HARVARD Kennedy School | Center for Public LEADERSHIP

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Research and Scholarship
February 16, 2022

This coming Friday, CPL faculty affiliates Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes will discuss their research findings on reparations for Black Americans in the JFK Jr. Forum.

FROM THE DIRECTORS' DESKS

I am overjoyed to be writing this month in collaboration with former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who, as Dean Elmendorf recently announced, is now a Harvard Kennedy School professor of practice and my partner in co-directing CPL. Deval has included his own message below. In future, we look forward to jointly raising up extraordinary work by members of our CPL community.

As many of you know, one of our extraordinary colleagues is Cornell William Brooks. Cornell explains to students in his Creating Justice in Real Time course at Harvard Kennedy School:

“The more we exercise moral leadership and moral authority, the more we expand our capacity for it in the future.”

Since he joined our community three years ago as a professor of practice and founder of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative—a think-and-do tank for social justice advocacy housed at Harvard Kennedy School—he’s been bringing our students to the front lines of policy analysis and design. Across the U.S., state and local governments are working to reimagine public safety, catalyze criminal justice reform, and secure voting rights for returning citizens—all with input from Trotter Collaborative students who are offering not only policy solutions, but strategies for successful fundraising, communications, and stakeholder management.

As one of its case studies, the Trotter Collaborative documented the widely acclaimed civil rights activism of former Hauser Leader Desmond Meade. Meade leads the Florida Rights Restoration Commission and is a national figure mobilizing political support to end the disenfranchisement of and discrimination against people with convictions.

See below for other inspiring examples of Cornell’s work, including an invitation to attend this Friday’s IOP Forum Event with Linda Bilmes on “Reparations for Black Americans: Radical or Routine?” and a link to their HKS PolicyCast episode previewing findings from their forthcoming report. You will also find a link to Deval’s Harris Lecture in the IOP Forum on "Leading Through Chaos and Anger" and profiles of health equity work by alumni of our CPL fellowship programs, Fatima Cody Stanford and Lauren Powell.

Please read, listen, and watch, and share in our sense of inspiration and motivation to advance the work of CPL.

In community,

Hannah Riley Bowles
Co-Director, Center for Public Leadership

Hannah hits the mark when she signs off above with “in community.” When I was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, where every kid was under the jurisdiction of every adult on the block, I learned that community is about seeing your stake in your neighbor’s dreams and struggles as well as your own. As imperfect as the times are, we need public leaders who elevate and model that sense of community, what I sometimes call “servant leaders.” What an important challenge CPL has taken on! I am looking forward to working alongside Hannah, and everyone at the Center and throughout the Kennedy School, to be the kind of servant leader at CPL that I want us to inspire in others.

Please introduce (and reintroduce) yourselves and otherwise be patient with me as I get my footing. Exciting times ahead.

In community,

Deval Patrick
Co-Director, Center for Public Leadership

Reexamining Reparations

In a forthcoming research paper, HKS faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes explore why the extensive U.S. system of restorative justice is so disconnected from the multi-faceted, intergenerational harms suffered by Black Americans.

Cataloging the harms suffered by Black Americans through the centuries from slavery itself through segregation, disenfranchisement, economic and educational discrimination, wealth inequality, and more, they found that no group was perhaps more deserving of being made whole. They also studied and cataloged a huge system of American restorative compensation that works every day to make people whole for harms they have suffered. What they didn’t find, however, was a connection between the two.

Learn more about this project by attending an upcoming Forum event this Friday, February 18; reading an in-depth feature on the paper on the HKS website; and listening to Profs. Brooks and Bilmes on the HKS PolicyCast.

Reparations for Black Americans: Radical or Routine?

Friday, February 18
4:00-5:00 PM

The United States government has a long history of providing compensation to Americans who have experienced harm. Why then are reparations to Black Americans for slavery-related and racial harms considered so controversial? In a groundbreaking study, Professor Linda J. Bilmes (AB '80 MBA '84) and Professor Cornell William Brooks present how government-provided reparations are the norm, and argue that the U.S government has both a fiscal and moral responsibility to compensate Black Americans for centuries of interlocking injustices.

A new HKS faculty study reimagines reparations using existing—and widely used—federal compensation mechanisms

In a webinar preview of their paper on restorative justice, Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Linda Bilmes and Cornell William Brooks examined the norms for compensation of harms which already exist in the United States and how harms against generations of African Americans fit into this model.

FROM THE DIRECTORS' DESKS

CPL RESEARCH RECAP

Reexamining Reparations

FACULTY COLLABORATORS

Cornell William Brooks

Linda Bilmes

ATTEND

Reparations for Black Americans: Radical or Routine?

READ

A new HKS faculty study reimagines reparations using existing—and widely used—federal compensation mechanisms

LISTEN

HKS PolicyCast: The United States pays reparations every day—just not to Black America

ON COALITION BUILDING FOR VOTING RIGHTS RESTORATION

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I learned to love. I learned to shed labels and become more personal. Proximity can change hearts and minds. We need to make other’s issues, our issues. Commitment to these issues transcends politics.

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES

Leading Through Chaos and Anger - The Seymour E. and Ruth B. Harris Lecture

ALUMNI IN ACTION: SPOTLIGHT ON HEALTH EQUITY