Raymond Wilkes first participated in the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic at Southern University a decade ago. Now he’s back at Northeastern University as CRRJ’s Senior Staff Attorney.
“I am excited to rejoin the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project as a Senior Staff Attorney,” said Wilkes, in a recent interview with CRRJ. “I am deeply committed to supporting the growth and development of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. However, most of my focus will be on the Federal Reparations Project and CRRJ’s work with the Boston Reparations Task Force.”
Referring to CRRJ’s reparations projects as “a second home,” Wilkes said he is “deeply grateful for the opportunity to continue the meaningful work of uncovering historical racial injustices and working with local communities and government actors to remedy these harms.”
But law was not his first calling. Wilkes was an undergraduate student at Louisiana State University, about to complete his degree in food science, when, in 2015, the Department of Justice released its report on the shooting of 18-year Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“I went across the street from the chemistry building to the African American Cultural Center, pulled up the report and spent hours reading it,” said Wilkes, who was starting to suspect that being in a lab all day was not what he wanted from his future career. “That’s when I realized that the law was what I was supposed to do,” he said.
A few months later, after successfully passing the LSAT, Wilkes was enrolled at Southern University Law School (SULC). In a recent interview with CRRJ, Wilkes credited now-Chancellor John Pierre for taking “a chance on him” and opening the doors to his true calling.
Pierre introduced Wilkes to CRRJ, and he participated in the second SULC/CRRJ summer clinic in 2015. That summer would mark the beginning of a fruitful, decade-long partnership between SULC and CRRJ.
Wilkes enjoyed the work so much that the following summer he contacted CRRJ Director Margaret Burnham and participated in the clinic for a second summer in 2016.
After graduating from SULC in 2018, Wilkes worked for an insurance defense firm, representing insurance companies and defending their clients, when he came across CRRJ’s posting for a legal fellow. Wilkes’ application was successful, and he returned to CRRJ as a Fellow in January 2020.
As a fellow, he brought formality and organization to many of CRRJ’s investigative procedures and practices, working alongside former CRRJ Project Archivist, Gina Nortonsmith, in devising the processes that would form the building block for the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA).
“It was a fun time, seeing the different projects and being so hands on,” he said. Wilkes is deeply grateful for the lessons imparted by Burnham, CRRJ Associate Director Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, and MIT Chancellor and BNDA co-founder, Melissa Nobles. “It was the best place to grow into the future academic, professor and practitioner that I wanted to be and I’m thankful for that to this day.”
When his fellowship ended in August 2022, Wilkes took Burnham’s advice and enrolled in an LLM program at NYU Law.
“NYU was the best decision for my life,” said Wilkes. He spent a year engrossed in international law, human rights law, comparative constitutional law, and the intersection of race and law. This was where, he said, he first began to appreciate how his domestic projects aligned with developments in the international field, and to explore areas for further investigation.
Having graduated from NYU in May 2023, he took a position as research fellow at the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Project. This initiative, launched by Harvard President Larry Bacow in 2019, is the university’s attempt to understand and address the enduring legacy of slavery at Harvard. “My work was scouring archives, repositories, identifying and verifying who the enslavers were, and determining if they were Harvard faculty, staff or leadership,” said Wilkes. In this role, Wilkes found himself returning to familiar archives and repositories across the country. “Through my time at CRRJ, I had already done the historical research on the ground,” he said. “CRRJ gave me the practical tools, taught me the processes and prepared me for the Harvard position, and when issues arose, I remembered how I handled them at CRRJ.” He says the work at Harvard brought an “understanding of how to draft the narratives of these enslaved persons, and how to view ourselves and the obligation we have in upholding the right to truth,” he said.
Now, a decade after first stepping onto Northeastern’s campus, Wilkes is back and hoping to create long-lasting change, particularly in the field of reparations, as well as return to teaching and the community work that has been his greatest motivator.
“CRRJ is very revolutionary in how we think of justice. We step outside the binary of civil and criminal, and we look at transitional and reparative and restorative justice,” said Wilkes. He brought this unique practice with him in teaching the Spring 2025 cohort of CRRJ Clinic students, who investigated 36 cases of racially motivated homicide. Their cases originated in the recently unsealed WWII-era United States Department of War records, discovered by CRRJ’s Project Historian Dr. Jay Driskell.
“I enjoyed exposing the students to multiple legal frames with which to examine these events, challenging dominant narratives, and giving voice to these neglected stories of historical racial violence,” said Wilkes.
“My work is at the intersection of history, law and public policy, and it’s been hard to find a specific lane,” said Wilkes. But “CRRJ showed me that it’s possible to make your own path. So, that’s what I’m doing, I’m creating my own lane.”
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