BOSTON — The Tufts historian Mayor Michelle Wu's Boston hired with taxpayer money to co-write the city's reparations report is a scholarly pariah. Her signature book has been yanked from print by its publisher over "multiple errors of fact." Her university placed her on leave. And Boston's long-promised reparations report — which she was hired to help deliver — has just missed yet another deadline.

Kerri K. Greenidge, formerly a tenured associate professor at Tufts, was tapped by Boston in 2024 as one lead of two research teams paid a total of $500,000 in city taxpayer money to write the definitive academic study of Massachusetts's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade from 1620 through 1940 — the foundational document supporters have long described as the eventual case for cash reparations to descendants of the enslaved in Boston. Greenidge's Tufts team drew the earlier era. A Northeastern University team led by historian Margaret Burnham took the modern period.

That $500,000 in research contracts is only one line of the Reparations Task Force budget. The task force has also carried a recurring annual operational and community-grants line — Mayor Wu's proposed FY27 budget cuts about $357,000 from it as the research phase concludes, meaning it has been running with at least that much every year since fiscal 2024. Reparations activists in May protested those cuts and demanded the city allocate no less than $2 million to the effort. Cumulatively, Boston taxpayers have already spent well over a million dollars on the task force since its 2022 establishment — and activists are pushing for millions more.

The trouble started three years ago with The Grimkes, Greenidge's 2022 book on a South Carolina slaveholding family that also produced prominent abolitionists. A formal complaint about the book's scholarship arrived at Tufts in late 2022. The university's own external peer reviewers came back with a verdict: the book contained "multiple errors of fact and citation." Reviewer Myra Glenn wrote that it "lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims" and is "riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes." In October 2025, Tufts placed Greenidge on leave. She no longer works there. Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, pulled the book from its website in July 2026 — after the New York Times exposed the extent of the findings.

For nearly two years — from Boston's 2024 hire through Tufts placing her on leave in October 2025 — Boston officials kept paying Greenidge while her own university was formally reviewing her scholarship. Neither the peer review's findings nor her October 2025 leave from Tufts interrupted the arrangement. Nobody at City Hall, apparently, thought to check in on the woman being paid to co-author the city's most politically sensitive report of the decade.

Greenidge herself is defiant. She told the Times there may have been "some incorrect citations" in her book. But the substance of the finding — the peer review, the missing endnotes, the withdrawn book — was not really about her scholarship at all, she argued. It was, in her words, "an attack on Black women in academics." She alleged racial bias in the panel that reviewed her work.

The report Boston paid $500,000 to produce has now missed three years of deadlines under two mayors. Wu's City Hall will not say whether Greenidge — still on leave, still discredited — will be replaced. Or when, or whether, the report will ever ship.