Who we are

What HERE Hopes to Accomplish

What you can do

Brief History of HERE

HERE was organized in the summer of 2020, during the simmering aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and in the midst of the COVID pandemic. It emerged from a graduate course on Community Engagement in Higher Education that started in January 2020 before the pandemic hit and before the heightened awareness among white Americans of racial injustice in the US that came with the murder of George Floyd. 

The curriculum was structured in a way that interrogated an emergent critical community engagement perspective in the field and its implications for teaching and learning, for faculty scholarship, and for institutions. The last session of the course focused on community engagement and reparations addressing anti-Black racism. The course examined how community engagement might be practiced through partnerships focused on and driven by reparative commitments.

Students read pieces on reparations, like the case for reparations by Coates, and reports by campus groups that examined their campus’s relation to slavery, like the slavery and justice report from Brown University, and other material that explored reparation in the context of the moral responsibility of higher education to acknowledge and repair its historical relationship to slavery and racial injustice. The book by Darity and Mullin, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twentieth Century, had been published in early 2020, and the authors did a COVID-induced webinar the in the spring, discussing their book.

The question was raised, during the webinar, of the responsibility of institutions of higher education for reparations. Institutions like Brown and Georgetown had begun to acknowledge their slave past, with some discussion, if not significant action, on redress. States like Florida have provided scholarships for higher education as redress for the Rosewood massacre (a Black town like dozens of others that were destroyed by white violence in the late teens and decade of the 1920s across the United States). What could Colleges and Universities do to support a program of reparations? Darity and Mullin were clear in their response: higher education institutions could support national legislation for a program of reparations, what has been attempted in the bill HR 40, which has been introduced in every session of Congress for over three decades, and never voted on.

Darity and Mullin write that “student activists on colleges and university campuses – who increasingly are working to uncover the deep connections of many of their institutions to slavery, to the veneration of the Confederacy, and to the ‘scientific’ perpetuating of the ideas of black cognitive and cultural inferiority – can take on a new challenge. Instead of seeking piecemeal reparations from their institutions on a one-by-one basis, activists should push these institutions to join the lobbying effort for congressional approval of black reparations.” Students could work to build a grassroots lobbying effort “to advocate, forcefully, for reparations for black Americans.” Students could be active in creating “the political conditions that will lead the U.S. Congress to enact a program of black reparations” (p. 269). Colleges and universities could mobilize “their considerable resources to compensate for the harms” of slavery and racial injustice through a national program of reparations (p. 270).

The text of H.R.40, as currently written, calls for “commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.” It repeatedly mentions educational disparities in explaining why calls for a commission to study the persistent harms of slavery is necessary. It describes economic and educational hardships suffered by Black Americans since 1865 as “debilitating” and notes that differences in educational funding have perpetuated this inequality. Further, it calls for the proposed commission to study how slavery directly benefited certain “societal institutions, both public and private, including higher education” and the ways in which contemporary “instructional resources” are used “to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent.”

In the aftermath of this course, a group of scholars and community activists came together to envision the building of a resource and networking hub to share resources, establish a repository of effective practices, create a collective network of students and campuses.