Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley met with CRRJ staff and faculty earlier this month, as her office picks up the mantle with bill H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, and reparations policies more broadly.
Congresswoman Pressley (D-MA-07) traveled to meet with the CRRJ in-person in Boston, accompanied by her Deputy District Director Eddie Rupia, and Press Secretary Avery Manousos. She met with members of CRRJ including Directors Margaret Burnham and Rose Zoltek-Jick, and CRRJ Staff Attorney and Program Director, Alex Stein. Pressley’s visit to CRRJ was the first stop as her and her team spend the coming weeks meeting with community members, advocacy groups, and entities like CRRJ as they relaunch the campaign for H.R.40.
The bill was first introduced in 1989 by Rep. John Conyers and previously proposed by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in January 2023, before her death in 2024. It was reintroduced this year by Pressley and Senator Cory Booker in January, and has been referred to the the House/Senate Committee on the Judiciary.
The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University has, for 17 years, studied cases of lynching and homicidal racial violence during the Jim Crow era. Our research is available in the Burnham-Nobles Archive, which classifies and documents more than 1,000 cases of lynching and other forms of historical homicidal racial in the mid-century South. From the project’s inception, we have worked closely with descendant communities and families seeking redress for these atrocities.
CRRJ’s Federal Reparations Project, launched in February at the annual Mills College at Northeastern reparations conference, explores how the federal government can address the harms that are in part attributable to its failure to fulfill its law enforcement responsibilities in the years from 1885 to 1965.
CRRJ is creating resources to identify and catalog those cases — and types of cases — that exemplify the miscarriages of justice for which significant responsibility lies with the federal government, including cases where the government improperly failed to:
- Protect the victims of historical homicidal racial violence.
- Investigate cases that were within the jurisdiction of the federal government.
- Prosecute federal law violators.
Three criteria have governed our case selection. Cases within this scope are those where there is:
- A federal record.
- Evidence of a failure to intervene, to investigate, or to prosecute.
- A showing that the killing of the victim was racially motivated.
Federal Reparations: Lynching and Racial Violence Project, unveiled by Civil Rights and Restorative Justice project team, at Black Reparations conference in Oakland, California.
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