CRRJ Director, Margaret Burnham, lays out ten principles  which, Burnham asserts, are common to the work of remembrance coalitions and similar projects focused on racist terror and historical injustice.

1. Intergenerational Justice

By virtue of being human, we are each bequeathed a set of obligations and entitlements from past generations. Past harms that unjustly enriched some to the detriment of others require redress in the present. We are committed to discharging these legacies and debts with the intent to lessen the burden on future generations.

2. Posthumous Recognition

The victims of historical injustices lost not just their lives, but their personal legacies, both reputational and material. Our work challenges this posthumous erasure in order to restore to history the memories, moral worth, and dignity of those who perished.

3. Historical Retrieval

By investigating and recovering the specific facts and events that the agents of historical injustice sought to bury, and that history’s scriveners have too often ignored, we amplify and also complicate our understanding of the effects of extreme racial violence and other harms. We are creating a more complete  historical record that incorporates the memories of descendant communities alongside other documentation, thereby rejecting the violence of organized forgetting.

4. Legal Rectification

When traditional legal remedies that could redress the systemic degradation wrought by law are not available, we pursue alternative corrective modalities that will establish truths for generations to come, and also illuminate the course that a just legal system should have followed.

5. Contemporary Consequences

We confront historical injustice because its legacies contaminate our lives today, affecting our economic, social, and environmental life chances and those of our children. We pursue research, advocacy, and policy that can interrupt the ongoing impacts of historical injustice, including trans-generational trauma.