California to study slavery reparations
Nine-member task force launches to examine impact of slavery, recommend proposals
In a historic first, a new task force in California on Tuesday took a first step toward proposing reparations for Black residents in a bid to address the injustice of slavery and its lingering effects in everything from the criminal justice system to housing.
The effort was created as part of a bill signed into law last year by Gov. Gavin Newsom and authored by then-lawmaker Shirley Weber, now California’s first Black secretary of state. It is the first time a state has formally undertaken a sweeping look at slavery and its impact on modern African American life, in what advocates hope will become a road map for a national approach to reparations.
“If not us, then who?” Weber, the daughter of sharecroppers who fled the South because of racism, said at the outset of the task force’s inaugural meeting, which was held virtually.
The task force’s nine members, led by Los Angeles transactional attorney and reparations scholar Kamilah Moore with assistance from vice chair Amos Brown, the longtime pastor of the Third
Baptist Church of San Francisco, will recommend not only reparations proposals but ways to educate the state’s residents about their findings.
It is not yet clear what form their proposal might take or which residents would be eligible, but it could include everything from cash payments to land to scholarships. The task force must publish a report by next June with initial findings, to be followed by a report with recommendations the following year.
Newsom and leaders of the state Senate and Assembly chose the members of the task force, a mix of civil rights activists, lawyers, lawmakers and others that includes UC Berkeley professor Jovan Scott Lewis and civil rights attorney Lisa Holder. Eight of the nine members are Black. The ninth is Don Tamaki, an attorney who helped Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II secure redress.
While Tuesday’s inaugural meeting was largely procedural, it provided a preview of some of the tensions the historic debate is likely to encounter: While some members wanted to speed up the process and move quickly from studying the impact of slavery to exploring how reparations should look, others said that the group needs to spend time making its case and getting buy-in from residents across the state.
“Look, a lot of people didn’t believe police shoot Black people in the back,” said Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a member of the task force and a lawmaker from South Los Angeles, “until they saw the visual.”
But Brown, a civil rights advocate for decades, said he was concerned the group could get bogged down in “a paralysis of analysis.”
“My hope is that we will be living examples of Nike’s slogan: Just do it,” the pastor said.
Reparations are not new. The U.S. paid Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, and the government has paid victims of 9/11 and those suffering from illnesses related to the attack. Germany has paid billions of dollars to Holocaust victims. But so far, there has been no widespread effort to compensate African Americans, especially those who are descendants of people enslaved in the U.S.
Earlier this year, task force member and state Sen. Steven Bradford, who represents parts of Los Angeles County, introduced a bill that would enable the transfer of Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach back to descendants of a Black couple who developed it as a resort for African Americans but had it seized by the local government last century.
“There are hundreds if not thousands of examples” of such wrongdoing, Bradford said.
Attorney General Rob Bonta’s staff, along with Weber’s, will assist the task force in its work.
“Slavery is this country’s original sin,” Bonta said. “Its harms are felt every single day by Black Americans in the present.”
Those harms, he said, come in the form of unequal health outcomes, a fact laid painfully bare by the coronavirus pandemic. They are also visible in the fact that Black people are paid less for the same work, regardless of education levels, and put behind bars at disproportionate rates.
“We must move quickly,” Bonta said. “How much longer can we wait for justice?”