Mary Frances Berry, an international civil rights activist, and Hilary Robertson-Hickling, a scholar of the Caribbean diaspora, gave a virtual talk about reparations and reconciliation at Binghamton University via Zoom on Thursday.

The event, titled “The 3 Rs: The Road to Reparations and Reconciliation,” was hosted by the BU Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity as part of an ongoing conversation the University is having about truth and reconciliation. This includes the Tubman Center’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has been looking at issues of race on BU’s campus both in the present and the past by listening to those whose voices have gone unheard. Berry was the former chairperson of the United States Civil Rights Commission, and Robertson-Hickling is a senior lecturer of human resource management at the Mona School of Business and Management at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and an author who has written over 20 scholarly journals about topics such as migration and its impact on mental health. The event had 12 co-sponsors, including the BU President’s Office and the Multicultural Resource Center. The discussion was the inaugural webinar of “The 3 Rs” series from the Tubman Center and will feature more speakers in the future, such as Calvin Mackie, who will be speaking on April 14.

Anne Bailey, director of the Tubman Center and professor of history at BU, hoped that this event and others will help educate the BU community on issues such as reparations and begin discussions about what the University can and should do to begin to reconcile racial issues.

“As part of the truth and reconciliation process, we want to start a conversation,” Bailey said. “We want to think global but start local. We have people like [Berry], an internationally known civil rights icon, to bring that global perspective, but we also have [Robertson-Hickling] who helps us think globally as well. She is a Caribbean scholar who is very dedicated to issues of reparations.”

At the discussion, both Robertson-Hickling and Berry spoke about reparations and answered audience questions about issues such as restorative justice, a system of criminal justice that focuses on rehabilitation through reconciliation with victims and the community and colonialism.

Robertson-Hickling teaches behavioral sciences and general management and has written about the Caribbean diaspora and its impacts on mental health. Her talk, titled “Repairers of the Breach From the Personal to the National,” discussed the impact that issues of racism can have on an individual, stressed the importance of reparations and implored young people to find solutions to these issues.

“Part of the challenge we have is that we have to be able to admit that a wrong has been done,” Robertson-Hickling said. “We’re not saying that people are going to be taking responsibility for what their great-grandparents did, but we are also saying that if you’re a beneficiary [of their actions] you have to acknowledge it.”

Berry, an internationally known civil rights activist and one of the founders of the Free South Africa Movement, a group credited with helping end apartheid, and former chairperson of the United States Civil Rights Commission over the course of four presidential administrations, spoke after Robertson-Hickling and gave a talk called, “Is There a Case for African American Reparations?”

This comes as the House Judiciary Committee plans to vote on House Resolution (H.R.) 40 within the next week. H.R. 40 seeks to create a commission that will look at the effect of slavery and develop reparations proposals. The bill has been introduced numerous times during its 30-year history, but Berry believes that it has a chance of being seriously considered and passed this time.

“If we kept the momentum up, we might be able to get a bill passed with H.R. 40, which has been reintroduced again in the Congress of the United States,” Berry said. “But there’s a problem, though. If we put too much emphasis on the political process and say that voting will lead us to ‘the promised land’ and don’t continue the counter-protests that we have had, we might not be able to win on these issues.”

Berry believes that monetary reparations should be given to descendants of former slaves in the United States because of the long-term harm that slavery has caused over generations.

“The short answer is reparations are owed because of the continuing harm done to slave descendants, but not just because they’re slave descendants,” Berry said. “But because of the manifestations of continuing denial of potential and a continuing abuse that has been done. That is the reason why. But who should give reparations and why? Anyone who benefited from that harm.”

Richard Chow, a senior majoring in business administration, attended the talk. Chow spoke in favor of reparations, stating that only by talking to each other and listening to others will a more inclusive environment be created.

“The case for reparations does not exclude the struggles and difficulties that people are facing nowadays,” Chow wrote in an email. “It speaks upon the historical injustices of slavery, redlining and discrimination. It’s about righting a wrong that caused an entire race of Americans to be at a socioeconomic disadvantage for hundreds of years. In fact, the effects of slavery and Jim Crow can still be felt today.”

Baaba Annan, a first-year graduate student studying human rights, said she was happy to see such a big turnout for the event.

“I believe it shows how much support we have for the work the [Tubman Center] is doing on campus,” Annan wrote in an email. “I hope people were able to take away that action has an immense impact on healing. There can be no true reconciliation without actually putting in the work to improve people’s experience. That is what we are implementing with our panels. We are listening to what people say and are turning those words into actionable items for the University to commit to. I want everyone to know that the work is going to take continuous time and effort. [Berry] said it so well, we have to keep fighting and never stop.”