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https://archive.is/8VAhz

>Following Boston’s appointment of a reparations task force in 2023, religious leaders in the city have formed a coalition and are calling on white churches in the city to pay $15 million in reparations.

>Rev. John Gibbons, a white minister in the Boston community who leads a multi-ethnic church, Arlington Street Church, told The Daily Beast that Boston’s history of racism is only different in its form from areas of the Deep South.

>The co-director of Boston’s People’s Reparations Commission Edward Sumpter agrees with Gibbons’ assessment of the city and the larger implication of New England, as he told The Daily Beast: “They ought to be willing to give back to those communities that have been so hurt by the fact that for the 300 years or so in the United States, Black people really got a low stock in terms of realizing the quote-unquote ‘American Dream.’ For so many years for us, it was an American nightmare.”

>“We can’t get [progress] until there is some means of addressing the damage, truly genocidal damage that was caused to Black Bostonians and Black Americans,” Gibbons said. “I feel these issues are too important to be left to the Black community to be responsible for white institutions.”