At a recent meeting, historians and an archaeologist who have examined Boston's history with slavery discussed possible paths forward. While the task force will still use a second report covering the period from 1940 onward, members said the era from 1630 until Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783 is essential to any reparations work.

Task force Chairman Joseph Feaster said the group will not yet make public a Northeastern University study. "Every single person has said that if you're going to do reparations for slavery, you cannot not include the period in which slavery happened," he said.

Historians who have studied that period suggested several options, including producing a new report to replace the Tufts one. Caitlin DeAngelis, a historian who has worked on three similar projects in recent years, proposed convening a conference of historians who have studied slavery in and around Boston. She noted that many churches, schools, and museums are working in their own archives, but there is little communication among them.

"There's so many projects and so much expertise in the community. But there's not a lot of talking to each other," DeAngelis said. She suggested that historians, people who have researched their own family histories, and professors could participate in panel discussions and then produce a report from the conference. "It's so hard to get someone who would be able to be an expert on all of those things, but you have all these experts," she said. "You can bring them together."

Archaeologist India Glenn said she is working to map where 2,300 people enslaved in colonial Boston lived. Working for the task force in 2025, she plotted 92 of the 1,040 properties of slave owners in Boston on an interactive map. Since then, she has assembled a team of researchers, unearthed the deeds of 356 properties belonging to enslavers, and produced profiles on them.

"By providing tangible, publicly available information, that allows people to connect with the city they walk through every day, with the hands that worked to create it," Glenn told the task force. "Our team's final goal is to have this research one day integrated into the Boston Public Schools curriculum."

Glenn argued that the project should aim to set the historical record straight in a city where historians have long stressed the population's abolitionist leanings while downplaying its role in slavery. "Right now, we are at a crossroads," she said. "We can either choose to continue Black Boston's legacy of progress and innovation, or fall into the trap of failing to take every opportunity we are presented with to ensure that our ancestors and their descendants are included in our history books." She added: "If we claim to care about reparations, rigorous research must be completed, and Glenn archaeology is capable, prepared, and eager to complete mapping slavery so that reparations can become a reality for Boston."

The English began importing enslaved Africans and enslaving Native Americans in Boston in the 1630s, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded. Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1783, the year the Revolutionary War ended with the Treaty of Paris. Slavery was then outlawed in Boston and in the towns that Boston later annexed: Roxbury, Dorchester, East Boston, Charlestown, Brighton, and Hyde Park. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, however, many Boston merchants, mill owners, and businessmen continued to profit from slavery.

The task force, founded in 2022, has wrestled with the thorny question of who should receive reparations. Some members, including Nyheim Way, president of the Sons and Daughters of Freedman, advocate for reparations to be limited to African Americans descended from those enslaved in the United States. "I want to be clear that this is not a history project," Way said. "It is a project that requires the history. And we need the history to quantify the harms so that this task force can submit the proper recommendations to the City of Boston to remedy the American Freeman families. Their history is the foundation. But the measurement is the purpose."

The Liberian-born historian George Walters-Sleyon alluded to the controversy in his opening remarks to the task force last week. "Now first of all, let me just say this: My presence here has sort of raised some kind of hullabaloo," he said.

The debate over how to document slavery's earliest era in Boston comes as the task force seeks to quantify the harms inflicted on Black people during and after slavery. The city's decision to drop the Tufts study has left a gap in the historical record that members agree must be filled for reparations to proceed.