Reparations advocates urge city to pause plan to give away vacant lots to build housing

Advocates at a city-funded reparations event Saturday urged Boston to suspend a program to build affordable housing on vacant lots in Dorchester and Roxbury that were once owned by Black families. The event, organized by the local chapter of American Descendants of Slaves with funding from Boston’s reparations task force, was advertised as an opportunity to provide public comment to the task force as it continues its work to determine what reparations should looks like in the city. “Tell the City of Boston what reparations means to you,” organizers announced on Facebook. Reggie Stewart, the Massachusetts coordinator for the ADOS Foundation, told attendees: “This is also a listening session which you can consider to be tantamount to testimony. So imagine that you are in City Hall and that the City Council is here in front of you and the mayor is here in front of you, because that is going to be the people that this is put in front of.” The reparations task force has hired researchers to document the history of slavery in Boston, as well as the history of discrimination post-slavery, with the goal of finishing that work by the end of the year. While the task...