CA Calls For Black Reparations: Report Details Legacy Of Oppression

CALIFORNIA — The Golden State on Wednesday published a groundbreaking study detailing harm against the Black community in California.

The state Department of Justice released the 500-page report authored by a first-in-the-nation California task force on reparations for African Americans. It marked the halfway point in the two-year task force's work.

"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 U.S. to educate their communities," task force Chair Kamilah Moore said, adding that the report also highlighted "contributions of the African American community and how they made the United States what it is despite ongoing oppression and degradation."

The report chronicled a California history in which African Americans faced threats of violence when they tried to vote, to swim in public schools or to assert their rights in courts or legislation.

African Americans now make up nearly 6 percent of California's population but are overrepresented in jails and prisons. They accounted for nearly 9 percent of people living below the poverty level and made up 30 percent of people experiencing homelessness in 2019, according to state figures.

Anti-Black violence peaked in the 1940s, a time when Black Californians tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods, according to the report.

"Today, police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California in the same manner as they do in the rest of the country," researchers said in the report.

The report estimated that up to 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California in 1852 and made the case that there has been a negative trickle-down effect on California's Black community in the modern day.

"These harms have compounded over generations, resulting in an enormous wealth gap that is the same today as it had been two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964," researchers said.

The study didn't outline a specific financial plan but recommended that lawmakers compensate those who were forced out of their homes for construction projects such as parks and highways and general renewal, as happened to San Francisco's historically Black and once-thriving Fillmore neighborhood.

"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 task force's vice chair and pastor of Third Baptist Church in the Fillmore district.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation creating the task force in 2020, making California the only state to move ahead with a study and plan. Cities and universities took up the cause, with the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, becoming the first U.S. city to make reparations available to Black residents last year.

The California task force voted in March to limit reparations to descendants, overruling reparations advocates who wanted to expand compensation to all Black people in the U.S.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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