SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California’s first-in-the-nation task force on reparations for African Americans will release a report Wednesday documenting in detail the harms perpetuated by the state and recommending steps to address those wrongs, including expanded voter registration, making it easier to hold violent police accountable and improving Black neighborhoods.
It also recommends the creation of a special office that would, in part, help African Americans descended from free or enslaved Black people in the country at the end of the 19th century document their eligibility for financial restitution.
The report, which runs 500 pages, will be the first government-commissioned study on harms against the African American community since the 1968 Kerner Commission report ordered by then-President Lyndon Johnson, task force Chair Kamilah Moore said.
“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,” 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.”
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 are taking 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 task force voted in March to limit reparations to descendants, overruling reparations advocates who want to expand compensation to all Black people in the U.S.
The report, to be released by the state Department of Justice, marks the halfway point for the two-year task force’s work. The draft report does not provide a comprehensive reparations plan, which is due to lawmakers next year.
The report is expected to lay out how California supported slavery before it was technically abolished and oppressed Black residents through discriminatory laws and practices in education, home ownership, employment and the courts.
African Americans make up nearly 6% of California’s population yet they are overrepresented in jails and prisons. They were nearly 9% of people living below the poverty level and made up 30% of people experiencing homelessness in 2019, according to state figures.
Despite it being a “free” state, an estimated 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California in 1852, according to the draft report. The Ku Klux Klan flourished in California with members holding positions in law enforcement and city government. African American families were forced to live in segregated neighborhoods that were more likely to be polluted.
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.
The task force in its draft report also recommends compensating people 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 Rev. Amos Brown, the committee’s vice chair and pastor of Third Baptist Church in the Fillmore.
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That which does not kill you makes you strong. So California is going to pay for the sins of people whose relatives died 150 years ago, is like making Hunter’s innocent born baby have to pay for what his dad and Joe did. Too many character strength growing challenges in life have already been deprived the Black people of America in Democrat social dependency to THEM. Feed, cloth house and medicate communities for free and you no longer are dealing with self-governing strong human beings but pet Gerbils trained to run on the Democrat wheel of voting where they just end up running in place and getting nowhere but a Jimmy Carter Habi trail if they win that lottery.
David Horowitz once wrote an article Titled, ” 10 Reasons why Reparations are a Bad Idea and Racist Too.”
I Think Everybody Should Read This Article Especially Those Cities Leaders who are thinking about
Reparations to be Paid to All Black People.
ITS only blacks, who seem to DEMAND reparations…
IT WOULD SEEM TO ME AND MANY OTHERS THAT THE BLACK RACE OWES AMERICA , NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND, THAT AMERICA OWES THEM.
They already get welfare and food stamps and public housing and section 8 . Since they say they were stolen not sold, then send back to africa it’s stolen people
Back in the 1960s a lot of blacks did go back to the “motherland” of Africa. After 2 years over 90% of them returned to the mean, racist, unfair USA. So why give them reparations when they already had their chance to go back home? After the Civil War was over there was a program in place to offer a free boat ride back to Africa and some blacks did go back and stay. So any black person today is here by their own free will, none are forced to stay here. There is NO way blacks can compare their situation to the American Indians.
The Colored People Would Love It to be Given A Prize For Slavery Which They, In Fact. Only heard about. Let the Black Race Repay all the welfare they received then we will talk about ” REPARATIONS. ” Remember, ” A RISING TIDE RAISES ALL BOATS, ” Says The Quote.
Show me one living porch dweller that was a slave, or one living White person that owned one and I’m down with your WOKE, pandering stupidity.
Most still are slaves, it’s just that today it is the Democrat party that owns them. They are as addicted to the Democrat false promises as Geroge Floyd was to his drugs. The results for most are the same. Their communities of need for fake Democrat leadership is like George getting kneed by the fake cop.
Reparations and civil war, one and inseparable. That is just what the cultural Marxists want, the division of a free country in order to gain power and profit.
I am a legal immigrant, I do not owe blacks one penny! I learned that California was not a slave state, so why are the idiots in California considering paying blacks any money. What about the other LEGAL immigrants here? The many Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants who arrived here in the 1970s? What about bi-racial folks? Will reparations be offset by welfare, foodstamps, Section 8 housing? What about criminals in prison, will the cost of their incarceration be offset? The increase in crime, looting, rioting and burning businesses surely will be taken into account? Will BLM’s Patrisse Cullors and her crooks get reparations or can she just keep her mansions?
“John F. Kennedy Vs Robert F. Kennedy ”
” When did the civil rights movement go off the rails? ”
” The Opponents of Civil Rights Went Off the Rails when they Justly Demanded Equal Rights To Unjustly Demanding Equal outcome.”
what is your view in particular on the specific point that they are recommending of job quotas by race? ”
“As to exactly when this occurred, that’s more difficult to answer. But consider statements, made five years apart, from the Kennedy brothers, John F. and Robert F. ”
“Neither brother was asked about nor used the word “reparations.” But during an August 1963 press conference, a reporter asked President John Kennedy about “special dispensation” for Blacks: “Mr. President, some Negro leaders are saying that, like the Jews persecuted by the Nazis, the Negro is entitled to some kind of special dispensation for the pain of second-class citizenship over these many decades and generations…..? ”
Since africa sold them to us ,how much will they pay in reparations to the U.S.??
NOT one dime!
” The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
Margaret Thatcher – FROM -BRAINY QUOTES
You Commented,” Will reparations be offset by welfare, food stamps, Section 8 housing? What about criminals in prison, will the cost of their incarceration be offset? The increase in crime, looting, rioting and burning businesses surely will be taken into account? ” ….One does have to wonder, The attitude of the Black Race, ” HOO-RAY FOR ME AND **** YOU. ” Booker T. Washington had a Good Response I Thought to the Al Sharpton’s and others like him.
“Thank God My Granddaddy Got on that Boat”
FEBRUARY 9, 2018 BY DEBBIE YOUNG
Image used under license from Shutterstock.com
With his customary cheekiness, Muhammad Ali responded to the reporter inquiring about his thoughts on Africa after his Rumble in the Jungle boxing match. It was 1974. Ali had just returned to the U.S. from Zaire, where he had beaten the previously undefeated world heavyweight-champ George Foreman.
It was not for nothing that Ali thanked God that his “granddaddy got on that boat,” Pedro Gonzalez tells readers of American Greatness. Citing Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, Gonzalez writes:
[America] is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protections of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all of those of Africa.