The African American Redress Network hosted two town halls in Lakeland this week to further its work documenting the community’s history and making recommendations to create a better future for residents.
Dozens of Lakelanders, Howard University students, University of Maryland representatives and College Park council members gathered inside the Embry AME Church Wednesday night to discuss their visions for the future of Lakeland, a historically Black community in College Park.
The City of College Park hired the network, which is operated by Columbia University and Howard University, to provide an official record of historic damages to the Lakeland community, understand the impact of those harms and present their findings for future actions to the city council.
“This step will be … beneficial in getting us that recognition of beyond ourselves and helping others to appreciate what has happened and what the future of Lakeland could be,” said Robert Thurston, president of the Lakeland Civic Association and a member of the city’s Restorative Justice Commission.
Lakeland was decimated by an urban renewal movement in the second half of the 20th century. This movement left two-thirds of the community displaced.
[Haunted by Lakeland’s past, Maxine Gross is working to preserve her community’s history]
Unlike other researchers and community groups that have investigated what happened to the Lakeland community, the African American Redress Network’s project will be an official city-funded record.
Researchers hope to collect the necessary information to build the case for reparations or other restorative justice initiatives for Lakeland residents, according to Charkera Ervin, a legal and policy director for the African American Redress Network.
Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, which is working on the Lakeland project, was successful in supporting the constitutionality of reparations in Evanston, Illinois — the first city in the country to offer reparation payments.
“A community group may want to capture the stories, but they may not necessarily answer the questions we believe that we need answered in order to take certain action,” Ervin said.
Ervin said past projects documenting Lakeland have set the African American Redress Network up for success, including one that sent researchers about 700 documents.
The town hall was led by Justin Hansford, a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent and the executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University.
Thurston said he is excited about the possibilities and opportunities of documenting sentiments directly from the community members.
“I do believe that the testimonies of the peoples are what actually gets the attention,” Thurston said. “This is a good step.”
[Special election for District 3 College Park City Council member set for March 11]
A key part of Wednesday’s discussion was education. Multiple attendees said there is little encouragement from local teachers to their students to attend this university.
Residents, including Delphine Gross, also expressed frustration with outsiders buying homes in the neighborhood to renovate them for students, making them unavailable for families in the community.
The African American Redress Network’s report about Lakeland is expected to be completed by the end of this summer, Ervin said.
“Not only are we looking at this very small community in this one place and what repair might look like for them, but also feeding into an international conversation about the state of affairs with people of African descent and looking at how their situation as a whole could be improved,” said Maxine Gross, chair of the Restorative Justice Commission.
Maxine Gross, a fifth-generation Lakelander who also runs the Lakeland Community Heritage Project, said she hopes this is not just a conversation within the city, but a broader conversation about how people treat one another.
Hansford said during the town hall that there will be an “inevitable win” at the end of the Restorative Justice Commission’s work.
