League of Women Voters may take position on reparations

The cotton sharecropper’s unit is one mule and the land he can cultivate with a one-horse plow. Greene County, Georgia by Dorothea LangeMore: View public domain image source here

The cotton sharecropper's unit is one mule and the land he can cultivate with a one-horse plow. Greene County, Georgia by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Should Black Americans receive reparations for slavery and the Jim Crow century? That’s a topic the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts may declare a position on this year.

And on March 2, the League of Women Voters of Newton will host a Reparations Consensus Meeting for LWVN membership—from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Durant-Kenrick House—to decide if the LWVMA should take a position in support of reparations to Black Americans.

A consensus meeting must be held before the League takes any position on any issue, and the League only works on issues for which it has an official position.

Adopting a position requires a specific process that includes a proposal and a formal study, which is then presented to membership at conventions and annual meetings.

“Consensus meetings are meetings of the local league membership. Consensus is an agreement among a substantial number of members, reached after study, leading to the formulation of a statement of position,” League of Women Voters of Newton co-presidents Frieda Dweck and Jane Harper explained in a press release announcing the meeting. “The consensus; reached by members through group discussion is not a simple majority, nor is it unanimity, but refers to the overall ‘sense of the group’.”

In general terms, reparations are moneys given as amends for injury or wrongdoing.

The League of Women Voters of Massachusetts in 2023 proposed a study on whether or not the League should take a position on reparations for Black Americans, and their Reparations Study Report and Reparations Study Guide were released this past fall.

The report is lengthy—almost 90 pages—and covers a vast array of topics including housing, the criminal justice system in America over the past 400 years, and how Black families have been kept from generational wealth while white people were allowed to prosper.

In 2019, the NAACP passed a resolution calling for reparations be paid to Black Americans for legalized slavery that lasted from 1619 to 1865 and for the Jim Crow-era legal oppression that lasted from 1865 through the 1960s.