Detroit voters favored launching a reparations commission Tuesday, and a proposal to decriminalize psychedelic plants was passing by a wide margin.
Another, Proposal S, was neck-and-neck in unofficial early returns.
More than 81% voters said yes to Proposal R, which would launch a reparations commission, while 62% of voters said yes to decriminalizing psychedelic plants.
Another ballot proposal to amend the city charter to allow for citizen-driven ballot initiatives tied to city spending, Proposal S, was close, with 51% of voters saying no and 48.82% voting yes.
Proposal R asked whether Michigan’s largest city should form a committee to consider reparations for residents, 77% of whom are Black.
“Timing is everything,” said Keith Williams, chairman of Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus. “It’s the teamwork with (council president pro tem) Mary Sheffield … We teamed together and we had a groundswell of support from different organizations to bring this to fruition. The most important thing is it’s time for reconciliation. It’s time to heal and let’s move the city forward.”
The group will recommend housing and economic development programs “that address historical discrimination against the Black community in Detroit,” according to the ballot language.
The proposal does not require steps beyond the group’s formation, including members and timelines for a decision, or mandate how any guidance would be enacted.
It was spearheaded bySheffield after talks with activists who pushed for the measure amid nationwide calls to compensate descendants of slaves.
Durrel Douglas, 35, said Tuesday he voted in favor of Proposal R to allow the city to explore reparations. Douglas moved from Houston to Detroit last year.
“I think cities like Detroit have to lead the nation in showing that these things are possible and the methods that other cities, other states and eventually the nation can move when it comes to doing what should have been done a long time ago around reparations,” he said.
Other communities across the country have started considering similar moves amid racial reckonings following the Black Lives Matter movement, the death in 2020 of George Floyd, the presidential election and the pandemic’s impact on minorities.
Last spring, the Democrat-controlled U.S. House Judiciary Committee passed a successor to legislation introduced by the late-John Conyers, the longest-serving African-American in Congress, to address reparations.
The City Council now will start a framework to select a task force, Sheffield hasaid. She and supporters say the move could lead to short- and long-term recommendations, such as housing grants, from a group that includes residents as well as professionals.
Paulette Watson, 70, said she voted to decriminalize psychedelic plants and establish a reparations task force but voted against amending the charter.
“I wasn’t sure on reparations, but after they said they just wanted to form a committee, I thought, that’s not going to hurt anything,” said Watson, who voted by absentee ballot. “Citizens can’t pick the budget for issues.”
One of the groups involved in backing Proposal R has also pushed for Proposal S, which seeks to amend a section of Detroit’s City Charter to allow voters to push ordinances that include appropriating money.
Those powers currently do not extend to the budget under the city charter.
The nonprofit Citizens Research Council of Michigan has said the move “could present challenges for the operation of government. It is not clear how such citizen-initiated appropriations would fit with current laws as they relate to the timing of elections, the budget and appropriations processes, the prioritization of city spending, and the powers granted to certain branches of government.”
Voter-initiated Proposal E asked Detroiters if they believe the personal possession and therapeutic use of entheogenic plants like psilocybin mushrooms or peyote should be decriminalized to the fullest extent permitted under Michigan law.
The measure would not legalize the use and possession of psychedelics but it would make it the city’s lowest law-enforcement priority.
Proposal E goes to Detroit voters after Democratic state Sens. Jeff Irwin of Ann Arbor and Adam Hollier of Detroit last month introduced a bill to decriminalize two popular psychedelic drugs in a bid to make them available for therapeutic use.
Under Senate Bill 631, possession and use of psilocybin, commonly known as magic mushrooms, and mescaline, found in cacti that is comparable to LSD, would be “exempt from criminal prosecution in certain circumstances.”
The group Detroit Decriminalize Nature helped shape the ballot initiative. Moudou Baqui, a member of the group that has worked to educate voters, said there are similar Decriminalize Nature groups around the state, including in mid-Michigan, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Deputy Mayor Conrad Mallett Jr. told The Detroit News the Mayor’s Office does not have a position on Proposals E or Proposal S. He said the City Council goes through a deliberative budget-setting process to maintain fiscal responsibility.
Catherine Phillips, a retiree of the city who served with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department for 30 years, said she voted yes on all three proposals.
“I don’t know a doggone thing about a mushroom. I didn’t even know these were still around since I was in high school,” said Phillips, 64. “I think if we legalize drugs, it’s for a better community as a whole. Alcohol kills more people than weed or a mushroom, so I think it’ll be better if it was on its way to regulation.”
Staff Writers Sarah Rahal and Mark Hicks contributed.
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So, we can now confirm the voter base in Detroit.
WE can confirm, they are ALL a bunch of luddite lemmings.. SHEEP willingly going to the slaughter.
Detroitistan is now lost to us, for good.
Well… in their defense… after several decades of Regressive Liberal Socialist Democrat degrading standard of living and lies shoved up their keister …with the squalor that several generations have been forced to exist in.. the garbage the RLSD’s are offering sounds good. It’s very sad… and I feel sorry for them … I’ll pray they see the light.
I feel not ONE IOTA of sympathy or pity for these cretins. THEY BROUGHT this nonsense on themselves, by Continually voting for the Demon party, and to ME, its foolish, to ever think these dunces can EVER “See the light”.. Their heads are too far into the ground, to ever do that.
When those who depend on government handouts to live are given a choice of more free money of course they will vote for it. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. These voters are still too lean in the intelligence department to see they are just promoting slavery . If I pay you for doing nothing, in return, I own you!
“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continues until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Lincoln could just as easily be speaking of the modern-day social wars declared on American people today who they have turned into Tax Slaves, where the hard earned wealth and personal property of others are “Tax and Spend” stolen from THE PEOPLE, now held in their divisive political promoted invisible chains of hatred, envy, and racial class division warfare. If the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous there will be a reckoning for these crimes as well because when it comes to wealth distribution, it really ALL comes from God who Created it, who looks unkindly upon those who seek to replace him in its deity designed talent rewarded assignment. The slavery they offer is no different than what Lincoln faced, whose faces of the people seeking to play god over others may change, but the unethical redistribution of wealth and property remains the same.
YET They don’t realize they are BACK IN SLAVERY, to the DNC.
Yeah… but they don’t have to pick cotton now… just stew in squalor.
The very thing that the Colored Race constantly complained about, now is Ok, Now that it benefits them, In this case, ” Reparations , ” suddenly ” Racial Reparations” for Slavery, is Ok, although many have no claim for ” Reparations, ” except for the fact that they’re Black.
YET many of them, were not even LIVING IN THIS NATION till 50 or so years ago, when their parents BROUGHT them over.
Reparations for residents, 77% of whom are Black.
These fools vote to continue to be servants on the traitorous, racist, lying, immoral,
socialist Democrat Party’s plantation.
Where these servants are people of color who are kept uneducated, fatherless, poor and dependent on government handouts and support.
They should base reparations on the estimated number of slaves in Detroit at the time of the Civil War. Otherwise it is clearly a scheme to throw money aftera problem that didn’t exist at the time!
One has only to look to Colorado and the increase in social problems since the legalization of pot to realize that this move isn’t a good one for anyone. If they opt to provide reparations will they then require those who received benefits throughout the intervening years pay them back? My grandfather’s estate was expected to pay back the county he lived in for food given out during the Great Depression. He died in the late 1970s but they billed for something in the early 30s.
Glad I don’t live in Michigan. I never owned a slave and none of my people ever owned a slave, so I don’t intend to pay anyone who never was a slave.
Several of my friends, moved UP to michigan.. I PITY THEM now.
the midwest states like michagan minnessota and illinois are all liberal hell holes run by slave owners and mudslimes.
PITY we can’t just carve them all out of the USA, and air drop them over ON CHINA.
I am all in on reparations for EVERY oppressed African-American. Each should get $450,000, as parity with what Biden wants to give to each illegal, but it will be proportional to their P.O.B., Purity Of Blackness, which a new Commission will decide. But after they receive their reparations, are they any less oppressed? No, because they’re still living in AmeriKKKa, the Home of Racism.
Solution: To receive their money, they must move to a country in Africa, and once settled, they must go to the nearest U.S. Embassy and renounce their U.S. citizenship. Then they can apply for and will receive their money in whatever currency they want. And then they’ll live happily ever after.
So, reparations MUST come with repatriation. And when these once oppressed African-Americans are gone, we can say, “Good Brandon Riddance”!
Thanks for reading.
CRT
That’s it Detroit, go ahead and chase more of businesses, who provide jobs and tax money, out of the city and maybe even out of Michigan. Without tax money, it will be very hard to pay these reparations to the lazy scumbags who don’t work.
Don’t worry, they will just DEMAND the feds bail them out, and unfortunately the feds will bend over and comply, like the lapdogs they are.
Detroit voters voting for reparations follows the scenario of wolves and sheep voting for the dinner menu. Where the wolves are the majority, the sheep are dinner.
Pity there’s still so many “SHEEP” out there, being allowed to vote!
Housing Discrimination in Detroit. Well Detroit ,like DC has been run by blacks for blacks for since forever. So how is it housing Discrimination. ???
Because.. RACISMMM!! White supremacy.. The patriarchy.
Take your pick.