Wofford College and the wider Spartanburg community are collaborating to develop research-informed plans for racial reparations solutions. The project’s community-campus inclusive research teams are focused on historic and ongoing harms against descendants of enslaved African persons and their communities. Specifically, the team at Wofford College will examine what has been lost as a result of centuries of enslavement, campaigns of displacement, destruction of neighborhoods and cultural/historical sites, systemic barriers to wealth, acts of terrorism, and systemic and structural racism. In addition to acknowledging what has been lost, this collaborative effort will begin the work of transforming Spartanburg’s historical narrative to reflect Black citizens’ experiences more accurately and to recognize their heretofore unacknowledged contributions to Spartanburg.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $5M grant to the Center for Social Solutions (CSS) and nine institutional partners as part of the Foundation’s ‘Just Futures’ initiative. Crafting Democratic Futures: Situating Colleges and Universities in Community-based Reparations Solutions, emerges from the Center’s focus on slavery and its aftermath and is informed by three generations of humanistic scholarship and what that scholarship suggests for all seeking just futures.

The Crafting Democratic Futures (CDF) Project is a three-year initiative that will bring together colleges and universities around the country with communities to develop suggestions for racial reparations solutions.