Editor’s Note: The reflections below come from my personal experience as a member of the Greenbelt Reparations Commission, created after a 2021 citizen referendum directing the City Council to form a 21-person body to “review, discuss, and make recommendations related to reparations for African-American and Native American residents of Greenbelt.” These views are mine alone and do not represent the Commission.
Gratitude in an Imperfect Democracy
Earlier this month, the Greenbelt Reparations Commission held a town hall to share what we’ve been learning and to hear from neighbors about reparations. As Thanksgiving approached, I felt grateful for our imperfect democracy — grateful that, despite setbacks and resistance, we still have tools to learn from our history, repair harm, and share power and wealth more equitably.
Yet that openness to truth-telling is increasingly under attack. Across the country, leaders are renaming, restricting or dismantling DEI efforts. School boards and museums face pressure to soften or silence the realities of slavery, Indigenous genocide and other foundational harms. When the truth becomes taboo, the possibility of making amends shrinks with it.
Some argue that reparations are unnecessary or “not the right time.” I hear the old civil rights refrain: If not now, when?
The town hall deepened my understanding of the urgency of this work and reminded me that racial equity requires steady, ongoing commitment, not occasional bursts of attention.
A Renewed Commitment After George Floyd
My decision to join the Commission grew out of a promise I made to myself after George Floyd’s murder. Over my career, I engaged in racial justice efforts in waves: active for a time, then drifting away. But witnessing Floyd’s killing made something painfully clear: unless White people show up consistently, shoulder-to-shoulder with African-American communities, progress will remain fragile and uneven. Today’s political climate only reinforces that truth.
Like many people in 12-step recovery, I’ve learned to face truths I once avoided. This reparations work has required a similar honesty: learning history I was never taught, recognizing harms I minimized or didn’t notice, and understanding that repair is not about guilt but responsibility. Naming harms endured by African-American and Indigenous communities does not deny the suffering of others. It simply acknowledges the central role these two histories play in America’s inequities, and in any path toward healing.
A Town Hall of Courage and Honesty
What struck me most at our town hall was the courage of those who showed up. The event’s title, “The Story of Greenbelt: A Place of Contradictions,” signaled a new willingness to publicly confront harder truths.
For many residents, that title is uncomfortable. Greenbelt is rightly proud of its New Deal origins and cooperative spirit. Many of us love living here. But for residents outside the largely White center-city area, the lived experience can be more complicated, and those complications have not always been acknowledged.
As I listened to presentations about harms experienced by African-Americans and the Piscataway Indian Nation, I realized how little I understood before joining the Commission two and a half years ago. I admired Greenbelt’s walkability, amenities, and progressive reputation. At the same time, I felt frustrated, even puzzled, by how racially and physically segregated the city remains, and how difficult it is to bring residents from different neighborhoods together.
A few years ago, I helped organize an initiative called Connecting Across Greenbelt, aiming to build relationships across communities. While we saw small successes, it always felt like swimming against a strong current. Back then, I had little appreciation of what that current really was.
What History Revealed
Working with 20 other residents on the Commission and studying Greenbelt’s past widened my view. It helped me see why trust across our communities has been so difficult to build.
Here is the short version:
- The Piscataway Indian Nation are the original inhabitants of this land. Their land was taken; their communities were displaced, decimated, and rendered nearly invisible in public memory.
- Greenbelt was founded as a Whites-only New Deal project. African-Americans who lived nearby were barred from applying.
- Black workers helped build the town and were required to leave by sundown.
- The original rental units in center city which became a 1600 unit cooperative remained overwhelmingly White well into the 1980s and remains majority White today.
- Newer Greenbelt neighborhoods, built through private development from the 1970s to the early 2000s, shifted from mostly White to largely African-American and Hispanic, a pattern that continues today.
- Prince George’s County, where Greenbelt sits, transitioned from a mostly White suburb to a majority Black community during the same period.
Seeing these dynamics together makes it easier to understand why Greenbelt feels both connected and fractured, proud of its cooperative roots yet still shaped by racial inequity.
The Ongoing Work of Repair
Understanding these contradictions isn’t quick work. And like recovery, it’s never “done.” It asks for honesty, humility, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. But it also opens the door to healing.
In future posts, I’ll share more of what I’m learning from my perspective as an older White resident and share other perspectives about how historic segregation shaped civic leadership, how power and resources are distributed, how transportation, housing, policing, and schools reflect older decisions, and how all of this affects our ability to come together as one Greenbelt.
For now, I’m grateful for residents who show up, speak truth, ask hard questions, and imagine repair. Gratitude, after all, isn’t passive. It invites us into action. And reparations, like recovery, begin with telling the truth.
We can live in Spain BECAUSE of reparations…..Renee’s mom escaped Nazi Germany in 1937 when her grandmom used an uncle’s money from the Puzzle King (a book too), the inventor of the jigsaw puzzle, to pay for visas and passage to America for approximately 100 family members from 1935 to 1938 to escape. How did she know what was coming is beyond my comprehension…..I’ve tried to imagine her sitting at dozens of family households’ dining room tables, cajoling them to flee….. It’s one of the major reasons we fled the US so quickly. Her family history was clear – Get out when in doubt
So Renee and now our kids and grandchild is becoming German through reparations. Allowing us to live in anywhere in the EU.
Folks need to understand it’s not just money but actions by a government and people to recognize, atone, and make amends as best they can for the horrors of the past. In the USA we have yet to begin that national conversation. In fact, we are in retrograde – Whites are frankly terrified by what it means to confront our horrifically violent past. Many are direct descendants of civil rights abusers and owners of others. They don’t want to discuss much less take action on reparations as Spain and Germany have (Spain allows for Spanish citizenship in two years for those from formally colonized countries like El Salvador and Colombia
Thanks for sharing
Thanks Greg, what an amazing story of courage and eventually justice. Justice is not given freely. We need to satnd up for it and claim it as a sacred value. Thanks for sharing with Critical Conversations readers Renee’s expereince and your experience in Spain. Be well.
How did Spain and Germany structure reparations? Our son was born in Colombia–we adopted him in 2006, and I am aware that two years in Spain would give him citizenship. He has just completed two years living in the Netherlands–had we known about Spanish citizenship we would have urged him to go to Spain. He is now off to Malta with a visa–perhaps he can make his way to Spain in the future. I assume then that your wife, children,etc. gain German citizenship as reparation for the work of the Nazis during the WWII era. That makes sense–the victim or descendant of the victim can be given something she or he would have enjoyed absent the national wrong. I think we have a bigger challenge in the US though. How would we structure a program to put deserving persons in the place where they would have been absent discrimination and mistreatment? And how would it be funded? Maybe government bonds or the like would do the trick. The responsibility for reparation must come from the public, not from individuals who may never have knowingly done anything discriminatory. However, our states, counties, cities, etc. clearly acted and benefitted from discrimination so as a body we can and should seek to make it right.
Thanks Ken for thinking about Greg’s post and sharing your experience. Indeed there is a long-term and complex road ahead. All roads begin somewhere. This one has history and we are needing to discern the next legs to build. Happy holidays!
Thank you for sharing this window into the complex local experience, Tom. We need to hear these stories and keep sharing…to keep the work alive in this regressive time….
Thanks Shirin, I am concerned that this initiatve got started in a unique window here after George Flyd’s murder whne a young African-American was elected Mayor the first time he ran. He led the charge for reparations. There continue to be new initiatives around the country. Like a lot fo things, it’s blue and red. And it is important to advancing awareness of harms done and the need for acknowedgement and amends. Thanks for affirming this need.
Thanks for the information and insights from this post, Tom.
My first job after college was at the PG County Housing Authority, where at least half the staff were African American – a new experience in my life. My work with the new construction division exposed me to several majority minority neighborhoods – quite different than the UM College Park campus and nearby neighborhoods where students rented.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about the work of the Committee. Thank you!
Thanks Pat, living in Prince Geoeges County is an interesting learning expereince. Not Baltimore, not MOntgomery or Howard County, a distinct place with a distinct history. And so much of the history is about racial transitions and includes much of the history the current federal administration wants to make go away. Thanks for your interest.
Hi Tom — Your story of Greenbelt is so familiar and it is a story our current administration would prefer it not be told. The suppression of history is the beginning of the elimination of populations we would rather not exist. The history of how we replaced indigenous peoples, Black people and their history coming from slavery that lasted over 20 years and then continued through Jim Crow and restrictive covenants. Black people built our country, farmed our fields, took care of our children, cleaned our homes, and fought in our wars, but we didn’t want them to live next door to us. And although we did away with redlining, we continued the practice of Black exclusion from our neighborhoods through real estate agents and bankers steering them away from these neighborhoods.
The Trump administration claims that DEI is discriminatory against white people and gives Blacks an advantage. Wow! Tell this story to any Black person! I wonder how they feel advantaged.
Thanks Bob for wegihing in on the atrocities happening all around us every day. And they aren’t new! That is the sad thing. So many of us white folks think racism is behind us. Lots more to do. Thanks for your life-time work for justice.