Reparations ‘essential’ to addressing systemic racial injustice, speakers say
Lurking behind systems from enslavement to segregation, from redlining to police violence, is a “brutal logic” from which the “lives and families of African Americans are subject to the acquisition by people to enrich themselves,” said author Ta-Nehisi Coates during a daylong conference hosted by Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project and the Africana Studies Program that also included commentary from noted activist Angela Y. Davis and others, as well as testimony from the descendants of lynching victims.