Binghamton University to host discussion on slavery reparations

The Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity at Binghamton University will host a discussion titled “The 3 Rs: The Road to Reparations and Reconciliation,” featuring Mary Frances Berry and Hilary Robertson Hickling, at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 8, via Zoom. This event is free and open to the public.

Since the summer of 2019, the United States has been in the midst of a national conversation about race and ethnicity. From both local and global perspectives, Berry and Hickling will present on the theme above. Berry’s discussion is titled “Is there a Case for Reparations for African Americans?” Dr. Hickling’s discussion is titled “Repairers of the Breach from the Personal to the National.”

Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She has had a distinguished career in public service. From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and from 1993-2004 served as chair. Between 1977 and 1980, Berry served as the assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). She has also served as provost of the University of Maryland and chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. In recognition of her scholarship and public service, Berry has received 35 honorary doctoral degrees, including from Binghamton University in 1999, and many awards, including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award.

Hickling is a senior lecturer in human resource management in the Mona School of Business and Management at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. She teaches organizational behaviour, organizational development, team building and management, and pastoral care and counselling She has studied at the University of the West Indies, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Birmingham, England, and has taken her concerns about migration and mental health into her research at home in the Caribbean and into the Caribbean Diaspora. She has published more than 20 articles in scholarly journals and several social scholarship articles in the popular press. Specializing in migration studies, she has authored the books White Squall on the Land: Narratives of Resilient Caribbean People, published by Hope Road Publishers, London, and That Time in Foreign, published by Hansib London. She has worked as a management consultant and a psychologist.

These conversations are part of Binghamton University’s ongoing commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation initiative sponsored by the Tubman Center.

Co-sponsors of this event at Binghamton University include:

● President’s Office
● Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science
● Provost’s Office
● University Libraries
● Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
● Department of History
● Department of Asian and Asian American Studies
● Harpur College of Arts and Sciences
● Convocations Committee
● Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention
● Binghamton University Alumni Association
● Department of Sociology

To register, go online.