In a letter dated Sept. 9, 2024, former Cambridge City Councillor Quinton Zondervan wrote, “One of the proudest achievements from my time of service on the City Council was passing the American Freedmen Commission Ordinance.”

Yet Zondervan’s letter expresses a deep sense of concern: Almost a year after the ordinance passed, he writes, “I’ve come to understand that the Commission has yet to be established.”

The historic ordinance is Cambridge’s first step towards reparations for slavery. Though reparations is a politically polarizing and emotionally fraught idea for most of the country, the American Freedmen Commission passed almost quietly with a unanimous decision back in December 2023.

Cambridge’s ordinance is unlike the reparations plans that have come before it. Rather than focusing on racial justice, it intends to implement transitional justice. Its reparations are aimed at redressing human rights violations, including slavery, housing discrimination, and mass incarceration. This plan is specifically for “American Freedmen,” a new identifying term — or actually, a really old one — for the descendants of enslaved people in the U.S.

The ideas behind Cambridge’s plan have implications for the vast network of reparations plans emerging in cities all around the U.S. By embracing a human rights legal framework, this ordinance provides a radical new scaffolding for reparations plans and racial justice initiatives writ large, potentially allowing them to avoid the race-based legal challenges that have previously ensnared them.

But first, it needs to happen. At the moment, the radical Commission outlined in the ordinance remains just that — an outline, an idea, a theoretical framework.

“That’s unfortunate,” Zondervan wrote in his letter, referring to the City Council’s recent inaction. “And I’m sure you intend to remedy that very soon, as continuing to leave the Commission unseated would be a great disservice to your constituents, and in violation of the law.”

Quinton Y. Zondervan, pictured middle, speaks at a May 2023 meeting of the Cambridge City Council. By Julian J. Giordano

‘Identifying With Our Ancestors’

The idea for Cambridge’s American Freedmen Commission originated with one woman.

Long-time Cambridge resident Saskia VannJames worked for four years as a lobbyist for racial justice policies in the Massachusetts cannabis industry. Too often, VannJames says, she saw private equity firms partner with medical dispensary owners from underrepresented backgrounds — only to later divert profit from them — while the state missed opportunities to protect cannabis workers, growers, and consumers alike.

VannJames had set out to repair harm in the cannabis industry, but after years of work she felt she had failed.

“So I took a step back, and I began to study reparations. A lot of hours, a lot of conversations,” VannJames recalls. “I just said, ‘Let me focus on my backyard. I can’t save the world.’”

Conversations became research into other cities’ reparations programs and the possibilities of the law to repair the harm of slavery. VannJames’s legal study became a growing conviction that the law had been misapplied to the reparations movement.

“The reparations movement is racist,” VannJames wrote in a post to Patreon in July.

VannJames lives and works by the idea that race is a social construct that lacks any scientific basis. The system for racial classification is a “eugenic philosophy born out of slavery,” she says.

In the early 20th century, eugenicists believed they could cure society of social ills like poverty and crime through selectively breeding humans. Eugenicists supported segregationist policies and targeted Black people, especially those with disabilities, for forced sterilization.

In VannJames’s view, there is no justification for using racial categories today — much less building one’s personal identity around race. “Why are we still upholding this?” she says.

VannJames wants to abandon the concept of race entirely, including as a basis for personal identity, social classification, and reparations policy.

She considers the U.S. one of a handful of countries that lives under a “race-based caste system,” which she says erases cultural and ethnic heritage. For example, VannJames says slavery stripped her ancestors of their specific African identities.

Rejecting race does not obviate the necessity of distinguishing people from one another. But to escape the long shadow of colonialism, VannJames says, people should identify by their ethnicity and ancestry, instead of the color of their skin.

“When did identifying with our ancestors not become enough?” she says. “Why do you trust systems of colonialism? What oppresses you is not going to liberate you.”

Instead, VannJames advocates for using the ancestry-based term “American Freedmen,” which the federal government used during the Reconstruction Era to identify newly emancipated people. The term allows her to honor her specific lineage as the descendant of enslaved people — to embody the legacy of her ancestors.

VannJames argues that the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. are a “whole new ethnic class” of mixed African, Indigenous, and European descent. Many American Freedmen, VannJames says, do not even appear Black or know that some of their ancestors were from Africa.

Because of that, American Freedmen does not describe race or skin color, but rather one of three distinct U.S. political classes, alongside those of “immigrant” and “Native American.”

Among these classes, VannJames argues that American Freedmen receive unequal treatment. “Only one lacks a federal Bureau, state departments, regional offices in the capital, and municipal commissions servicing their community,” VannJames wrote in a July Patreon post. “This is what a racial caste looks like.”

Abandoning race for ancestry meets the political moment following last year’s Supreme Court ruling against Harvard College’s race-based admissions practices, VannJames says.

While most advocates for Black Americans decry the ruling, VannJames considers it a confirmation of her ideas that race is an illegitimate basis for equity. Her eyes light up as she discusses finding the term “American Freedmen” in the opinions.

For example, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, wrote that the 1865 Freedmen’s Bureau Act authorized “the Bureau to care for all loyal refugees and freedmen.”

For Thomas, the act’s history is not explicitly racial. “Importantly, however, the Acts applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large,” he wrote.

Under this distinction, Thomas wrote that “the government can plainly remedy a race-based injury that it has inflicted” under the caveat that “such remedies must be meant to further a colorblind government, not perpetuate racial consciousness.”

But not everyone sees the history that way. In her dissent to the ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasizes the connection between the term American Freedmen and race.

“Indeed, contemporaries understood that the Freedmen’s Bureau Act benefited Black people. Supporters defended the law by stressing its race-conscious approach,” Sotomayor wrote. For her and many others, race is imperfect but the most effective tool available to identify the intended recipients of efforts to repair harm, like affirmative action.

Under Thomas’ strict constitutionalist interpretation, which is now the prevailing precedent, there is still a way to remedy historic harms. Cambridge just has to get specific about who reparations are intended for.

VannJames contends that Cambridge’s adoption of the term for its reparations commission can change residents’ views on race for the benefit of the city. VannJames believes redefining reparations is the first step in undoing the legacy of slavery.

Questioning the race-based caste system is “the beginning of an unraveling,” she says.

The Cannabis Catalyst

But how did VannJames’s ideas about race, ethnicity, and ancestry end up in a unanimously approved Cambridge ordinance?

The roots of the ordinance trace back to November 2016, when Massachusetts residents voted to legalize recreational marijuana in a referendum. The state legislature ordered municipalities to create their own regulations on its use and sale, foisting the issue onto Zondervan’s desk in January 2018.

The legalization opened the possibility of making tremendous profits off a drug that has led to millions of arrests since the War on Drugs began in the 1970s, when the federal government ramped up punishment of drug offenses. Zondervan and other members of the City Council saw an opportunity to direct that money back to Black residents of Cambridge who were disproportionately harmed by racist policing and prosecution just decades ago.

“Simply legalizing cannabis without providing some form of reparations for that harm wasn’t good enough,” Zondervan says.

Around the time of legalization, VannJames came knocking at the doors of City Council. After years of advocating for the legalization of recreational marijuana sales, she was now traveling around Massachusetts lobbying cities and towns to allow stores to open. VannJames, the policy director of a recreational cannabis cooperative, urged the City Council to write equity measures into cannabis policy.

The City Council ultimately voted to bar existing medical marijuana dispensaries from converting to recreational businesses for two years so that minority business owners could gain a foothold in the market.

The Council’s reparations approach to recreational marijuana made Zondervan think about how to help Black residents outside the cannabis industry, he says.

He and VannJames had been meeting to discuss cannabis regulation, which often led to conversations about the possibilities for more ambitious racial justice legislation by the City Council.

Mayor E. Denise Simmons — then a councillor — proposed a policy order to distribute a percentage of cannabis revenue to “local Black-owned businesses and economic empowerment applicants,” but Zondervan was not “particularly excited about this idea” because it excluded the majority of Black residents.

VannJames spoke against Simmons’s proposal at a council meeting in June 2021, arguing that it “would distribute money to the top and trample the people at the bottom,” Zondervan recalls. He invoked his right to table the order.

Mayor E. Denise Simmons — then a councillor — proposed a policy order to distribute a percentage of cannabis revenue to "local Black-owned businesses and economic empowerment applicants." By Frank S. Zhou

Two months later, VannJames convinced the councillors to table Zondervan’s own reparations proposal, which would instead distribute cannabis revenue to “current and former Cambridge residents who have been harmed by the war on drugs.” With the additional time, VannJames could continue to gather residents’ input.

She became a sounding board for some of Zondervan’s ideas, including a proposal for a racial justice and equity commission. The commission would propose immediate equity change to the government and other possibilities for repair, as well as report on the implementation of policy orders to divert percentages of cannabis revenue to reparations for slavery and the War on Drugs.

VannJames expressed concern that Zondervan’s proposal would conflict with recent orders by the Trump administration against race-based initiatives. Continuing down the path of racial justice policy, they feared, might put them in danger of a legal challenge.

But to understand why they feared a challenge, you need to understand what happened in Evanston.

A Flawed Model?

Evanston was — and continues to be — a model for Cambridge’s plan for repair. But when Evanston is mentioned, it’s usually as a model of what to avoid.

The story begins in Nov. 2019, when Evanston, Illinois passed a resolution to establish the City of Evanston Reparations Fund and the Reparations Committee. This Committee began distributing reparations in the form of housing grants in March 2021, becoming the first city to institute publicly funded reparations for Black residents.

Evanston’s plan was spearheaded by former city Alderman Robin Rue Simmons. Rue Simmons first began thinking about reparations after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article, “The Case For Reparations,” in 2014. She says the article prompted her to “begin to think about the harm today, the legacies of slavery, and how it plays out in government and institutions today.”

“The Case For Reparations” follows the story of Clyde Ross, a man who moves from the Jim Crow South to Chicago in 1947 and finds himself the victim of predatory housing practices that inflated rent prices, withheld home ownership, and evicted many unsuspecting Black families. Due to rampant redlining that blocked off a large section of the legitimate home financing industry to Black people, Ross was forced into this predatory agreement. Coates’ example was set in Chicago, but Rue Simmons drew parallels to the legacy of slavery and discrimination in her own city, a suburb of Chicago.

From 1919 to 1969, a system of illicit practices, including redlining and barring Black residents from mortgage loans, stripped many Black Evanstonians of valuable property and forced them to reside only in a designated section in West Evanston. In 1921, the City even rezoned for commercial use every area outside of the west that Black residents lived, so they had no choice but to relocate there.

Next, Rue Simmons came across a 2018 report by the Metropolitan Planning Council which calculated the cost of segregation in the Chicago Metropolitan Area and the cost to repair historic harm.

According to the report, “Segregation is not only an issue in low-income communities or communities of color. Everyone pays a price, measured in lost income, lives and education.”

The report calculates that if segregation was redressed, wages for black people would rise $2,982 per person annually and the entire region would see a net gain of $4.4 billion dollars in income, homicide rates would drop by 30%, and 83,000 more people would have the means to achieve a bachelor’s degree. If these were the types of benefits Chicago could see, why couldn’t Evanston see similar changes?

(And why couldn’t Cambridge as well? A 2015 study found that redlining in the Greater Boston area led to multi-generational poverty and a wealth disparity of an $8 average net worth for non-immigrant Black households, compared to $247,000 for white households.)

At that point, Rue Simmons began to think more concretely about how a plan for reparations could be implemented in Evanston.

The Evanston reparations model redirects taxes from recreational cannabis sales and real estate purchases to a reparations fund to be dispersed to eligible residents in grants of up to $25,000 for house down payments, home improvements, or to make a payment on a mortgage balance.

Since then, cities ranging from Seattle to Chicago to Boston have begun to research and design reparations programs.

But just this year, Evanston’s reparations plan was challenged in court. The lawsuit was filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative organization with a history of challenging racial justice initiatives, on behalf of six white people who claimed that they, as residents of Evanston, should be eligible for reparations, but are excluded from eligibility on the basis of race.

“It wasn’t that everyone in the city was harmed due to this,” Rue Simmons says, referring to the racially discriminatory housing policy. “Some folks had advantages, better livability, more access to wealth by home values.”

“But there was a segment of the community that was harmed and that community was Black,” she says.

The dismantling of affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard could have clear implications for how Evanston decides eligibility for their reparations program.

But Rue Simmons wasn’t fazed. She was aware from the beginning that reparations are a partisan issue and anticipated there would be legal challenges.

“Evanston continues to disperse reparations during this time of the lawsuit,” she says. As of September 2024, the City of Evanston has disbursed over $5 million in reparations grants.

An Issue of Sovereignty

So, faced with a major potential problem, VannJames offered a novel alternative: Instead of basing reparations on civil rights law and racial justice principles, Cambridge should justify its reparations program on international human rights law.

Reparations, VannJames argued, is not about racial equity for Black people. Reparations is about giving the descendants of enslaved people what their ancestors were owed when they suffered a violation of their human rights.

That means reparations is an issue of sovereignty, rather than racial justice.

VannJames wants people to consider U.S. chattel slavery a human rights violation subject to redress under United Nations law.

In recent decades, countries have allowed minorities that suffered human rights abuses to lead reparations processes, as Colombia did with the descendants of enslaved people or South Africa did with victims of apartheid. U.S. Reconstruction policies in the decades following the Civil War failed to complete a victim-led process of repair.

During that era, Black political leaders emerged in cities, states, and towns across the country, including in Massachusetts. When white Southerners targeted Black politicians for violence and legislated against the rights of freedmen, VannJames argues, Black Americans lost control over their free future. What’s more, Congress terminated the only federal agency explicitly created to provide food relief, education, and land to emancipated people, the Freedmen’s Bureau, seven years after its founding.

American Freedmen are essentially no different from any other minority group in the world that is oppressed by its own government, VannJames says. So why are there special rules for “racial justice” governing American Freedmen and “human rights” for everyone else?

According to Rue Simmons, Evanston’s reparations framework is also based on the principle of repair for egregious harms — a human rights rather than racial justice issue — but Cambridge’s ordinance makes this framing explicit to guard against legal challenges.

“The human rights framework takes it out of the peculiar box of skin color and what does it mean to be Black, et cetera, and makes it equivalent to all other human rights violations,” Zondervan says. “It’s a matter of international law.”

The term American Freedmen clarifies who is owed reparations for U.S. chattel slavery.

“Once we start using that term, we are able to break out of the trap of race — ‘What about recent immigrants? Afro-Caribbeans?’” Zondervan says.

Zondervan felt that VannJames’s framing of reparations was the missing piece to reach consensus within the Council, where he and Simmons had been at “opposite ends” of the discussion on writing racial justice mechanisms into cannabis regulations.

“I don’t know if we would have been able to pass anything without Saskia’s involvement,” Zondervan says.

With the revived framework, VannJames and Zondervan got to work on transforming his racial justice proposal into the American Freedmen Commission.

The eventual ordinance called for the future Commission to “investigate and report on any historic, systemic, and/or ongoing harms done to American Freedmen by the Federal, Massachusetts, and/or Cambridge governments, and identify adequate, effective, and prompt reparations.” In December, the city council passed the ordinance without a single opposing vote.

‘Justice Delayed’

So, how did it get to the point described in Zondervan’s letter? How did the reparations ordinance, a unanimously-passed piece of legislation carefully constructed to address the legacy of slavery in Cambridge, lose momentum?

The next step would appear to be establishing the American Freedmen Commission. But why hasn’t it been established?

VannJames says she has not been provided any explanation from the City Council. And VannJames is not a councilor, so it’s difficult for her to figure out what’s going on.

Zondervan, on the other hand, is no longer serving on the City Council or residing in Cambridge. The reparations ordinance lost two of the strongest voices advocating for it.

So whose job is it to implement the ordinance now? This responsibility falls on the city manager.

And the city manager’s yearly self-assessment begins to sketch out a faint picture of where things stand behind closed doors. In the assessment, the city manager must rate each of the yearly goals as met (green), partially met (yellow), or not met (red). Of the 18 goals listed, there are no reds, fifteen greens, and only three yellows — one of which is establishing the AFC.

The ADEI update column reads, “Working with Mayor’s Office to establish a working group to provide greater guidance and scoping on the Commission, including incorporating greater community engagement.”

It’s not clear exactly what facets of the ordinance require “greater guidance and scoping” on how the Commission should be established, but, according to Dan Totten, a former aide to Zondervan, it could result in significant changes to the ordinance.

Any proposed changes would still have to be voted on by the City Council, but the working group could potentially change the member requirements or remove the transitional justice framework entirely.

Potential modifications aren’t Totten’s only concern. He also worries about how much time it will take to get from the working group stage to the establishment of the Commission.

“It will be justice delayed,” he says. “This framework is the right one. This framework has been developed with people who have thought deeply about this issue, and it deserves to be implemented. We just need to not be afraid of looking inward on our own government.”

The city manager’s unclear progress on the American Freedmen Commission ordinance isn’t a one-off issue. The City Council passes policy orders faster than the City Manager can implement them. Since 2019, city staff have responded to an average of only about 60 of the roughly 100 awaiting reports passed by the Council each year.

Huang noted the “steadily increasing” number of unanswered policy orders in a January memo to the City Council, calling the backlog a “pain point” in the often-strained relationship between the Council and the city manager.

“I respect the amount of work it takes to put in these policy orders,” Huang said in a January meeting, “but there is a significant amount of work that it takes to actually provide the replies and to do the work to then actually implement them.”

That month, the City Council voted to clear the backlog of 68 policy orders.

But there are harsher mechanisms than policy orders for holding the city government accountable for the progress of the reparations ordinance. Both the city manager and the City Council can be held liable if a lawsuit is filed.

Still, Zondervan says the situation is unlikely to get to that point.

“Obviously everybody wants to avoid that, right? Because that becomes an adversarial process,” he says. “So the hope is that with enough reminders and effort behind it, they will just establish the commission.”

However, both Simmons and Cambridge Chief of Equity and Inclusion Deidre T. Brown say that the time delay is essential. For them, the working group is not a negligible step.

“While we are firmly committed to launching the Commission and have already taken a series of steps to ensure its short and long-term success, the work is complex and requires careful strategic planning,” Brown says.

The purpose of the working group, according to Brown, is to define deliverables for the Commission, and she’s wary of getting ahead of the results before the working group has convened.

The priority for Simmons is engaging the community.

“I want to do my best, to do it correctly. And what better way than to solicit the thoughts of other folks,” she says. “This is going to be such long work. We’re talking about 400 years of chattel slavery. It’s something you have to do thoughtfully, something you have to do carefully. It’s too easy to get this wrong.”

40 Acres and a Mule

But the thing about reparations is they’re not just hard to actualize — they’re hard to imagine too. Perhaps that’s because the need for reparations is built on a history of broken promises dating back to the end of the Civil War, including an agreement between Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and 20 Black pastors to divide former Confederate land into 40-acre parcels for emancipated slaves.

“The promise through President Lincoln of the forty acres and a mule — that didn’t happen,” says Kenneth E. Reeves ’72, a former Cambridge mayor and the current president of the Cambridge chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It keeps coming up, sometimes prompted, sometimes not. When imagining reparations, even people living in a metropolitan area such as VannJames, Reeves, and Simmons bring up one image — forty acres and a mule.

“This is about agency,” Simmons says. “And almost that the 40 acres and mule is a part of that, but it’s not all of it.”

It’s not about the 40 acres, it’s about the principle of giving someone what was taken away once — the opportunity to start on an even playing field and to succeed or fail on your own terms. And though it may manifest in a similar idiom, people imagine this idea of providing all American Freedmen with baseline equality differently.

"This is about agency," Simmons says. By Julian J. Giordano

“The idea I have is that reparations should really be organized in a way to address the tremendous income gap. That would have a positive impact, across the board, on all Black people, to move us out of this basement of net worth,” Reeves says.

VannJames envisions an “American Freedmen Homestead Act,” which would distribute 40-acre grants for home ownership.

“What is pressing for us in society right now is keeping a roof over our heads, paying bills, and keeping a job,” she adds.

But for VannJames, home ownership is just the “basics.” There should also be symbolic forms of repair — like renaming Harvard Square to Freedmen Square — and forms of repair that foster personal healing, unity, and above all, joy.

For example, VannJames imagines converting the CambridgeSide Mall into the Freedmen Trauma Center, where Cantabridgians could receive acupuncture, massages, or emotional healing services. In her ideal world, she jokes, the center would also offer indoor water surfing.

“You gotta dream several impossible things before breakfast,” VannJames adds, laughing.

— Magazine Editor-at-Large Jade Lozada can be reached at jade.lozada@thecrimson.com.

— Associate Magazine Editor Jem K. Williams can be reached at jem.williams@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @jemkwilliams.