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Columbia University, College Park to develop plan for reparations

Posted on: January 16, 2025

By JOSEPHINE JOHNSON

Lakeland sign
Columbia The city has hired a Columbia University research team to make recommendations for reparations to Lakeland residents
PHOTO CREDIT Lillian Glaros

Columbia University will consult with College Park’s Restorative Justice Commission over the next six months to develop a plan to repair harm done to the Lakeland community in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The College Park City Council on Dec. 3 approved a contract of nearly $150,000 with Columbia University in New York for a research team that will recommend how the city can make reparations to the community, which was all but destroyed by urban renewal.

The research project began at the start of this year and will wrap up at the end of June with a presentation of the team’s recommendations to the city council and the community. 

In past projects involving Columbia’s African American Redress Network, reparations, or repairs, have included memorialization and commemoration, such as publishing researched history or placing markers indicating historical landmarks.

“I think it’s a really great start,” Maxine Gross, founding chair of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, said. “They’ll look into filling historical holes that they find, questions that the materials don’t answer and really look in some of those nooks and crannies for documentation that we just didn’t have access to.”

Lakeland, a once-thriving, mostly African American community in what is now College Park, started to disappear with urban renewal efforts in the 1970s and 1980s and the destruction of 104 of 150 homes. In 2020, the College Park City Council officially acknowledged and apologized for the city’s role in dismantling the community.

In 2022, the city formed the Restorative Justice Commission to work with current and past Lakeland residents to come up with plans for how to begin reparations. Now, according to city documents, College Park aims to establish an accurate historical record of Lakeland in a plan to embrace history and diversity.

Councilmember Susan Whitney (District 2) said she looks forward to the research report in June. 

“It is important to have a well-researched, well-documented, academically sound record of what happened in Lakeland and what parties were involved in that occurring, either by actions or inactions,” Whitney said. “There’s a lot of hurt and a lot of harm that came from that.”

The research team, with members from Columbia and the city’s Restorative Justice Commission, will determine appropriate reparations regarding economic stability, history of access to education and health care, and other effects of losing that neighborhood and social community. 

Appropriate repair differs by community, but the African American Redress Network has the experience to help determine what it means for the current and past Lakeland community, Gross said. 

Councilmember Llatetra Brown Esters (District 2) said while it is impossible to completely restore the community when so much was lost, the city intends to fulfill its promise to commit to restorative justice. 

“It is important that all people who live within this community feel like they matter and that they’re important, and when something so challenging and negatively impacting occurs, for the city to be able to acknowledge it,” Esters said. “It’s not enough to give things lip service. You have to follow it with action.”

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