On June 1, 2022, the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans released its Interim Report providing an in-depth overview of the cumulative, cascading, and continuing harms inflicted on African Americans resulting from 246 years of enslavement, 90 years of Jim Crow, and decades more of systemic discrimination. The Interim Report includes a preliminary set of recommendations to the California Legislature. A final report is expected to be issued in 2023.
The Reparations Task Force is a first-in-the-nation effort by a state government to study slavery, its effects throughout American history, and the compounding harms that the United States and Californian governments have inflicted upon African Americans.
Download the full report and related material:
Full Interim Report
Executive Summary
Key Findings
Preliminary Recommendations
Summary of California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans
California Assembly Bill 3121. California Assembly Bill 3121 (AB 3121) (California Government Code Section 8301 et seq.) was enacted on September 30, 2020 and establishes a 9-Member the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
Purpose. The purpose of the Task Force is: (1) to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans; (2) to recommend appropriate ways to educate the California public of the task force’s findings; and (3) to recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Task Force’s findings.
Rationale for the Legislation. The institution of slavery is inextricably woven into the establishment, history, and prosperity of the United States. Constitutionally and statutorily sanctioned from 1619 to 1865, slavery deprived more than four million Africans and their descendants of life, liberty, citizenship, cultural heritage, and economic opportunity. Following the abolition of slavery, government entities at the federal, state, and local levels continued to perpetuate, condone, and often profit from practices that brutalized African Americans and excluded them from meaningful participation in society. This legacy of slavery and racial discrimination has resulted in debilitating economic, educational, and health hardships that are uniquely experienced by African Americans.
Deliverables: Task Force is legislatively required to issue a report in two parts:
- Interim Report (Part 1), released on June 1, 2022, a sweeping study of almost 500 pages, and compiling and synthesizing the latest scholarly work cataloguing the harm of 400 years of oppression, and drawing a through-line leading to current day consequences. The Interim Report has 13 chapters: documenting:
- The Institution of Slavery, commencing with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, with slavery and White supremacy as foundations for colonial America and the founding of the United States, to the Civil War, the undermining of Reconstruction, and reneging of reparations promises, and theft of land, wages, businesses, etc.;
- Exclusion of Blacks from political participation by violence, voter suppression through poll taxes, literacy, and other tactics, gerrymandering, etc.;
- Housing policies following the Civil War that for the next 130 years that caused cities to be racially segregated through violence, zoning, redlining, restrictive covenants, condemnation/eminent domain, freeway construction;
- Education—250 years of prohibiting literacy of the enslaved, followed by multiple strategies to limit or deny education, and segregate it, enforced by Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregated and unequal education to the present day; states’ denial of access to G.I. bill educational benefits; erasure of history and perpetuation of “Lost Cause” mythology;
- Racial Terror—slavery era was followed by 95 years of terrorism, lynching, mob violence, mass murder, vigilantism, police extra-judicial murders, as a form of social control and maintenance of the social order; rise of the KKK and White supremacist groups, spurring Great Migration from end of 1800’s to 1950’s; hate crimes today;
- Public Health and Mental Health—slavery established foundation for discriminatory healthcare system of today; medical experimentation treating Blacks as human guinea pigs “it was cheaper to use niggers than cats” Harry Bailey, neurosurgeon speech at Tulane Medical School (1960’s); eugenics, pseudo-science theories that persist today; Blacks sicker and die younger than Whites; life expectancies correlate with zip codes;
- Environment—harms caused by substandard housing and pollution in segregated neighborhoods; zoning and redlining which pushed polluting industries into Black neighborhoods; as of 1983, 3 out of 4 communities with heavy hazardous waste landfills were predominantly Black, and Blacks are 75% more likely to live near oil and gas facilities; exposure to traffic, lead, poor access to nutritious food; climate change-extreme weather disproportionately impacts Black communities;
- Justice System—Slave Codes, Black Codes, post-emancipation vagrancy laws criminalizing ordinary behavior (e.g. learning to read, making loud noises, smoking) essentially re-enslaving Blacks through convict leasing; modern-day “law and order”, “war on drugs”, “tough on crime,” “driving while Black”, policing policies resulting in mass incarceration; extra-judicial killings in encounters with law enforcement; school to prison pipeline, and conviction on records used to disqualify Blacks from employment, housing, etc.;
- Arts, Culture and Faith—religious institutions that profited from slavery and used religion to promote docility; the racist stereotyping, censorship, appropriation of art and culture, and exploitation of Blacks, from minstrelsy, to dehumanizing propaganda narratives (e.g. Birth of a Nation promoting the Lost Cause myth), to monuments honoring the Confederacy and White supremacists; exclusion and exploitation of Black musicians, artists, athletes, authors, banning of books such as the Color Purple; the confiscation of Black leisure venues such as Bruce’s Beach resort;
- Family—Decimation of the Black family, loss of identity, family separation, etc. resulting from slavery, post-emancipation re-enslavement of children through apprentice programs, Jim Crow, continuing disparities in opportunity, impact of criminal justice system, foster care to prison pipeline, etc.;
- Labor—Black Codes, before and after Civil War excluded Blacks from employment; post-Civil War re-enslavement by sharecropping and convict leasing re-supplied former slave-owners with labor; wage theft enforced by racial violence; Jim Crow restricted travel and employment; 19th century opportunities for Blacks in the North worse than in the South as White workers excluded and attacks Blacks, with Northern and Southern Whites gradually developing a consensus of exclusion; New Deal protections excluded Blacks (e.g. exclusion of agricultural and domestic services, jobs held overwhelmingly by Blacks, not covered by Fair Labor Standards Act or Social Security); rampant racism in unions; military service segregated and did not result in benefits (e.g. 98% of G.I. guaranteed housing loans, one of the nation’s most significant transfers of wealth, went to Whites—not surprising as these federal funds were administered by states); employment discrimination despite passage of civil rights laws; deindustrialization of cities; challenges to affirmative action in employment; cumulative result is widening wage gap;
- Wealth Accumulation and the Contemporary Racial Wealth Gap—Wealth—i.e. what you own minus liabilities—is key to economic security, racial wealth gap is increasing each year, following centuries of policies restricting Black Americans ability to build, maintain, and pass on wealth; in 2019, financial assets of White households were more than 9 times that of Black households; Blacks excluded from government sponsored wealth transfers such as Homestead Act of 1862, GI Bill, etc; and redlining denying Blacks access to federally insured FHA-backed loans; destruction of Black businesses by racial terror, segregation, urban renewal/redevelopment, and freeways; loan discrimination and restrictive covenants prevented Blacks from moving to suburbs; Great Recession cause decline of Black wealth by 53% between 2005 to 2019; intergenerational wealth transfers, the building blocks of wealth, are unlikely or small; pre-pandemic studies found that 58% of Blacks have almost no liquid assets.
- Significant Government Sponsored Report. The 1967-68 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission was an 11-member Presidential Commission established to investigate the causes of the urban uprisings of 1967. The report was released in 1968, blaming the riots on lack of economic opportunity, failed social service programs, police brutality, and racism, and warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” While the Kerner report discussed in about 40 pages the connection between the oppression of the past and its continuing consequences today, the Interim Report more deeply synthesize the recent research of scholars showing the widening racial wealth gap and other results of layer after layer of horrific anti-Black racism over a 400 year period.
- Part 2 of the report, to be released in June of 2023, will discuss definition of reparations, examples of reparations domestically and internationally, responsibility to pay reparations (e.g. federal government and state of California); eligibility, form of reparations, and how reparations might be calculated. As of February, 2022, the Task Force is commencing discussion on Part 2 of the report.
Progress as of July, 2022:
- 9 public hearings have been convened since June of 2021, with more to be scheduled commencing in September, 2022 and thereafter;
- Experts and lay witnesses have provided testimony on the subject matter areas listed above;
- Commencing in February, in addition to the Task Force’s public hearings, the Task Force has conducted “listening sessions” throughout California to hear testimony of the impact of the legacy of slavery, and the cumulative layers of racism and exclusion that continued thereafter to the present day;
- On June 1, 2022, the Task Force released Interim Report tracking the harm of slavery and its badges and incidents thereafter. In September of 2022, the Task Force will commence discussion of what the repair and reparations that ultimately it will recommend to the Californai legislature and the public.
- The Task Force is in the process of surveying District Attorneys’ Offices and Courts in 58 counties with respect to the data these entities collect for the purpose of determining the presence of racial bias in criminal justice administration decisions pertaining to charging, prosecuting, sentencing, diversion, etc.
- State Efforts. California is the first state to form a reparations task force, but Vermont is considering doing something similar:
Vermont Senate gives tentative OK to creating a state truth and reconciliation commission
- Local Government Efforts. While state task forces similar to the California Reparations Task Force might be a political impossibility (for now) in most states, other locales are launching their own inquiries:
- California Cities and Counties
- Mayors Organizing for Reparations and Equality (MORE)
- Los Angeles (Eric Garcetti)
- Sacramento, CA (Daryl Steinberg)
- County Supervisors Organizing for Reparations and Equality (proposed)
- San Francisco (City and County; (led by Supervisor Shamann Walton)
- Alameda (County) (led by Supervisor Nate Miley)
- Non-California Cities
- Other Mayors Organizing for Reparations and Equality (MORE)
- Kansas City
- Tullahase, OK
- Providence, RI
- Carrboro, NC
- Austin, TX
- St. Paul, MN
- Durham, NC
- Denver, CO
- Nashville, TN
- Other Non-California Cities’ Reparations Initiatives
- Ashville, Tennessee
- Evanston, Illinois
- Charleston, SC [June 9, 2020]
- Ferguson, MO [November 18, 2014 created and appointed by Governor Jay Nixon]
- Philadelphia
- Boston
- Iowa City, Iowa
- Minneapolis, MN [planning phase]
- New York City (Charter Commission)
- Detroit, Michigan
- Borough of Carlisle, PA
- Smaller Scale Discussions. Individual organizations have also launched their own inquiries and projects; see e.g. Ohio State Divided Communities Project; efforts by religious institutions to atone for enslaving Blacks. In other words, discussion on this subject matter could be commenced by other organizations, however large or small.
- Congressional Bills
- H.R. 40
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