In our next Catalyst Series for Social Justice, the Graduate School of Social Work will host Dr. David Ragland, co-founder and co-executive director of the Truth Telling Project and the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. Dr. Ragland will explore issues regarding progressive politics, reparations, and the systemic changes needed to enact them in the United States and the world at large. His conversation will provide a deep dive into reparations as a spiritual and healing practice that responds to gross abuses against human rights. In this historical moment, the entire nation and world is grappling with what accountability looks like, the urgent need to support those to tell their truths and repair the harm the truth reveals. Dr. Ragland will discuss H.R. 40 and its path to restorative justice, and the work to create a culture of reparations.

Bio:
Dr. David Ragland is one of the co-founders and co-executive director of the Truth Telling Project and the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. He recently published a series on reparations in Yes Magazine and has taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute. David has also taught at Bucknell University, Juniata College, and Southern Illinois University. David’s areas of activism and research focus on moral injuries and the possibilities of transforming violence and intergenerational trauma against vulnerable populations in the US, envisioning and working for a world with reduced violence on all levels, and the intersections of critical race issues, decoloniality, restorative justice, peace education, and Africana and Existentialist philosophies.

As an activist, educator, and scholar, David’s work has been rooted in his home community near Ferguson, Missouri. His analysis is drawn from the radical teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly King’s description of the “triplet evils of racism, militarism, and materialism” as an ever-present part of American life.

Dr. Ragland focuses on how our society conceives justice as retributive and proposes a shift toward restorative justice to transform communities and criminal justice systems. He weaves his personal experience of growing up in segregated St. Louis with the history of that city and nearby Ferguson, explaining how Ferguson became the new center of American racism and Black resistance. In the early days of the Ferguson Uprising, David cofounded the Truth Telling Project so that marginalized voices could be heard and move society to lay a groundwork for healing, reconciliation and social transformation.

Georgetown University’s AdvocacyLabs included Dr. Ragland’s research as part of the “most important research on advocacy” in the last forty years. David was recently inducted into Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. He served as the Senior Bayard Rustin Fellow at Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and as a board member for the Peace and Justice Studies Association