Some want apology, reparations from city for racial injustices
Community activists want an official apology and a reparations package from the city of Pittsburgh — including land and cash — to make up for lost time, wealth and opportunity stolen by past and current racial injustices.
Speakers at a public hearing Wednesday in City Council chambers recounted income, health and educational outcome disparities from neighborhood-to-neighborhood within city limits to say reparations are “due” to Pittsburgh’s black residents.
“We want to push this in a more serious way,” said Khalid Raheem, of Manchester, who petitioned for Wednesday’s public hearing, where nearly a dozen attended and held signs. Five delivered testimony.
“Oftentimes we don’t think of southwestern Pennsylvania as having strong ties to really structural, organized institutions of Jim Crow, structural institutions of white supremacy and economic injustices and exploitation of black people,” Mr. Raheem said, listing local institutions’ connections to slavery, pay disparities at large local companies throughout the early 1900s and the current state of segregated and
low-income neighborhoods within the city.
“There’s so much a deep-rooted history, economic history, social history, political history that ties slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration ... police brutality — and we can go on and on — into the conditions that contemporary black people have to deal with,” he said. “... So we demand reparations.”
Several speakers cited the city’s Gender Equity Commission report released last month that found that quality of life — in matters of health, infant mortality, job opportunities, discipline in schools, among other categories — for Pittsburgh’s black population scores lower than in other comparable cities.
Others focused on “the wealth gap.”
“Particularly in my neighborhood, which is basically being gentrified, or what is sometimes called urban renewal, which tends to turn out to be black removal ... it is a part of the crisis,” said Yusef Ali, 75, of Point Breeze. “The only way it can be dealt with effectively is to implement a policy that deals with repair, deals with some kinds of restitution.”
Still others brought up personal stories, including Jay Walker, of Shadyside, who described his father’s move from the South to Harlem and eventual service in the military.
“He lacked the privilege to dodge the draft and was pulled into the Vietnam War, where he was permanently traumatized. The war eventually killed him thanks to the Agent Orange sprayed by our own military,” said Mr. Walker, 29, and head of the Allegheny County Green Party. “This collective trauma has had major ripple effects on my entire family.”
Council President Bruce Kraus, and members Theresa Kail-Smith, Ricky Burgess, Darlene Harris and Deb Gross attended.
“This is not the end of this conversation,” Mr. Burgess said. “I’ve been very moved by it.”
Ms. Gross, who sits on the city’s Gender Equity Commision, said the community is “really trying to find another way to not just have another report sitting on the shelf ... but to translate it into action.”
Council will be taking the next month to “look into what has been done in other cities and what can be applied here,” said Kellie Ware-Seaborn, council’s equity, diversity and inclusion policy analyst.
Mr. Raheem said he is also planning to fight for reparations at the county and state level.