‘Atrocities in every sector’: California’s reparations panel details discrimination
California’s taskforce on reparations for Black Americans has released an exhaustive report detailing 170 years of state-sanctioned discrimination through housing policies, political disenfranchisement and environmental injustice.
The 500-page report, issued by the first-in-the-nation reparations committee, extensively describes “segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect” inflicted on Black people nationally, and in California – recounting mistreatment since the state’s founding in 1850. The report concludes that “atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations, resulting in the current wealth gap between Black and white Americans”.
The taskforce recommends the creation of a special office to help the descendants of enslaved Black people document their eligibility for financial restitution, and details how California can reform its educational, environmental, housing, policing and voting policies to stop perpetuating harms.
A second report, due to lawmakers next year, will explain what a reparations plan will entail, and what it will cost.
The report will be the first government-commissioned study on harms against the Black community since the 1968 Kerner commission report ordered by President Lyndon Johnson, said Kamilah Moore, the taskforce chair.
“I hope that this report is used not only as an educational tool, but an organizing tool for people not only in California but across the US to educate their communities,” she said, adding that the report also highlights “contributions of the African American community and how they made the United States what it is despite ongoing oppression and degradation”.
Even though California joined the United States as a free state, the report details how state policies inflicted racial violence and enforced a fugitive slave law that was harsher than the federal law. The Ku Klux Klan flourished in California with members holding positions in law enforcement and city government.
State housing policies and zoning ordinances restricted where Black Californians could live. The report explains how San Francisco destroyed the Fillmore, a prominent Black neighborhood, in the name of urban renewal, shuttering 883 businesses, displacing 4,729 households and destroying 2,500 Victorian homes.
“Other groups that have suffered exclusion, oppression and downright destruction of human existence have received reparations, and we should have no less,” said the Rev Amos Brown, the committee’s vice-chair and pastor of Third Baptist church in the Fillmore district.
Describing decades of environmental injustice, the report also points out that the Central Valley town of Lanare, which was settled by Black families during the Dust Bowl era, lacked running water until the 1970s. Many residents there still lack access to clean drinking water amid the state’s worsening drought.
African Americans make up nearly 6% of California’s population yet they are overrepresented in jails and prisons. They account for nearly 9% of people living below the poverty level and made up 30% of people experiencing homelessness in 2019, according to state figures.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation creating
the taskforce in 2020, making California the only state to move ahead with a study and plan. Cities and universities are taking up the cause with the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, becoming the first US city to make reparations available to Black residents last year.
The taskforce voted in March to limit reparations to descendants, overruling reparations advocates who want to expand compensation to all Black people in the US. Moore said that a state Office of African American or American
Freedmen Affairs could help African American residents file claims and trace their lineage to prove eligibility for individual restitution.