The East Side Freedom Library and the City’s Reparations Legislative Advisory Committee invite you to a community conversation about the work of this committee.

There are two upcoming sessions:

Thursday, April 7, 2022, 5pm – 6pm
Friday, April 29, 2022, noon – 1pm

Register here to join one or both of these conversations on Zoom. 

The East Side Freedom Library and the St. Paul Recovery Act Reading Group have been convening monthly conversations since January 2020. We have explored the history of racism in the United States (even before there was a “United States”): the transatlantic slave trade; the plantation system; the role of slave labor in the development of the U.S. economy; the domestic slave trade; the role of slavery in the American Revolution; the roles played by free African Americans and enslaved people in abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War; the rise and fall of Reconstruction; sharecropping and convict labor; the migration north; the participation of African American workers in the labor movement and the New Deal; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; the movement for reparations, particularly progress being made in other cities, such as Evanston, Illinois, and Asheville, North Carolina; the Japanese-American movement for redress and reparations and its lessons for African Americans’ quest for reparations; and the intersections between the movement for reparations and other movements for justice.

These investigations and these conversations helped inform the work of the St. Paul City Council and the creation of the Reparations Legislative Advisory Committee, which was appointed in January 2021. They are now reaching the final stages of their process. What would you like to know about their work? What would you like them to know about reparations from your experiences and perspective? Please join us for these two virtual conversations, via Zoom.

Free and open to all