San Francisco's Black Leaders Call on City to Use Tax Funds for Reparations

Leaders of San Francisco's African American community are calling on the city to use income from hotel and marijuana taxes to pay reparations to black residents.

The funds would be used to make amends for the city's historic discrimination against African Americans that led to the displacement of much of the former black community, according to the NAACP San Francisco branch, which is leading the effort.

“Here we are at the end of 2019, and in San Francisco blacks are still suffering from the fallout of the human degradation of slavery and the treatment of their ancestors as tools and not human beings," said the Rev. Amos Brown, the San Francisco NAACP's president and pastor of the Third Baptist Church. Brown addressed a small rally of supporters Tuesday in front of City Hall in advance of the Board of Supervisors meeting, where members of the group advocated for the reparations proposal.

Brown said he was inspired by city leaders in Evanston, Illinois, who pushed lawmakers to approve the first reparations legislation in the nation earlier this month. That plan will funnel tax revenue from recently legalized marijuana sales into a reparations fund aimed at creating additional opportunities for black people in the Chicago suburb.

“We have all these billionaires in San Francisco,” Brown said. “It looks like somebody ought to have a heart to say: ‘We are going to do what we did for the Japanese, what we did for the Jews in Germany.’ That was reparations. The same thing can be done for African Americans.”

The NAACP wants to use the additional tax revenue to fund new tutoring and mentoring programs and other support services for the city's black public school students, many of whom, it says, face unique challenges to academic success, including elevated rates of depression and other mental health issues that stem from high rates of poverty and violence in their communities.

The group is also asking that taxes be used to help support former black residents of San Francisco who have been displaced because of widespread gentrification and urban renewal projects, and to fund a new housing lottery system that would give black residents preference in the city's nonprofit, public and affordable housing developments. Additionally, the group is pushing to restore the historically black Fillmore District, in the city's Western Addition, to the "vibrant black community" it once was by investing in new black-owned businesses and cultural institutions.

“San Francisco at that time, particularly Western Addition, was filled with families, thousands of families, that lived here and worked here and paid taxes here,” said Maddie Scott, who lost her son to gun violence in 1996. “And then the violence happened. The guns and drugs were dumped in our neighborhoods and that's when all hell broke loose. And now here we are, 22 years later, and families now can't even afford to live here.”

This local reparations effort comes amid a national campaign to compensate black Americans for the suffering they experienced under slavery and subsequent racial injustices. The issue has been raised during recent presidential debates, and several Democratic hopefuls, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, have declared their support for legislation that would commission a study on reparations.

San Francisco, the NAACP emphasized, is one of the wealthiest cities in the nation, and has an obligation to address its ongoing failure to provide equal opportunity to black residents, who have been forced out in droves. The group notes that African Americans today make up less than 5% of the city's population, down from about 13% in the 1970s. And while an estimated 10% of all San Francisco residents live in poverty, that rate hovers above 30% for its black residents, according to city figures from 2018.

Reparations could help the city's remaining black population stay here and flourish, the group said.

“Right now the numbers are so low. And it's all by design,” said Dan Daniels Sr., coastal area director of the NAACP's California & Hawaii State Conference. “They've done it through racism, through rent control, through other initiatives that have been designed, allegedly designed, to improve the quality of life for citizens of San Francisco. But it has not helped black folks. The majority of black folks that live here are on welfare and struggling and being forced out of a community that most of them grew up in.”

Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Vallie Brown said they support the movement but have no plans to draft legislation.

Additional reporting from Bay City News' Daniel Montes