers, had been facing serious allegations of shoddy scholarship and had, under unclear circumstances, left the university.

“I wasn’t aware of any of it at all,” said Joseph Feaster, chairman of the city’s reparations task force.

Suddenly the delay of the long-overdue report made sense.

Several years ago, momentum began building for Boston to confront its legacy of racism and begin to consider the highly fraught question of reparations for the communities that have been affected by the legacy of slavery.

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To simplify the effort, Boston’s history was divided into two eras: 1620-1940 and 1940 to the present. A research group at Tufts University, led by the dynamic Black historian Kerri Greenidge — author of among other works, an acclaimed biography of legendary Black journalist and activist William Monroe Trotter — would analyze the earlier era, while a team at Northeastern led by Margaret Burnham, a Northeastern law professor and celebrated retired judge, would take on the modern period. The due date for both efforts was 2025.

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From Tufts, the city got missed deadlines and increasingly vague explanations about when the work would be complete.

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What might those recommendations look like? For one thing, it won’t be cutting checks to community members. The task force is more likely to look at the systemic ills that can be traced to the legacy of slavery — such as inequities in housing, health care, and employment — and to recommend policy reforms meant to address the issues we see all around us, if we are willing to look.

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