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"content": "\u003cp>San Francisco resident Pia Harris hopes for reparations in her lifetime. But the nonprofit program director is not confident that California lawmakers will turn the recommendations of a first-in-the-nation task force into concrete legislation, given pushback from opponents who say slavery was a thing of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It frustrates Harris, 45, that reparations opponents won’t acknowledge that life for Black people did not improve with the abolition of chattel slavery in 1865. Black families have been unable to accumulate wealth through property ownership and higher education. Black boys and teenagers are still told to watch out for law enforcement, and Black businesses struggle to get loans, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Les Robinson, associate pastor, The Sanctuary church\"]‘People wonder why African Americans at large are angry. Because we’ve been lied to. We’ve been bamboozled. For centuries — not decades — centuries.’[/pullquote]“I want them to stop acting like it’s so far removed, and it’s not currently happening,” said Harris, of the lingering effects of slavery and discrimination. “I want them to understand that we’re still going through things now as a community. It’s not — it hasn’t been over for us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black Californians have watched closely as the state’s reparations task force forged ahead on a two-year study, finally \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-task-force-apology-de0b43dd237c47113554a9aae56ca9f5\">signing off this month\u003c/a> on a hefty list of recommendations that will be submitted to lawmakers. It’s uncertain \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-black-reparations-african-americans-slavery-383e526514915002f511b77c29e575bc\">what lawmakers will do with the proposals\u003c/a>, which include payments to descendants of enslaved people and a formal apology from the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Associated Press interviewed a handful of Black advocates and residents who have followed the task force’s work — as well as those who have long been engaged in the conversation about reparations. Both activists who fought for civil rights in the 1960s and young entrepreneurs echoed a common fear: that California’s exploration of reparations will become another example of the government offering false hope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Reparations proposals for African Americans date back to 1865, when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that newly freed people be given up to 40 acres of land. That didn’t happen. In recent decades, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have tried to pass legislation to study federal reparations, to no avail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=\"news_11948385,news_11945690,news_11944986,news_11948784\" label=\"Related Posts\"]In 2020, California became the first state to approve the creation of a reparations task force to study the state’s role in perpetuating systemic racism and to find ways to atone. Although California entered the union as a “free” state, it did not enact laws guaranteeing African Americans’ freedom, according to a draft report from the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state currently \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-governor-newsom-budget-d12f60cda36c2bbc9c765b64023bfff9#:~:text=(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20California's%20budget%20deficit,dollar%20deficits%20in%20the%20future.\">faces a projected $31.5 billion budget shortfall\u003c/a>, which may reduce the possibility of legislative support for some of the task force’s more ambitious recommendations, including direct payments to eligible residents and the creation of a new state agency to help those families research their ancestors and file claims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One key lawmaker, who is also a task force member, has already warned residents \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-payments-black-african-american-1d8225ab2c0af0cbe8e96d78813ad43b\">not to expect large payments\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force did not recommend specific payment amounts, but estimates from economists say the state is responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from buying homes in appreciating neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damien Posey, 44, grew up in historically Black neighborhoods in San Francisco, where he heard gunshots at night and was bussed to schools in neighborhoods that weren’t so welcoming to Black children. He spent a decade in prison on a weapons charge and later started a nonprofit called Us 4 Us Bay Area to mentor youth and reduce gun violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meaningful reparations would include an official state apology, public funding for nonprofit organizations that assist Black residents, and cash reparations for every eligible person for the pay denied to their ancestors, who built this country with their labor, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And our people deserve it, honestly,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compensation is an important part of state reparations proposals because Black Americans have “been deprived of a lot of money,” due to discriminatory policies, said Les Robinson, 66, an associate pastor at The Sanctuary church in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But money isn’t everything, Robinson said, and the task force’s other important work shouldn’t be lost in a fixation on dollar figures alone. He pointed to efforts to retell California history through a different lens — one that examines the state’s role in perpetuating systemic racism despite its label as a “free” state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robinson was “hit by a tsunami of emotions” when he learned in 2017 he was descended from a man who founded the first Black church in California and played a critical role in the state’s groundbreaking African American community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was disappointed that more people — himself included — were not taught the story of Daniel Blue, his great-great-great-grandfather, who created what is now known as the historic Saint Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robinson is skeptical that reparations will be approved by lawmakers, if history is an indicator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People wonder why African Americans at large are angry,” he said. “Because we’ve been lied to. We’ve been bamboozled. For centuries — not decades — centuries.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Robinson, former Black Panther Party member Joan Tarika Lewis has been researching her lineage and was proud to discover that several ancestors came to California in the mid-19th century and helped other Black people escape slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lewis, who became the party’s first female activist when she joined as a teenager, wants more Black residents to learn about their heritage and for all Californians to know more about the contributions of Black community and civic leaders. Lewis, 73, also wants to raise more awareness about what the community has lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her father operated a boxing gym in West Oakland that served as a community space for young people to learn from their elders. But government officials took the land, and in its place built a freeway and commuter line. The family was paid a pittance for what would go on to become valuable San Francisco Bay Area property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lewis is optimistic that state lawmakers can make reparations happen if they have the political will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So is Vincent Justin, a 75-year-old Richmond resident and retired bus driver who has fought for racial equity for decades. He marched in the 1960s with Martin Luther King Jr., Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael and other major civil rights figures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though the fight has been long, he hopes reparations will one day be approved at the federal level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that we’re going to come to a fair and equitable ending,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I want them to stop acting like it’s so far removed, and it’s not currently happening,” said Harris, of the lingering effects of slavery and discrimination. “I want them to understand that we’re still going through things now as a community. It’s not — it hasn’t been over for us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black Californians have watched closely as the state’s reparations task force forged ahead on a two-year study, finally \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-task-force-apology-de0b43dd237c47113554a9aae56ca9f5\">signing off this month\u003c/a> on a hefty list of recommendations that will be submitted to lawmakers. It’s uncertain \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-black-reparations-african-americans-slavery-383e526514915002f511b77c29e575bc\">what lawmakers will do with the proposals\u003c/a>, which include payments to descendants of enslaved people and a formal apology from the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Associated Press interviewed a handful of Black advocates and residents who have followed the task force’s work — as well as those who have long been engaged in the conversation about reparations. Both activists who fought for civil rights in the 1960s and young entrepreneurs echoed a common fear: that California’s exploration of reparations will become another example of the government offering false hope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In 2020, California became the first state to approve the creation of a reparations task force to study the state’s role in perpetuating systemic racism and to find ways to atone. Although California entered the union as a “free” state, it did not enact laws guaranteeing African Americans’ freedom, according to a draft report from the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state currently \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-governor-newsom-budget-d12f60cda36c2bbc9c765b64023bfff9#:~:text=(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20California's%20budget%20deficit,dollar%20deficits%20in%20the%20future.\">faces a projected $31.5 billion budget shortfall\u003c/a>, which may reduce the possibility of legislative support for some of the task force’s more ambitious recommendations, including direct payments to eligible residents and the creation of a new state agency to help those families research their ancestors and file claims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One key lawmaker, who is also a task force member, has already warned residents \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-reparations-payments-black-african-american-1d8225ab2c0af0cbe8e96d78813ad43b\">not to expect large payments\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force did not recommend specific payment amounts, but estimates from economists say the state is responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from buying homes in appreciating neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damien Posey, 44, grew up in historically Black neighborhoods in San Francisco, where he heard gunshots at night and was bussed to schools in neighborhoods that weren’t so welcoming to Black children. He spent a decade in prison on a weapons charge and later started a nonprofit called Us 4 Us Bay Area to mentor youth and reduce gun violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meaningful reparations would include an official state apology, public funding for nonprofit organizations that assist Black residents, and cash reparations for every eligible person for the pay denied to their ancestors, who built this country with their labor, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And our people deserve it, honestly,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compensation is an important part of state reparations proposals because Black Americans have “been deprived of a lot of money,” due to discriminatory policies, said Les Robinson, 66, an associate pastor at The Sanctuary church in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But money isn’t everything, Robinson said, and the task force’s other important work shouldn’t be lost in a fixation on dollar figures alone. He pointed to efforts to retell California history through a different lens — one that examines the state’s role in perpetuating systemic racism despite its label as a “free” state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robinson was “hit by a tsunami of emotions” when he learned in 2017 he was descended from a man who founded the first Black church in California and played a critical role in the state’s groundbreaking African American community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was disappointed that more people — himself included — were not taught the story of Daniel Blue, his great-great-great-grandfather, who created what is now known as the historic Saint Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robinson is skeptical that reparations will be approved by lawmakers, if history is an indicator.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People wonder why African Americans at large are angry,” he said. “Because we’ve been lied to. We’ve been bamboozled. For centuries — not decades — centuries.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Robinson, former Black Panther Party member Joan Tarika Lewis has been researching her lineage and was proud to discover that several ancestors came to California in the mid-19th century and helped other Black people escape slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lewis, who became the party’s first female activist when she joined as a teenager, wants more Black residents to learn about their heritage and for all Californians to know more about the contributions of Black community and civic leaders. Lewis, 73, also wants to raise more awareness about what the community has lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her father operated a boxing gym in West Oakland that served as a community space for young people to learn from their elders. But government officials took the land, and in its place built a freeway and commuter line. 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"content": "\u003cp>The California Reparations Task Force approved economic models for calculating reparations, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars owed to eligible Black residents, to address past racial inequities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The models tell the state what is owed. The Legislature would have to adopt the recommendations and decide how much to pay, task force members said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"US Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland)\"]‘Reparations are not a luxury, but a human right long overdue for millions of Americans.’[/pullquote]The state-appointed task force also unanimously voted to recommend California formally apologize “for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity and African slaves and their descendants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After 15 public hearings, two years of deliberations and input from more than 100 expert witnesses and the public, the task force on Saturday voted to finalize its proposals in an Oakland meeting. The nine-member panel has a deadline to submit it all to the Legislature by July 1.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The historic effort could become a model for a national program of reparations, some observers have said. U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Oakland, said at the beginning of the task force meeting that the United States must repair the damage done to Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Reparations are not a luxury, but a human right long overdue for millions of Americans,” she said. “We are demanding that the government pay their tax.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A bill by former state Assembly member Shirley Weber created the reparations task force in 2020, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. The panel has since examined the history of slavery and racism in the state and developed detailed plans for how California can begin to undo certain types of racial harm, such as housing discrimination, mass incarceration, the devaluation of Black-owned businesses, the unjust taking of property and unequal access to health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recommendations include policy changes and financial payouts. The task force’s final report and documents, numbering thousands of pages, don’t contain an overall price tag for reparations. They do include \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">ways the state could calculate how much money eligible African Americans in California have lost (PDF)\u003c/a> since the state’s founding in 1850. The loss calculations vary depending on the type of racial harm and how long a person has lived in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://calmatters-reparations-calculator.netlify.app/calc-embed?copy=y\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For instance, the loss estimates are $2,300 per person per year of residence for the over-policing of Black communities, and $77,000 total per person, regardless of length of residence, for Black-owned business losses and devaluations over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force voted in March 2022 that African American descendants of enslaved Americans were eligible, but other Black residents, such as more recent immigrants, are not. Nearly 80% of California’s 2.6 million Black residents would be eligible, said William Darity, an economist who consulted with the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force members said older people should have priority for payment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CalMatters created an \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters-reparations-calculator.netlify.app/\">interactive tool\u003c/a> for calculating how much a person is owed, using formulas from the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">task force’s final reports\u003c/a> and how long a person lived in California during the periods of racial harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For instance, a 19-year-old who moved to California in 2018 would be owed at least $149,799 based on the calculations, but a 71-year-old who has lived in California all their life could be owed about $1.2 million. On the other hand, an eligible 28-year-old Californian who moved out of state in 2012 and just moved back could be due around $348,507, according to the calculator.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Hundreds of millions of dollars\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If all of the eligible African American residents lived in the state only two years, it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in potential reparations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eligible Black residents should not expect cash payments anytime soon, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=\"news_11948385,news_11945690,news_11944986\" label=\"Related Posts\"]The state Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom will decide on reparations. It’s unclear what they will do with the task force recommendations. The task force was not told to identify funding sources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a task force member and Democrat from Los Angeles, stressed that the process will take time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Giving the impression that funds will become readily available — or that cash payments are recommended by the task force to rectify marginalization caused by generations of reckless policies and laws — is not focusing on the real work of the task force or the report itself,” he said in an interview Sunday. “There is a process by which the Legislature will look at and discuss all recommendations, and that will take some time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force members voted to recommend the Legislature consider “down payments” of varying amounts to eligible African American residents, saying direct cash payments are part of other reparations programs around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The initial down payment is the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices; not the end of it,” the task force report states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force also is recommending \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/01/california-reparations/\">a variety of policy changes\u003c/a> to counteract discrimination. For example, the task force has recommended the state end the practice of forced labor in prisons and \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda11-ch23-policies-addressing-separate-and-unequal-education-05062023.pdf\">adopt a K–12 Black studies curriculum (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Freedmen’s bureau\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]The group finalized plans to establish a \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/03/california-reparations-2/\">centralized state agency\u003c/a> similar to the national Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency created in 1865 to assist previously enslaved Black people. The state agency would provide oversight and implement the task force’s proposals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The agency will be doing the work that we weren’t able to finish in two years,” said Kamilah Moore, chair of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saturday’s meeting was one of the more rowdy hearings of the task force. It included a brief shouting match between a regular meeting attendee and Amos Brown, the task force’s vice chair. Also, the California Highway Patrol escorted a disruptive group out of Lisser Hall at Mills College, where the meeting was held.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During this nearly final task force meeting, debate continued over who is eligible for reparations. Some task force members also voiced concerns that the Legislature might not honor the task force’s vote to consider lineage for eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By a 5–4 vote last year, the task force narrowly defined an eligible person as an “individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That vote was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2022/04/californias-reparations-task-force/\">contentious and emotional\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Reparations vote\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The task force voted 6–3 Saturday to approve the recommendations for financial compensation. The three members who voted against it did so after changes they wanted failed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore on Saturday made several attempts to further codify the lineage-based definition in the task force’s final reports by adding a new chapter. That failed to garner majority support from the rest of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Moore requested a section of the final report be moved from one part to another, members of the Department of Justice staff who put the report together balked, saying the panel would have to rescind its prior vote and convene an additional meeting to redo the report’s structure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monica Montgomery Steppe, a task force member and San Diego City Council member, disagreed with them. But a majority of the task force went on to approve the final documents as presented with slight tweaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking on Sunday in Twitter Spaces, Moore said that meeting “procedure can be weaponized.” She declined to say more publicly about issues from the meeting. “Stay tuned for the ‘tell-all’ book, though,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force tentatively set its final meeting for June 29 in Sacramento. Members said they plan to hand the documents to members of Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The California Reparations Task Force approved economic models for lawmakers to calculate the costs of historical racism in California. Try using the interactive tool to see what is owed.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The state-appointed task force also unanimously voted to recommend California formally apologize “for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity and African slaves and their descendants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After 15 public hearings, two years of deliberations and input from more than 100 expert witnesses and the public, the task force on Saturday voted to finalize its proposals in an Oakland meeting. The nine-member panel has a deadline to submit it all to the Legislature by July 1.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The historic effort could become a model for a national program of reparations, some observers have said. U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Oakland, said at the beginning of the task force meeting that the United States must repair the damage done to Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Reparations are not a luxury, but a human right long overdue for millions of Americans,” she said. “We are demanding that the government pay their tax.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A bill by former state Assembly member Shirley Weber created the reparations task force in 2020, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. The panel has since examined the history of slavery and racism in the state and developed detailed plans for how California can begin to undo certain types of racial harm, such as housing discrimination, mass incarceration, the devaluation of Black-owned businesses, the unjust taking of property and unequal access to health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recommendations include policy changes and financial payouts. The task force’s final report and documents, numbering thousands of pages, don’t contain an overall price tag for reparations. They do include \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">ways the state could calculate how much money eligible African Americans in California have lost (PDF)\u003c/a> since the state’s founding in 1850. The loss calculations vary depending on the type of racial harm and how long a person has lived in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://calmatters-reparations-calculator.netlify.app/calc-embed?copy=y\" width=\"800\" height=\"800\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For instance, the loss estimates are $2,300 per person per year of residence for the over-policing of Black communities, and $77,000 total per person, regardless of length of residence, for Black-owned business losses and devaluations over the years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force voted in March 2022 that African American descendants of enslaved Americans were eligible, but other Black residents, such as more recent immigrants, are not. Nearly 80% of California’s 2.6 million Black residents would be eligible, said William Darity, an economist who consulted with the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force members said older people should have priority for payment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CalMatters created an \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters-reparations-calculator.netlify.app/\">interactive tool\u003c/a> for calculating how much a person is owed, using formulas from the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">task force’s final reports\u003c/a> and how long a person lived in California during the periods of racial harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For instance, a 19-year-old who moved to California in 2018 would be owed at least $149,799 based on the calculations, but a 71-year-old who has lived in California all their life could be owed about $1.2 million. On the other hand, an eligible 28-year-old Californian who moved out of state in 2012 and just moved back could be due around $348,507, according to the calculator.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Hundreds of millions of dollars\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If all of the eligible African American residents lived in the state only two years, it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in potential reparations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eligible Black residents should not expect cash payments anytime soon, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The state Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom will decide on reparations. It’s unclear what they will do with the task force recommendations. The task force was not told to identify funding sources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a task force member and Democrat from Los Angeles, stressed that the process will take time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Giving the impression that funds will become readily available — or that cash payments are recommended by the task force to rectify marginalization caused by generations of reckless policies and laws — is not focusing on the real work of the task force or the report itself,” he said in an interview Sunday. “There is a process by which the Legislature will look at and discuss all recommendations, and that will take some time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force members voted to recommend the Legislature consider “down payments” of varying amounts to eligible African American residents, saying direct cash payments are part of other reparations programs around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The initial down payment is the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices; not the end of it,” the task force report states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force also is recommending \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/01/california-reparations/\">a variety of policy changes\u003c/a> to counteract discrimination. For example, the task force has recommended the state end the practice of forced labor in prisons and \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda11-ch23-policies-addressing-separate-and-unequal-education-05062023.pdf\">adopt a K–12 Black studies curriculum (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Freedmen’s bureau\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The group finalized plans to establish a \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/03/california-reparations-2/\">centralized state agency\u003c/a> similar to the national Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency created in 1865 to assist previously enslaved Black people. The state agency would provide oversight and implement the task force’s proposals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The agency will be doing the work that we weren’t able to finish in two years,” said Kamilah Moore, chair of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saturday’s meeting was one of the more rowdy hearings of the task force. It included a brief shouting match between a regular meeting attendee and Amos Brown, the task force’s vice chair. Also, the California Highway Patrol escorted a disruptive group out of Lisser Hall at Mills College, where the meeting was held.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During this nearly final task force meeting, debate continued over who is eligible for reparations. Some task force members also voiced concerns that the Legislature might not honor the task force’s vote to consider lineage for eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By a 5–4 vote last year, the task force narrowly defined an eligible person as an “individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That vote was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2022/04/californias-reparations-task-force/\">contentious and emotional\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Reparations vote\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The task force voted 6–3 Saturday to approve the recommendations for financial compensation. The three members who voted against it did so after changes they wanted failed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore on Saturday made several attempts to further codify the lineage-based definition in the task force’s final reports by adding a new chapter. That failed to garner majority support from the rest of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Moore requested a section of the final report be moved from one part to another, members of the Department of Justice staff who put the report together balked, saying the panel would have to rescind its prior vote and convene an additional meeting to redo the report’s structure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monica Montgomery Steppe, a task force member and San Diego City Council member, disagreed with them. But a majority of the task force went on to approve the final documents as presented with slight tweaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking on Sunday in Twitter Spaces, Moore said that meeting “procedure can be weaponized.” She declined to say more publicly about issues from the meeting. “Stay tuned for the ‘tell-all’ book, though,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force tentatively set its final meeting for June 29 in Sacramento. Members said they plan to hand the documents to members of Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Reparations Task Force Readies Recommendations Amid Concerns Over Outreach",
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"content": "\u003cp>California’s Reparations Task Force is about two months away from submitting its recommendations to the state Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the deadline nears, some task force members and observers are expressing concern about whether the body’s research is reaching people. And the recommendations will require broad public support to survive the intense scrutiny they will likely receive — from members of the Legislature and the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Monday, the task force released \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">a draft of its recommendations (PDF)\u003c/a>, including calculations for up to $1.2 million in compensation for qualifying residents. The task force is expected to finalize recommendations at its next meeting on \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/meetings\">Saturday in Oakland\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the last task force meeting in late March, callers during public comment spoke in opposition of reparations for the first time. In a few instances, the comments included racist stereotypes about Black people, revealing an ignorance of the state’s systemic discrimination against Black residents since its founding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Dr. Cheryl Grills, member, California Reparations Task Force\"]‘People don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things that actually contributed to us being where we’re at with communications. They’re just looking at the surface.’[/pullquote]“The fight for public opinion is now,” Chris Lodgson, a community organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, said at that meeting in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lodgson’s organization has been holding listening sessions throughout the state for two years to raise awareness in Black communities about the task force. He said he had hoped the task force would take on more of the work building public understanding of the state’s reparations endeavor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force named public engagement as a central goal at its first meeting in June 2021. Then it backed it up with money: In November 2021, the task force entered into a nearly $1 million contract with the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies to develop a series of public listening sessions across the state, and bring in a communications firm to support the sessions and publicize the task force’s findings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given the controversial nature of reparations in the United States, task force members emphasized that clear communication with the public and wide buy-in would be essential to the ultimate success of their recommendations. But a year and a half later, the publicity work has been delayed by infighting and complications with communication firms. The first three communications firms quit, and a fourth, Charles Communications Group, only started in September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are at the 11th hour, and the average Black person in California has no clue that this task force has been operating for the last two years,” said one unidentified caller during the late March meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11948414\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11948414\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman holds a face mask to the side in a building with a laptop in front of her and an American flag in the background inside a building.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Task force member Dr. Cheryl Grills speaks during the second day of the in-person California Reparations Task Force meeting at Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on April 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dr. Cheryl Grills, the task force member initially selected to lead the community engagement effort, acknowledged that the revolving door of communications firms had created confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It cost the task force a semblance of credibility,” Grills, director of the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University, told KQED during the March meeting. “People don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things that actually contributed to us being where we’re at with communications. They’re just looking at the surface.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re very late in the game, not because of the capacity or the skills of these communication firms, but because of the behavior of the chair,” Grills continued, referring to Kamilah Moore, the task force chair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first three firms left because of disagreements with Moore, according to Grills and the Bunche Center. The initial two, New York-based A—B and Los Angeles-based Young Communications, were hired together. A—B was to manage a national communications strategy while Young Communications would handle the statewide messaging. But by the winter of 2021, the relationship between Moore and the firms had soured.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label='The Latest on California Reparations' tag='california-reparations']In a recent interview with KQED, Moore said that she was skeptical of A—B because of the CEO’s comments critical of the African Descendants of Slaves movement. Moore is a strong supporter of lineage-based reparations for residents with ancestral connections to people enslaved in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills has spoken in favor of race-based reparations, which would have widened the eligibility pool to include anyone in the state who identifies as Black, regardless of a familial connection to an enslaved person. Experts testifying before the task force suggested this approach would likely face greater legal challenges because of state and federal laws prohibiting policies that favor or discriminate based on race and gender. In March 2022, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11909471/unpacking-reparations-eligibility-in-california\">the task force decided to make its reparations plan lineage-based\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Support of lineage-based reparations is central to the ADOS movement, and Moore felt the CEO’s criticism of ADOS implied A—B would not effectively promote the task force after it committed to a developing lineage-based reparations plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the April 2022 meeting, Grills reported that both firms felt their efforts were being questioned unfairly and in an offensive way by Moore. The firms said work with the task force had become toxic. Both firms resigned by the end of the month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Young Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an emailed statement, A—B said that it had ended its “engagement with the task force amicably,” but did not expand further.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, the Bunche Center and Grills hired Fenton Communications, one of the largest public interest communications firms in the country. According to Grills, Fenton’s previous relationship with UCLA allowed the Bunche Center to avoid a lengthy on-boarding process which, she said, was important considering the task force was already a year into its work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore, who was elected to help Grills direct the task force’s communications in April 2022, said she was excluded from the decision to hire Fenton. When she learned of the hiring, she said she asked for a meeting with the firm. Fenton quit during the meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11948415\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11948415\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman wearing glasses, a navy blue jacket and yellow and black designed shirt, shakes hands with a Black woman wearing a patterned hat and black shirt in a building with other people in the background.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Task force chair Kamilah Moore speaks with attendees during the second day of an in-person meeting of the California Reparations Task Force at Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on April 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Moore said she raised concerns about Fenton that were similar to those she had about A—B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I pointed out that many of their clients are fervent advocates of race-based reparations, which is fine, but also on top of that have also been very critical of lineage-based reparations,” Moore, an attorney and reparatory justice scholar, said. “I was asking these kinds of questions about potential conflicts and then the person who was running Fenton got really mad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills said that professional communications firms are capable of representing clients with opposing views without taking sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way she was expressing her concerns about some of these other clients that Fenton had felt like an unprofessional attack on their clients,” she added. “And they said, ‘We will not accept that. We will not tolerate that. We’re gonna quit before we even get started. We’re done.’ Literally within an hour.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fenton Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Communications Group, directed by Shawna Charles, was hired with just 10 months left in the task force’s work. In the time between the departure of Young Communications and A—B, and Charles’ start in September, the task force released its \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a>, the first government publication detailing the history and impact of anti-Black policies over more than 50 years. Its release received no communications support and, perhaps consequently, little fanfare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles was recommended to the Bunche Center by task force and Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. Within three months, Charles said, her interactions with Moore made her ready to quit, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore said Charles was producing low-quality work. Moore said she spent hours editing spelling and grammatical errors in press releases and social media posts Charles sent her, and that she was candid about her disapproval.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles said the mistakes were included in drafts, and that she expected editing to be part of the relationship between her firm and the task force. The errors, she said, were things that could be fixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s a big deal to some people, isn’t a big deal to other people,” she told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore disagreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It just feels like people think that Black Americans, particularly who descend from slaves, should be OK with third-rate services, like, ‘Oh, this is normal, you should be glad that there’s people who even wanna help with this type of thing,’” she said. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles told KQED that she sent an email to Moore and other task force members in December that said Moore’s criticism had become overwhelming and distracting from the work she was hired to do. “We expect you [Moore] to assume responsibility for the task force not having the support it needs,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At that point, if they had fired me that would have been fine with me,” said Charles, reflecting on the email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the task force meeting in December, Grills read an email from the director of the Bunche Center to the audience, which said Charles’ errors in the drafts were editable. The email faulted Moore for driving away firms and stymying the task force’s efforts to engage the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That day, the task force voted to remove Grills and Moore from their roles supervising communications. Two other members, Jovan Scott Lewis, a UC Berkeley professor and chair of the school’s Department of Geography, and state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), were selected to take their place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles said that with Moore no longer managing communications, things have gotten easier. “Now I’m not worried about every period, every comma,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But Grills said delays have cost the task force attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I think we would be in better shape if we had had a communications firm in place consistently pushing out the messaging and engaging the media,” she said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "As the deadline nears for California’s Reparations Task Force to submit its recommendations to the state Legislature, some task force members and observers are expressing concern about whether the body’s research is reaching people.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California’s Reparations Task Force is about two months away from submitting its recommendations to the state Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the deadline nears, some task force members and observers are expressing concern about whether the body’s research is reaching people. And the recommendations will require broad public support to survive the intense scrutiny they will likely receive — from members of the Legislature and the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Monday, the task force released \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda10-ch17-draft-05062023.pdf\">a draft of its recommendations (PDF)\u003c/a>, including calculations for up to $1.2 million in compensation for qualifying residents. The task force is expected to finalize recommendations at its next meeting on \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/meetings\">Saturday in Oakland\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the last task force meeting in late March, callers during public comment spoke in opposition of reparations for the first time. In a few instances, the comments included racist stereotypes about Black people, revealing an ignorance of the state’s systemic discrimination against Black residents since its founding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘People don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things that actually contributed to us being where we’re at with communications. They’re just looking at the surface.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“The fight for public opinion is now,” Chris Lodgson, a community organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, said at that meeting in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lodgson’s organization has been holding listening sessions throughout the state for two years to raise awareness in Black communities about the task force. He said he had hoped the task force would take on more of the work building public understanding of the state’s reparations endeavor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force named public engagement as a central goal at its first meeting in June 2021. Then it backed it up with money: In November 2021, the task force entered into a nearly $1 million contract with the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies to develop a series of public listening sessions across the state, and bring in a communications firm to support the sessions and publicize the task force’s findings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given the controversial nature of reparations in the United States, task force members emphasized that clear communication with the public and wide buy-in would be essential to the ultimate success of their recommendations. But a year and a half later, the publicity work has been delayed by infighting and complications with communication firms. The first three communications firms quit, and a fourth, Charles Communications Group, only started in September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are at the 11th hour, and the average Black person in California has no clue that this task force has been operating for the last two years,” said one unidentified caller during the late March meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11948414\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11948414\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman holds a face mask to the side in a building with a laptop in front of her and an American flag in the background inside a building.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55306_023_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Task force member Dr. Cheryl Grills speaks during the second day of the in-person California Reparations Task Force meeting at Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on April 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Dr. Cheryl Grills, the task force member initially selected to lead the community engagement effort, acknowledged that the revolving door of communications firms had created confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It cost the task force a semblance of credibility,” Grills, director of the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University, told KQED during the March meeting. “People don’t know all the behind-the-scenes things that actually contributed to us being where we’re at with communications. They’re just looking at the surface.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re very late in the game, not because of the capacity or the skills of these communication firms, but because of the behavior of the chair,” Grills continued, referring to Kamilah Moore, the task force chair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first three firms left because of disagreements with Moore, according to Grills and the Bunche Center. The initial two, New York-based A—B and Los Angeles-based Young Communications, were hired together. A—B was to manage a national communications strategy while Young Communications would handle the statewide messaging. But by the winter of 2021, the relationship between Moore and the firms had soured.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In a recent interview with KQED, Moore said that she was skeptical of A—B because of the CEO’s comments critical of the African Descendants of Slaves movement. Moore is a strong supporter of lineage-based reparations for residents with ancestral connections to people enslaved in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills has spoken in favor of race-based reparations, which would have widened the eligibility pool to include anyone in the state who identifies as Black, regardless of a familial connection to an enslaved person. Experts testifying before the task force suggested this approach would likely face greater legal challenges because of state and federal laws prohibiting policies that favor or discriminate based on race and gender. In March 2022, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11909471/unpacking-reparations-eligibility-in-california\">the task force decided to make its reparations plan lineage-based\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Support of lineage-based reparations is central to the ADOS movement, and Moore felt the CEO’s criticism of ADOS implied A—B would not effectively promote the task force after it committed to a developing lineage-based reparations plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the April 2022 meeting, Grills reported that both firms felt their efforts were being questioned unfairly and in an offensive way by Moore. The firms said work with the task force had become toxic. Both firms resigned by the end of the month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Young Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an emailed statement, A—B said that it had ended its “engagement with the task force amicably,” but did not expand further.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, the Bunche Center and Grills hired Fenton Communications, one of the largest public interest communications firms in the country. According to Grills, Fenton’s previous relationship with UCLA allowed the Bunche Center to avoid a lengthy on-boarding process which, she said, was important considering the task force was already a year into its work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore, who was elected to help Grills direct the task force’s communications in April 2022, said she was excluded from the decision to hire Fenton. When she learned of the hiring, she said she asked for a meeting with the firm. Fenton quit during the meeting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11948415\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11948415\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman wearing glasses, a navy blue jacket and yellow and black designed shirt, shakes hands with a Black woman wearing a patterned hat and black shirt in a building with other people in the background.\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/05/RS55334_044_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForce_04142022-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Task force chair Kamilah Moore speaks with attendees during the second day of an in-person meeting of the California Reparations Task Force at Third Baptist Church in San Francisco on April 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Moore said she raised concerns about Fenton that were similar to those she had about A—B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I pointed out that many of their clients are fervent advocates of race-based reparations, which is fine, but also on top of that have also been very critical of lineage-based reparations,” Moore, an attorney and reparatory justice scholar, said. “I was asking these kinds of questions about potential conflicts and then the person who was running Fenton got really mad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills said that professional communications firms are capable of representing clients with opposing views without taking sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way she was expressing her concerns about some of these other clients that Fenton had felt like an unprofessional attack on their clients,” she added. “And they said, ‘We will not accept that. We will not tolerate that. We’re gonna quit before we even get started. We’re done.’ Literally within an hour.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fenton Communications did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Communications Group, directed by Shawna Charles, was hired with just 10 months left in the task force’s work. In the time between the departure of Young Communications and A—B, and Charles’ start in September, the task force released its \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a>, the first government publication detailing the history and impact of anti-Black policies over more than 50 years. Its release received no communications support and, perhaps consequently, little fanfare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles was recommended to the Bunche Center by task force and Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer. Within three months, Charles said, her interactions with Moore made her ready to quit, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore said Charles was producing low-quality work. Moore said she spent hours editing spelling and grammatical errors in press releases and social media posts Charles sent her, and that she was candid about her disapproval.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles said the mistakes were included in drafts, and that she expected editing to be part of the relationship between her firm and the task force. The errors, she said, were things that could be fixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s a big deal to some people, isn’t a big deal to other people,” she told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore disagreed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It just feels like people think that Black Americans, particularly who descend from slaves, should be OK with third-rate services, like, ‘Oh, this is normal, you should be glad that there’s people who even wanna help with this type of thing,’” she said. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles told KQED that she sent an email to Moore and other task force members in December that said Moore’s criticism had become overwhelming and distracting from the work she was hired to do. “We expect you [Moore] to assume responsibility for the task force not having the support it needs,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At that point, if they had fired me that would have been fine with me,” said Charles, reflecting on the email.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the task force meeting in December, Grills read an email from the director of the Bunche Center to the audience, which said Charles’ errors in the drafts were editable. The email faulted Moore for driving away firms and stymying the task force’s efforts to engage the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That day, the task force voted to remove Grills and Moore from their roles supervising communications. Two other members, Jovan Scott Lewis, a UC Berkeley professor and chair of the school’s Department of Geography, and state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), were selected to take their place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles said that with Moore no longer managing communications, things have gotten easier. “Now I’m not worried about every period, every comma,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But Grills said delays have cost the task force attention. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I think we would be in better shape if we had had a communications firm in place consistently pushing out the messaging and engaging the media,” she said. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Imagine the year is 2033. The California American Freedmen Affairs Agency (CAFAA), an independent body created at the recommendation of California’s Reparations Task Force, has existed for nearly a decade. The agency is funded by an inheritance estate tax on the state’s wealthiest 1%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label='The Latest on California Reparations' tag='california-reparations']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-agenda19-21-policy-032023.pdf\">the initial concept recommended in 2023 (PDF)\u003c/a>, this agency works diligently to identify and compensate descendants of formerly enslaved Black Californians. Staff genealogists assist people in tracing their ancestry. Claims for elders are expedited. Community figures like \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11873838/how-some-elders-are-working-to-preserve-the-legacy-of-the-black-panther-party-in-oakland\">former Black Panther elder Buffalo Sojourn\u003c/a> are now able to afford housing with the money paid out by CAFAA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Freedman’s Bank serves the descendants of the enslaved, and a dedicated media team continues to educate the public on the legacy and impact of slavery in the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back to the current moment. The task force held meetings on March 29–30, and members continued to debate reparations recommendations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Should there be a residency requirement? How should compensation be determined? How will the task force ensure the Legislature understands the methodology of the recommendations?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force, the first statewide body to study historic harms endured by Black people, has been working for almost two years to create a comprehensive plan to repair that harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At these meetings, California’s Reparations Task Force studied and developed reparation proposals for African Americans, and the body approved methods for calculating how much anti-Black racism embedded in state policy has cost Black residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945869\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"Rows of men and women sit in attendance listening intently to speakers during a California Reparations Task Force meeting. Many video cameras on tripods can be seen in the background.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A crowd listens during opening remarks at a California Reparations Task Force meeting in Sacramento on March 3, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The task force has been advised by a team of five economists to calculate the lost wealth. The most recent meetings garnered international media attention because of the unofficial draft calculations that totaled $800 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Justin Hansford, professor, Howard University School of Law\"]‘California’s program is path-breaking. It’s important for the public to read the reports and to digest the information.’[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“California’s program is path-breaking,” said Justin Hansford, a Howard University School of Law professor and a member of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, in an interview with KQED. “It’s important for the public to read the reports and to digest the information.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He thinks that in 10 years, half of the states in the country will have a reparations commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California task force could provide a blueprint for other states to follow. It could also publish a well-researched report that gets put on a shelf to collect dust.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What are these calculations, and how do they work?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://economicservicesolutions.com/about/\">Kaycea Campbell\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://publicpolicy.uconn.edu/person/thomas-craemer/\">Thomas Craemer\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://scholars.duke.edu/person/william.darity\">William A. Darity Jr.\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/author/11616-a-kirsten-mullen/\">A. Kirsten Mullen\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://aflcio.org/policy-experts/william-e-spriggs\">William E. Spriggs\u003c/a> are a team of economists, lecturers and college professors with different background specializations who came up with the calculations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we are estimating is not reparations,” Craemer said during his presentation last month. “What we are estimating is losses to the African American descendants of the enslaved in the United States.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said the calculations can be used to come up with determinations of reparations, but they are not necessarily identical. “The task force can go above and beyond because some losses are frankly very difficult to estimate,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The draft recommendations also note that the calculations are not exhaustive, nor are they a final estimate of losses. Rather, they are “a very cautious initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, for which the State of California is responsible,” states the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report also “recommends that the Legislature make a ‘down payment’ on reparations with an immediate disbursement of a meaningful amount of funds to each member of the eligible class.” The draft then states the initial down payment is “the beginning of a conversation about historical injustices, not the end of it.” It does not specify what would constitute a meaningful amount.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What did the task force approve?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The task force approved a way to calculate how much wealth has been denied to California’s Black residents because of anti-Black policies. It also authorized a methodology for calculating those losses by focusing on five specific harms:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1. Health harms\u003cbr>\n2. Disproportionate Black mass incarceration and over-policing\u003cbr>\n3. Housing discrimination\u003cbr>\n4. Unjust property takings by eminent domain\u003cbr>\n5. Devaluation of Black businesses\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first three categories — health harms, Black mass incarceration and over-policing, and housing discrimination — the task force and the team of economic experts identified full calculations along with draft numbers. For the remaining categories, they were only able to establish a method for calculating losses. The draft report notes that the data needed to conduct calculations in time for publication was not readily available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945887\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945887\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with long, black braids and eyeglasses wear a yellow, floral blouse and black vest. She stands in front of a podium with a skinny microphone in the front of her face as she speaks.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Economist Kaycea Campbell gives expert analysis during a California Reparations Task Force meeting in Sacramento on March 3, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One example, disproportionate incarceration, is when a racial group is incarcerated for certain crimes at a rate higher than their percentage of the population. The task force decided to look specifically at drug arrests from 1970 to 2020. Studies have shown that people use and sell illegal drugs at essentially the same rates across racial groups. But during the 50-year period, Black Californians were arrested and charged with drug crimes more than any other racial group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The five-part equation goes like this: The number of people who are incarcerated who are above the percentage of the population, times the length of the average felony drug sentence, times the average state income of a state employee, plus a certain amount of money to repay people’s loss of freedom. Then, all of that is divided by the Black population of California in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using the formula, the estimate of losses the team of economic experts came up with for disproportionate incarceration is approximately $125,000 per California Black resident in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This breaks down to about $2,500 per year of living in California. This means that someone who can trace their lineage as an African American descendant of a chattel-enslaved person or as the descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century could qualify — if the person lives in California. It should be noted that the residency requirements were not finalized or approved during the last meeting, and the task force could leave it up to the Legislature to determine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full math behind the calculations and rationale can be found in the expert team summary, economic report and draft report:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Expert team summary presentation (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-expert-teampres-summary-03292023-03302023.pdf\">9-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Draft economic expert report (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-draft-economic-expert-rpt-03292023-03302023.pdf\">38-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Draft report section (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-draft-ch17-03292023-03302023.pdf\">40-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003ch2>What happens next?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The next task force meeting is May 6. The final meeting will be on June 30.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final report and recommendations will be sent to the state Legislature, but Reggie Jones-Sawyer, one of the two state legislators on the task force, said deliberations won’t start until next year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945888\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945888\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a nice, gray suit and pink tie sits at a dais with his arms crossed. He has eyeglasses. His face is serious.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a member of the California Reparations Task Force, listens to public input on reparations at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. \u003ccite>(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Legislation could go into effect as early as 2025, according to Jones-Sawyer. But ironing out all the details of how the recommendations would be enacted will not be an easy task.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no such thing as an easy bill or an easy budget request,” he said. “You don’t know until you start talking to each individual legislator.”[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, member, California Reparations Task Force\"]‘The most important part of what we have to do is education. There should be reparations. We need to let people know why there should be reparations.’[/pullquote]For any of the task force’s recommendations to be instituted, state lawmakers will have to introduce and approve legislation. Then the governor will have to sign it into law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Department of Justice, at the recommendation of the task force, is in the process of hiring curriculum experts to turn the research into lessons that can be used in classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important part of what we have to do is education,” Jones-Sawyer said. “There should be reparations. We need to let people know why there should be reparations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/afinney\">Annelise Finney\u003c/a> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-agenda19-21-policy-032023.pdf\">the initial concept recommended in 2023 (PDF)\u003c/a>, this agency works diligently to identify and compensate descendants of formerly enslaved Black Californians. Staff genealogists assist people in tracing their ancestry. Claims for elders are expedited. Community figures like \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11873838/how-some-elders-are-working-to-preserve-the-legacy-of-the-black-panther-party-in-oakland\">former Black Panther elder Buffalo Sojourn\u003c/a> are now able to afford housing with the money paid out by CAFAA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Freedman’s Bank serves the descendants of the enslaved, and a dedicated media team continues to educate the public on the legacy and impact of slavery in the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back to the current moment. The task force held meetings on March 29–30, and members continued to debate reparations recommendations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Should there be a residency requirement? How should compensation be determined? How will the task force ensure the Legislature understands the methodology of the recommendations?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force, the first statewide body to study historic harms endured by Black people, has been working for almost two years to create a comprehensive plan to repair that harm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At these meetings, California’s Reparations Task Force studied and developed reparation proposals for African Americans, and the body approved methods for calculating how much anti-Black racism embedded in state policy has cost Black residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945869\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"Rows of men and women sit in attendance listening intently to speakers during a California Reparations Task Force meeting. Many video cameras on tripods can be seen in the background.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63311_003_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A crowd listens during opening remarks at a California Reparations Task Force meeting in Sacramento on March 3, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The task force has been advised by a team of five economists to calculate the lost wealth. The most recent meetings garnered international media attention because of the unofficial draft calculations that totaled $800 billion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘California’s program is path-breaking. It’s important for the public to read the reports and to digest the information.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“California’s program is path-breaking,” said Justin Hansford, a Howard University School of Law professor and a member of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, in an interview with KQED. “It’s important for the public to read the reports and to digest the information.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He thinks that in 10 years, half of the states in the country will have a reparations commission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California task force could provide a blueprint for other states to follow. It could also publish a well-researched report that gets put on a shelf to collect dust.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What are these calculations, and how do they work?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://economicservicesolutions.com/about/\">Kaycea Campbell\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://publicpolicy.uconn.edu/person/thomas-craemer/\">Thomas Craemer\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://scholars.duke.edu/person/william.darity\">William A. Darity Jr.\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/author/11616-a-kirsten-mullen/\">A. Kirsten Mullen\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://aflcio.org/policy-experts/william-e-spriggs\">William E. Spriggs\u003c/a> are a team of economists, lecturers and college professors with different background specializations who came up with the calculations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"link1": "https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we are estimating is not reparations,” Craemer said during his presentation last month. “What we are estimating is losses to the African American descendants of the enslaved in the United States.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said the calculations can be used to come up with determinations of reparations, but they are not necessarily identical. “The task force can go above and beyond because some losses are frankly very difficult to estimate,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The draft recommendations also note that the calculations are not exhaustive, nor are they a final estimate of losses. Rather, they are “a very cautious initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, for which the State of California is responsible,” states the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report also “recommends that the Legislature make a ‘down payment’ on reparations with an immediate disbursement of a meaningful amount of funds to each member of the eligible class.” The draft then states the initial down payment is “the beginning of a conversation about historical injustices, not the end of it.” It does not specify what would constitute a meaningful amount.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What did the task force approve?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The task force approved a way to calculate how much wealth has been denied to California’s Black residents because of anti-Black policies. It also authorized a methodology for calculating those losses by focusing on five specific harms:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>1. Health harms\u003cbr>\n2. Disproportionate Black mass incarceration and over-policing\u003cbr>\n3. Housing discrimination\u003cbr>\n4. Unjust property takings by eminent domain\u003cbr>\n5. Devaluation of Black businesses\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the first three categories — health harms, Black mass incarceration and over-policing, and housing discrimination — the task force and the team of economic experts identified full calculations along with draft numbers. For the remaining categories, they were only able to establish a method for calculating losses. The draft report notes that the data needed to conduct calculations in time for publication was not readily available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945887\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945887\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with long, black braids and eyeglasses wear a yellow, floral blouse and black vest. She stands in front of a podium with a skinny microphone in the front of her face as she speaks.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/RS63349_041_KQED_CAReparationsTaskForceSac_03032023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Economist Kaycea Campbell gives expert analysis during a California Reparations Task Force meeting in Sacramento on March 3, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>One example, disproportionate incarceration, is when a racial group is incarcerated for certain crimes at a rate higher than their percentage of the population. The task force decided to look specifically at drug arrests from 1970 to 2020. Studies have shown that people use and sell illegal drugs at essentially the same rates across racial groups. But during the 50-year period, Black Californians were arrested and charged with drug crimes more than any other racial group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The five-part equation goes like this: The number of people who are incarcerated who are above the percentage of the population, times the length of the average felony drug sentence, times the average state income of a state employee, plus a certain amount of money to repay people’s loss of freedom. Then, all of that is divided by the Black population of California in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using the formula, the estimate of losses the team of economic experts came up with for disproportionate incarceration is approximately $125,000 per California Black resident in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This breaks down to about $2,500 per year of living in California. This means that someone who can trace their lineage as an African American descendant of a chattel-enslaved person or as the descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century could qualify — if the person lives in California. It should be noted that the residency requirements were not finalized or approved during the last meeting, and the task force could leave it up to the Legislature to determine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full math behind the calculations and rationale can be found in the expert team summary, economic report and draft report:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Expert team summary presentation (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-expert-teampres-summary-03292023-03302023.pdf\">9-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Draft economic expert report (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-draft-economic-expert-rpt-03292023-03302023.pdf\">38-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Draft report section (\u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-agenda7-draft-ch17-03292023-03302023.pdf\">40-page PDF\u003c/a>)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003ch2>What happens next?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The next task force meeting is May 6. The final meeting will be on June 30.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final report and recommendations will be sent to the state Legislature, but Reggie Jones-Sawyer, one of the two state legislators on the task force, said deliberations won’t start until next year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945888\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945888\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a nice, gray suit and pink tie sits at a dais with his arms crossed. He has eyeglasses. His face is serious.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/04/GettyImages-1243475670-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a member of the California Reparations Task Force, listens to public input on reparations at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. \u003ccite>(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Legislation could go into effect as early as 2025, according to Jones-Sawyer. But ironing out all the details of how the recommendations would be enacted will not be an easy task.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no such thing as an easy bill or an easy budget request,” he said. “You don’t know until you start talking to each individual legislator.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘The most important part of what we have to do is education. There should be reparations. We need to let people know why there should be reparations.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>For any of the task force’s recommendations to be instituted, state lawmakers will have to introduce and approve legislation. Then the governor will have to sign it into law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Department of Justice, at the recommendation of the task force, is in the process of hiring curriculum experts to turn the research into lessons that can be used in classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important part of what we have to do is education,” Jones-Sawyer said. “There should be reparations. We need to let people know why there should be reparations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/afinney\">Annelise Finney\u003c/a> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Proving Lineage for Reparations? Concerns Loom Over Feasibility, Emotional Toll for Black Californians",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lison Ford grew up on Parker Street in South Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her mother was a postal worker — everything from a mail sorter to a window clerk. When she had weekend shifts, she’d take Ford and her younger sister, Sabrina, across the Bay Bridge to their great-grandmother’s house in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winfrey Broadnax Ford, known as Granny Ford to the family, had Ford and Sabrina help tend the small garden in the backyard of the Marina-style home she owned in the Bayview neighborhood, a section of San Francisco where Black people once were a majority of the residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945032\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11945032 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman wearing a jean, long-sleeved shirt and black T-shirt underneath sits on a couch inside a living room with her father to the right. He wears a gray, hooded sweatshirt. The two smile as they look down at a photo album together.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alison Ford and her father, Algiin Ford, look through a family photo album in Berkeley on March 2, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ford was always interested in her family’s history, but it wasn’t until Granny Ford, her father’s grandmother, died in 2015 — at age 102 — that she really began seeking out information about the distant relatives she only knew vaguely from Granny Ford’s stories. She wanted more context about who she was.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Alison Ford\"]‘Growing up, I knew that I was only a couple generations removed from slavery.’[/pullquote]Ford ultimately traced her lineage to generations of enslaved ancestors, all the way back to her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Isaac.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[He] was probably a slave until he was my age,” said Ford, 44. “That is mind-blowing to me. And he then went on to sharecrop and have kids that did the same. But his grandkids were literate and landowners.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always felt connected to that part of my family history, because I spent so much time with my great-grandmother,” she continued. “Growing up, I knew that I was only a couple generations removed from slavery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s Reparations Task Force is \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California\u003c/a>. Last summer, the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">task force released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists today. This summer, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]If the task force’s recommendations are adopted by the state Legislature, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089629383/california-group-votes-to-limit-reparations-to-slave-descendants\">many Black Californians will have to prove their eligibility for reparations\u003c/a>. To help with this, the preliminary report proposed establishing a California African American Freedmen Affairs Agency to “support potential claimants with genealogical research to confirm eligibility.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 5–4 vote in March 2022, the task force voted in favor of lineage-based reparations that would be “determined by an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the U.S. prior to the end of the 19th century.” But there’s still a lot yet to be finalized about what kind of specific documentation would be required to prove eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eligibility has loomed over the first-in-the-nation statewide task force since it began meeting in June 2021. There’s a wide spectrum of opinion on how feasible it will be to document eligibility — and considerable concern about the emotional toll Black Californians will have to pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force will continue the debate on eligibility Wednesday and Thursday in Sacramento, including defining the parameters of a residency requirement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ford allowed me to observe a session with a genealogy consultant, offering a window into the process of documenting ancestry. Having a deeper understanding of what her ancestors endured brought the weight of their existence into sharper focus.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Alison Ford\"]‘Such a huge net of people had to go through so many traumatic things for me to be here having this conversation.’[/pullquote]“Such a huge net of people had to go through so many traumatic things for me to be here having this conversation,” she told KQED. “I don’t think that there’s an amount of money that would make it right, but I think that it serves to show that there has just been generational trauma that has very directly led to the financial disenfranchisement of African Americans in this country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a person can track their ancestry back to the 1870 census, and their relative was living in a state that practiced enslavement, some genealogists feel it is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the ancestor likely was enslaved. The census tracked additional components, like whether a person could read and write; that could lend support to the likelihood the person was enslaved since enslavers often \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hgse/status/1227940488579174400?lang=en\">forbid the people they held captive from becoming literate\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.archives.gov/files/research/census/african-american/census-1790-1930.pdf\">Black people were not counted as part of the country’s population until the 1870 census (PDF)\u003c/a>, the first undertaken after the Civil War. That’s because, until then, enslaved people were considered property, said Sharon Morgan, who runs \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/groups/13488807931/about/\">Our Black Ancestry\u003c/a>, a Facebook genealogy group with more than 36,000 members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For people who were enslaved, we were not considered people,” said Morgan, a genealogist in Macon, Mississippi, who has served as a consultant for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.aahgs.org/\">Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society\u003c/a>. “You find them in property records.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many genealogists, including Morgan, said they were only able to access some records by sifting through physical archives. Morgan originally traveled to Mississippi, where the vestiges of enslavement show in glaring racial disparities, to do research on a distant relative who, she said, had 17 children fathered by the nephew of her enslaver. “I came to Mississippi to write a book about it, and I ended up staying. And my book still isn’t finished,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be lucky enough to find a will, a deed or some other family papers, farm records — something else that will identify your ancestor,” Morgan continued. “But there’s another problem, because those lists are generally only by first name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kellie Farrish, a genealogist based in the East Bay, said the scavenger hunt described by Morgan is mostly a thing of the past because of the digitization of records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945036\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945036\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with shoulder-length dark hair and a navy business suit speaks with a microphone in hand at the California Ballroom in Oakland.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1278\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kellie Farrish speaks about tracing genealogy and locating enslaved ancestors during a California Reparations Task Force listening session at the California Ballroom in Oakland on May 28, 2022. The session was sponsored by the task force and hosted by the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It used to be a lot of traveling,” said Farrish, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JybSOSrlj9k\">presented at a task force meeting in March 2022\u003c/a>. “And [the records are] in boxes, if they’re even maintained at all. That world just doesn’t exist anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrish, who owns \u003ca href=\"https://www.reparativegenealogy.com/\">Reparative Genealogy\u003c/a>, which helps Black people trace their lineage to the earliest ancestor documented in the United States, has been working in genealogy for more than 15 years. The first time we talked on the phone, she told me to think about navigating genealogy like navigating geography: Drivers used a road atlas before printing out MapQuest directions; now they use Google Maps on their phones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s the same with genealogy,” she said. “This is what ancestry has become. And the group that needs to realize that the most is African Americans. As we build out everyone’s [family] tree, this work becomes easier and easier and easier.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we dug into the past, details about Granny Ford’s life, like her leaving Arkansas as a young mother to escape what she’d described as an unhealthy marriage, are reflected in government records. Harry Broadnax, Granny Ford’s grandfather, was recorded in the 1870 census, though his surname was misspelled as “Brodinax.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945024\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 3575px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945024\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session.png\" alt=\"A computer screen shot of a Zoom conversation between three women. On the screen, a census record of Harry Broadnax from 1870. Broadnax was the enslaved ancestor of Alison Ford.\" width=\"3575\" height=\"1889\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session.png 3575w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-800x423.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1020x539.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1536x812.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-2048x1082.png 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1920x1015.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3575px) 100vw, 3575px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kellie Farrish (top) goes over the 1870 census record of Harry Broadnax (misspelled as ‘Brodinax’), the enslaved ancestor of Alison Ford (bottom), as reporter Mary Franklin Harvin (center) observes. To be eligible for lineage-based reparations, Black Californians will have to prove they are descended from a chattel enslaved person or from a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Alison Ford)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Broadnax, who was Isaac’s son, was born in 1846 in Arkansas 15 years before the start of the Civil War. In 1860, a year before the war began, about a quarter of the state’s population was enslaved. “He got to experience a lot of life [after slavery], but then he also experienced a lot of life being a slave,” Farrish said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1870, Broadnax was a 24-year-old farm laborer in Union County, Arkansas, most likely sharecropping on the land where his ancestors had been enslaved. Broadnax was illiterate, but records show the children he raised with his wife, Cloie, could read and write at a young age.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Broadnax] doesn’t have time to go to school, but they’re going to make sure that John and Wallace and Fred and M.H. and Clara go to school,” Farrish said as she scrolled through the records for the Broadnax children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I asked Ford how she felt after combing through census records, draft cards and more.[aside postID=news_11942302 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/blackminer.jpg']“I keep going back to the literacy,” said Ford, who lives in Los Angeles and works in the finance industry. “My family is really big on words. My grandmother was, up until her last few weeks on Earth, [she’d] wake up in the morning and ask for her eyeglasses and the newspaper. And I would say, ‘Let me read it to you, Granny.’ And she’s like, ‘As long as these eyes work, I have to do it myself.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cheryl Grills, director of the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University and a task force member, voted against lineage-based reparations because of the trauma associated with searching for enslaved ancestors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not every Black person wants to do this genealogy thing. It could be triggering,” Grills said. “It could be retraumatizing because [of] what the family had to go through, what the family suffered and endured.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to free and low-cost online genealogy community forums like Our Black Ancestry, Ancestry.com has an agreement with many public libraries that allows users to access the site for free. \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/en/\">FamilySearch.org\u003c/a>, which is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is also free. The Bay Area has more than a dozen physical \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/centers/locations/\">FamilySearch centers\u003c/a>, with many more throughout the state; the centers offer Zoom support groups that \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Oakland_California_FamilySearch_Library/Classes_and_Workshops\">specialize in African American genealogy\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some might be hesitant to use genealogical services offered by \u003ca href=\"https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/09/22/mormon-church-lds-black-racism\">the Mormon church, which has a documented history of racism\u003c/a>. But Farrish points out that there are few industries in the country that haven’t been buttressed by slavery or racism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s your ancestry information, and they are holding it whether or not you seek it from them,” she said.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Cheryl Grills, director, Psychology Applied Research Center, Loyola Marymount University\"]‘I think it’s going to be very important that we have alternatives for folks who legitimately just cannot establish the lineage criteria.’[/pullquote]Hiring a professional like Farrish to do individualized genealogical research can be costly. According to the Association of Professional Genealogists, hourly rates for \u003ca href=\"https://www.apgen.org/cpages/how-to-hire-a-professional-genealogist\">genealogical consultations typically start around $30 an hour and climb to over $200 per hour\u003c/a>, depending on the experience level of the genealogist. A basic Ancestry.com subscription costs $25 per month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills said some people will have a difficult time tracing family lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it’s going to be very important that we have alternatives for folks who legitimately just cannot establish the lineage criteria,” she said. “We don’t want to further injure the African American community because we made a decision that seemed to be right at the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before settling in California, Granny Ford lived in Texas. A single mother, she raised four children in the home she bought on Athens Street in San Francisco. For generations, Ford’s ancestors owned land and homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945037\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 663px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945037\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A grandmotherly figure with curly, gray hair sits in a wooden arm chair smiling for the camera. Her hands delicately placed on her knees as she smiles for the camera.\" width=\"663\" height=\"953\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut.jpg 663w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut-160x230.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 663px) 100vw, 663px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Winfrey Broadnax Ford, known as Granny Ford to her family. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Alison Ford)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ford, who recalled the tomatoes and herbs Granny Ford grew in her backyard and at a community garden in the neighborhood, can’t afford to buy a house where she lives and works. According to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Public Policy Institute of California, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-housing-divide/\">Black homeownership rate in the state is 36.8%\u003c/a>, about 26% lower than the rate for white households. “To a large extent, the racial homeownership gap reflects persistent income inequalities,” the analysts note, while pointing out that the median income for white households in the state is 65% higher than Black households.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I do believe that the fact that I have not yet bought a home is tied to my choice to remain in California,” said Ford, who once considered moving to Georgia, a state where the \u003ca href=\"https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/housing-finance-policy-center/projects/forecasting-state-and-national-trends-household-formation-and-homeownership/georgia\">homeownership rate for Black people is 47.6%\u003c/a>, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve chosen to remain in California, primarily, because this is where my family is,” Ford continued. “Sometimes I regret not leaving, but I wouldn’t want to be terribly far from my parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Eligibility has loomed over California's first-in-the-nation reparations task force since it was formed. There’s a wide spectrum of opinion on how feasible proving lineage will be — and considerable concern about the emotional toll Black Californians will have to pay.",
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"title": "Proving Lineage for Reparations? Concerns Loom Over Feasibility, Emotional Toll for Black Californians | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">A\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>lison Ford grew up on Parker Street in South Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her mother was a postal worker — everything from a mail sorter to a window clerk. When she had weekend shifts, she’d take Ford and her younger sister, Sabrina, across the Bay Bridge to their great-grandmother’s house in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winfrey Broadnax Ford, known as Granny Ford to the family, had Ford and Sabrina help tend the small garden in the backyard of the Marina-style home she owned in the Bayview neighborhood, a section of San Francisco where Black people once were a majority of the residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945032\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11945032 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman wearing a jean, long-sleeved shirt and black T-shirt underneath sits on a couch inside a living room with her father to the right. He wears a gray, hooded sweatshirt. The two smile as they look down at a photo album together.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63487_012_KQED_AlisonFordBerkeley_03022023-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alison Ford and her father, Algiin Ford, look through a family photo album in Berkeley on March 2, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ford was always interested in her family’s history, but it wasn’t until Granny Ford, her father’s grandmother, died in 2015 — at age 102 — that she really began seeking out information about the distant relatives she only knew vaguely from Granny Ford’s stories. She wanted more context about who she was.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘Growing up, I knew that I was only a couple generations removed from slavery.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Ford ultimately traced her lineage to generations of enslaved ancestors, all the way back to her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Isaac.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[He] was probably a slave until he was my age,” said Ford, 44. “That is mind-blowing to me. And he then went on to sharecrop and have kids that did the same. But his grandkids were literate and landowners.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve always felt connected to that part of my family history, because I spent so much time with my great-grandmother,” she continued. “Growing up, I knew that I was only a couple generations removed from slavery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s Reparations Task Force is \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California\u003c/a>. Last summer, the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">task force released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists today. This summer, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>If the task force’s recommendations are adopted by the state Legislature, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089629383/california-group-votes-to-limit-reparations-to-slave-descendants\">many Black Californians will have to prove their eligibility for reparations\u003c/a>. To help with this, the preliminary report proposed establishing a California African American Freedmen Affairs Agency to “support potential claimants with genealogical research to confirm eligibility.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 5–4 vote in March 2022, the task force voted in favor of lineage-based reparations that would be “determined by an individual being an African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free Black person living in the U.S. prior to the end of the 19th century.” But there’s still a lot yet to be finalized about what kind of specific documentation would be required to prove eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eligibility has loomed over the first-in-the-nation statewide task force since it began meeting in June 2021. There’s a wide spectrum of opinion on how feasible it will be to document eligibility — and considerable concern about the emotional toll Black Californians will have to pay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force will continue the debate on eligibility Wednesday and Thursday in Sacramento, including defining the parameters of a residency requirement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ford allowed me to observe a session with a genealogy consultant, offering a window into the process of documenting ancestry. Having a deeper understanding of what her ancestors endured brought the weight of their existence into sharper focus.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘Such a huge net of people had to go through so many traumatic things for me to be here having this conversation.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Such a huge net of people had to go through so many traumatic things for me to be here having this conversation,” she told KQED. “I don’t think that there’s an amount of money that would make it right, but I think that it serves to show that there has just been generational trauma that has very directly led to the financial disenfranchisement of African Americans in this country.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a person can track their ancestry back to the 1870 census, and their relative was living in a state that practiced enslavement, some genealogists feel it is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the ancestor likely was enslaved. The census tracked additional components, like whether a person could read and write; that could lend support to the likelihood the person was enslaved since enslavers often \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hgse/status/1227940488579174400?lang=en\">forbid the people they held captive from becoming literate\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.archives.gov/files/research/census/african-american/census-1790-1930.pdf\">Black people were not counted as part of the country’s population until the 1870 census (PDF)\u003c/a>, the first undertaken after the Civil War. That’s because, until then, enslaved people were considered property, said Sharon Morgan, who runs \u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/groups/13488807931/about/\">Our Black Ancestry\u003c/a>, a Facebook genealogy group with more than 36,000 members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For people who were enslaved, we were not considered people,” said Morgan, a genealogist in Macon, Mississippi, who has served as a consultant for the \u003ca href=\"https://www.aahgs.org/\">Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society\u003c/a>. “You find them in property records.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many genealogists, including Morgan, said they were only able to access some records by sifting through physical archives. Morgan originally traveled to Mississippi, where the vestiges of enslavement show in glaring racial disparities, to do research on a distant relative who, she said, had 17 children fathered by the nephew of her enslaver. “I came to Mississippi to write a book about it, and I ended up staying. And my book still isn’t finished,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be lucky enough to find a will, a deed or some other family papers, farm records — something else that will identify your ancestor,” Morgan continued. “But there’s another problem, because those lists are generally only by first name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kellie Farrish, a genealogist based in the East Bay, said the scavenger hunt described by Morgan is mostly a thing of the past because of the digitization of records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945036\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945036\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with shoulder-length dark hair and a navy business suit speaks with a microphone in hand at the California Ballroom in Oakland.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1278\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS56257_005_KQED_OaklandReparationsListeningSession_05282022-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kellie Farrish speaks about tracing genealogy and locating enslaved ancestors during a California Reparations Task Force listening session at the California Ballroom in Oakland on May 28, 2022. The session was sponsored by the task force and hosted by the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It used to be a lot of traveling,” said Farrish, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JybSOSrlj9k\">presented at a task force meeting in March 2022\u003c/a>. “And [the records are] in boxes, if they’re even maintained at all. That world just doesn’t exist anymore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farrish, who owns \u003ca href=\"https://www.reparativegenealogy.com/\">Reparative Genealogy\u003c/a>, which helps Black people trace their lineage to the earliest ancestor documented in the United States, has been working in genealogy for more than 15 years. The first time we talked on the phone, she told me to think about navigating genealogy like navigating geography: Drivers used a road atlas before printing out MapQuest directions; now they use Google Maps on their phones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s the same with genealogy,” she said. “This is what ancestry has become. And the group that needs to realize that the most is African Americans. As we build out everyone’s [family] tree, this work becomes easier and easier and easier.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As we dug into the past, details about Granny Ford’s life, like her leaving Arkansas as a young mother to escape what she’d described as an unhealthy marriage, are reflected in government records. Harry Broadnax, Granny Ford’s grandfather, was recorded in the 1870 census, though his surname was misspelled as “Brodinax.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945024\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 3575px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945024\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session.png\" alt=\"A computer screen shot of a Zoom conversation between three women. On the screen, a census record of Harry Broadnax from 1870. Broadnax was the enslaved ancestor of Alison Ford.\" width=\"3575\" height=\"1889\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session.png 3575w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-800x423.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1020x539.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-160x85.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1536x812.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-2048x1082.png 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/Farrish-Ford-Genealogy-Session-1920x1015.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3575px) 100vw, 3575px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kellie Farrish (top) goes over the 1870 census record of Harry Broadnax (misspelled as ‘Brodinax’), the enslaved ancestor of Alison Ford (bottom), as reporter Mary Franklin Harvin (center) observes. To be eligible for lineage-based reparations, Black Californians will have to prove they are descended from a chattel enslaved person or from a free Black person living in the US prior to the end of the 19th century. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Alison Ford)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Broadnax, who was Isaac’s son, was born in 1846 in Arkansas 15 years before the start of the Civil War. In 1860, a year before the war began, about a quarter of the state’s population was enslaved. “He got to experience a lot of life [after slavery], but then he also experienced a lot of life being a slave,” Farrish said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1870, Broadnax was a 24-year-old farm laborer in Union County, Arkansas, most likely sharecropping on the land where his ancestors had been enslaved. Broadnax was illiterate, but records show the children he raised with his wife, Cloie, could read and write at a young age.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Broadnax] doesn’t have time to go to school, but they’re going to make sure that John and Wallace and Fred and M.H. and Clara go to school,” Farrish said as she scrolled through the records for the Broadnax children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I asked Ford how she felt after combing through census records, draft cards and more.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I keep going back to the literacy,” said Ford, who lives in Los Angeles and works in the finance industry. “My family is really big on words. My grandmother was, up until her last few weeks on Earth, [she’d] wake up in the morning and ask for her eyeglasses and the newspaper. And I would say, ‘Let me read it to you, Granny.’ And she’s like, ‘As long as these eyes work, I have to do it myself.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cheryl Grills, director of the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University and a task force member, voted against lineage-based reparations because of the trauma associated with searching for enslaved ancestors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not every Black person wants to do this genealogy thing. It could be triggering,” Grills said. “It could be retraumatizing because [of] what the family had to go through, what the family suffered and endured.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to free and low-cost online genealogy community forums like Our Black Ancestry, Ancestry.com has an agreement with many public libraries that allows users to access the site for free. \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/en/\">FamilySearch.org\u003c/a>, which is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is also free. The Bay Area has more than a dozen physical \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/centers/locations/\">FamilySearch centers\u003c/a>, with many more throughout the state; the centers offer Zoom support groups that \u003ca href=\"https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Oakland_California_FamilySearch_Library/Classes_and_Workshops\">specialize in African American genealogy\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some might be hesitant to use genealogical services offered by \u003ca href=\"https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/09/22/mormon-church-lds-black-racism\">the Mormon church, which has a documented history of racism\u003c/a>. But Farrish points out that there are few industries in the country that haven’t been buttressed by slavery or racism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s your ancestry information, and they are holding it whether or not you seek it from them,” she said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘I think it’s going to be very important that we have alternatives for folks who legitimately just cannot establish the lineage criteria.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Hiring a professional like Farrish to do individualized genealogical research can be costly. According to the Association of Professional Genealogists, hourly rates for \u003ca href=\"https://www.apgen.org/cpages/how-to-hire-a-professional-genealogist\">genealogical consultations typically start around $30 an hour and climb to over $200 per hour\u003c/a>, depending on the experience level of the genealogist. A basic Ancestry.com subscription costs $25 per month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grills said some people will have a difficult time tracing family lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think it’s going to be very important that we have alternatives for folks who legitimately just cannot establish the lineage criteria,” she said. “We don’t want to further injure the African American community because we made a decision that seemed to be right at the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before settling in California, Granny Ford lived in Texas. A single mother, she raised four children in the home she bought on Athens Street in San Francisco. For generations, Ford’s ancestors owned land and homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11945037\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 663px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11945037\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A grandmotherly figure with curly, gray hair sits in a wooden arm chair smiling for the camera. Her hands delicately placed on her knees as she smiles for the camera.\" width=\"663\" height=\"953\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut.jpg 663w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/03/RS63878_Winfrey-Ford-qut-160x230.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 663px) 100vw, 663px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Winfrey Broadnax Ford, known as Granny Ford to her family. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Alison Ford)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Ford, who recalled the tomatoes and herbs Granny Ford grew in her backyard and at a community garden in the neighborhood, can’t afford to buy a house where she lives and works. According to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Public Policy Institute of California, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-housing-divide/\">Black homeownership rate in the state is 36.8%\u003c/a>, about 26% lower than the rate for white households. “To a large extent, the racial homeownership gap reflects persistent income inequalities,” the analysts note, while pointing out that the median income for white households in the state is 65% higher than Black households.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I do believe that the fact that I have not yet bought a home is tied to my choice to remain in California,” said Ford, who once considered moving to Georgia, a state where the \u003ca href=\"https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/housing-finance-policy-center/projects/forecasting-state-and-national-trends-household-formation-and-homeownership/georgia\">homeownership rate for Black people is 47.6%\u003c/a>, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve chosen to remain in California, primarily, because this is where my family is,” Ford continued. “Sometimes I regret not leaving, but I wouldn’t want to be terribly far from my parents.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "californias-legislature-has-roots-in-slavery-are-lawmakers-ready-to-confront-that",
"title": "California's Legislature Has Roots in Slavery. Are Lawmakers Ready to Confront That?",
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"headTitle": "California’s Legislature Has Roots in Slavery. Are Lawmakers Ready to Confront That? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ean Ryan was unaware of the most brutal chapters of American history when he started high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He spent much of his adolescence in what he described as a religious cult that his mother joined, near Redding. While children his age constructed models of Spanish missions using sugar cubes and popsicle sticks, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-california-mission-models-20170919-story.html\">longtime popular assignment in California’s fourth-grade classrooms\u003c/a>, Ryan was placed in a series of rotating apprenticeships. Starting when he was 8, Ryan chainsawed tree limbs with lumberjacks near Mount Shasta, paved roads in Arizona and went to Reno for a plumbing gig — work organized by his mother’s church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan moved in with his father in San José when he was 14. He enrolled in school in the adjacent suburb of Los Gatos, an upscale community tucked in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. His first class — U.S. history — required reading about the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of 60,000 Indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the southeastern part of the United States. Thousands died as they were marched to reservations west of the Mississippi River.\u003cu> \u003c/u>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The brutality of American history, like the forced labor of Indigenous people in the 18th and 19th centuries to build the Spanish missions, startled Ryan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just cried in front of the whole class,” Ryan, now 53, recalled. “They were like, ‘What is going on?’ And I was like, ‘I never knew any of this stuff. This is all completely new to me.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed was an insatiable desire to learn more about his family’s history. Did his ancestors have a role in the subjugation and forced removal of people? Ryan’s research revealed that he had a direct connection to California’s foundational years, when a veneer of frontier freedom and prosperity concealed an agenda anchored in racist hostility and terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942343\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942343 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg\" alt=\"A bearded white man with glasses holds an old photo of another white man, dressed formally in 19th century garb.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1484\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-800x618.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-1020x788.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-160x124.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-1536x1187.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sean Ryan holds a daguerreotype of his great-great-great grandfather, James Madison Estill, an early California legislator who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme to reinstate enslavement in the new state. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Sean Ryan)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It began with a photo. A great-aunt on Ryan’s mother’s side heard about his interest in genealogy, and asked whether a box of records she had would help his hunt. Among the documents included was a picture of his great-great-great grandfather: James Madison Estill, a founder of California’s system of mass incarceration, who was an early California legislator and who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme in the 1850s to reinstate enslavement in the newly formed state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California is now going through a similar unearthing of its past. The state’s Reparations Task Force is \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers, including enslavers like Estill, held outsize influence in its early Legislature. They enacted laws aiding enslavers, and supported the expansion of human bondage across the country.[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB3121\">The bill creating the Reparations Task Force\u003c/a> was passed with bipartisan support in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It was heralded as a transformative step for racial justice. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill that September, he vowed the state would not “turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday and Saturday, that task force will meet in Sacramento, the state Capitol where Estill and his allies sought to create a western outpost for the ideals that would galvanize the Confederacy. On the task force agenda: how to potentially provide financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Slavery is an afterthought in the popular California origin story of rugged Gold Rush frontierism. But hundreds of enslaved Black people were involuntarily brought to the state to work in the gold mines by Southerners who hoped to replicate the system of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture on the Pacific Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">task force released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists. In July, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942341\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942341 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg\" alt=\"An older bald, Black man wearing a jacket and tie, sitting at a desk, smiling pleasantly at the camera with his hands folded in front of him on a desk.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1371\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-800x571.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-1020x728.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-160x114.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-1536x1097.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of California’s Reparations Task Force, in his office in Sacramento. \u003ccite>(Guy Marzorati/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But at the state Capitol, the preliminary report has been largely ignored \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11916026/no-the-reparations-task-force-report-isnt-a-watershed-moment-action-will-be\">in the months since its release\u003c/a>, according to state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m sad to report not a single one of my colleagues have even mentioned this report, and I doubt very seriously if any of them have really taken time to read it,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They need to read this report, they need to understand what’s there and understand the history instead of the whitewash that we’ve been allowed to perpetuate itself as American history for almost 400 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘A bit hard to swallow’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Estill, whose surname is also documented in some places as “Estell,” brought his family from Kentucky to Missouri in the 1840s. He sought fortune by starting a military prison, a grain mill and a postal route. When the ventures stalled, Estill journeyed on to California. He left his wife and young children behind, but took his most prized possessions: the people he owned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the census taken on Nov. 20, 1850, just 10 weeks into California’s statehood, Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County, with real estate valued at $15,000. Listed beneath his name are 14 men and one woman — with surnames of either Brown or Smith — who ranged in age from 18 to 40.\u003c/p>\n\u003cpre>June Brown\r\nJoe Brown\r\nIsaac Brown\r\nJohn Brown\r\nBill Brown\r\nPeter Brown\r\nThomas Brown\r\nMid Brown\r\nBolin Brown\r\nComins Brown\r\nJoe Smith\r\nHigins Smith\r\nWhitehead Smith\r\nGeneral Smith\r\nMinerva Smith\u003c/pre>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942342\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 463px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942342\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A hand-written census ledger, with a list of names.\" width=\"463\" height=\"631\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg 1879w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-800x1090.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1020x1390.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-160x218.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1127x1536.jpg 1127w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1503x2048.jpg 1503w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1920x2616.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 463px) 100vw, 463px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">On this copy of a page from the 1850 census, James Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County. His assets included 14 men and one woman. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ancestry.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The following note is scribbled in the margin next to the list of names: “These men were slaves in Missouri and have contracted to work in this state and then be free after two years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as Estill was elected to the state Senate in 1851, representing Napa and Solano counties, he began to pursue laws that would allow him to keep his human property in California, a “free state,” and advance the institution of chattel slavery. As some of his peers found fortunes mining for gold, Estill charted a path toward a more lucrative American hustle: the construction and management of state prisons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Estill won a contract to run the prison system the year he was elected to the Legislature. He pocketed profits from the forced labor of incarcerated people, who, under his authority, built a monument to mass incarceration: San Quentin State Prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No man has received one tenth the money from the State that General Estill did; and no man made greater profit on what he received,” read a scathing obituary in \u003cem>The Sacramento Bee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper Ryan dug into his great-great-great grandfather’s past, the more he found the man “despicable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a great research project, but at the end of the day, it was kind of a bit hard to swallow,” Ryan said. “It was obvious people hated him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan’s research was guided by a trove of records, articles and photographs. The same documents don’t exist for the descendants of enslaved people, like the Browns and the Smiths listed on the 1850 census — a vexing issue for the task force currently grappling with who could become eligible for compensation from the state of California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pursuit of his family history took Ryan around the world. He learned that Estill’s granddaughter was married to an anatomist who moved his family to Bangkok for work. Inspired, Ryan moved with his family to Bangkok and stayed overseas for a decade. Now he lives with his wife and four kids in Oregon, where he works as an oceanographer on devices that collect energy from waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve definitely made life choices based on some of this stuff,” said Ryan. “To me, finding out about the history of my family was very cathartic, I guess. It filled a lot of holes. I really kind of dug into it and it became very important to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Fugitives in a ‘free state’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Pro-slavery politicians like Estill were instrumental in California’s formation as a state. The issue of slavery was clearly on the minds of the delegates who gathered in Monterey to write California’s constitution in the fall of 1849. In fact, the slavery debate literally shaped the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historians of early California history like Franklin Tuthill and Rockwell D. Hunt have detailed how the state’s current eastern boundary was forged through a debate with pro-slavery delegates who wanted to create a massive state that would stretch into present-day Utah. They believed that a state so large would inevitably be broken into two states: one where slavery would be allowed, the other free. Even though the delegates officially banned slavery in California, the meeting at Colton Hall in Monterey was “understood to be under the management, imaginary if not real, of southern men,” according to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. And men like William Gwin, a Mississippi enslaver who moved to California and became one of its first U.S. senators, would dominate early state politics under the pro-slavery “Chivalry” wing of the Democratic Party.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would say in terms of the people who came to California thinking about elected office, rather than just the gold mining, that tended to be Southerners,” said Alex Vassar of the California State Library, who wrote a book on the history of state legislators. “And so they brought their values, they brought the customs of their place and their time to California with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And some, Vassar said, “actually served in the state Legislature owning slaves.”[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Stacey Smith, history professor, Oregon State University\"]‘Certainly there were specific members of the state Legislature and the congressional delegation who had a direct interest in enslaving people in California and keeping control over them.’[/pullquote]Vassar has documented members such as state Sen. William B. Norman, who brought an enslaved person from Mississippi to California, and Charles S. Fairfax, who traveled west from his family’s Virginia slave plantation and eventually became speaker of the state Assembly. The Marin County town where Fairfax built his manor now bears his name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1850s, enslavers and their allies were part of the legislative majority in California that took two dramatic actions in support of enslavement: passing the state’s fugitive slave law and backing the explosive Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the federal law allowing the expansion of slavery into the territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that it wasn’t just always a symbolic issue,” said Stacey Smith, associate professor of history at Oregon State University, who is advising California’s Reparations Task Force. “Certainly there were specific members of the state Legislature and the congressional delegation who had a direct interest in enslaving people in California and keeping control over them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal Fugitive Slave Act, which required residents and law enforcement in free states to assist with the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, was included in the agreement that ushered California into the union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the federal law only dealt with enslaved persons escaping across state lines, and California’s enslavers had no legal recourse if their captives escaped within the new, free state. To account for this, pro-slavery lawmakers drafted the state’s own fugitive slave bill, that would give enslavers a one-year window to recapture formerly enslaved people they had brought to California pre-statehood, and forcibly take them out of the state and back to slaveholding states in the South. The legislation, officially “an Act respecting Fugitives from labor, and Slaves brought into this State prior to her admission into the Union,” passed the Assembly in February of 1852.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942340\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942340 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg\" alt=\"A white marble bust of a man, with hair that's a bit long on top and a slight beard, whose chest is draped in a toga.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1371\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-800x571.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-1020x728.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-160x114.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-1536x1097.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A bust of David Broderick, a California state senator in the 1850s known for his opposition to slavery, on display at the California State Library in Sacramento. Broderick was killed in a duel, purportedly over his anti-slavery stance. \u003ccite>(Guy Marzorati/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the Senate, where the proposal had been defeated the year before, the Chivalry had to overcome opposition from anti-slavery Democrats, most notably San Francisco Sen. David Broderick. The bill was carried in the state Senate by Estill. Lawmakers deliberated the bill for days before a final vote. Opponents hatched a series of roadblocks, desperately trying to weaken the proposal with amendments or at least find a majority willing to adjourn for the night. But Estill and his allies prevailed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate Journal for April 13, 1852, shows that after more than a dozen procedural votes, the bill passed 14–9, and was signed by Gov. John Bigler. One-year extensions of the law were subsequently passed in 1853 and 1854. Not included in the record is the fact that Estill was fighting to protect his ownership of the 15 people who toiled without compensation on his Solano County farm, less than 50 miles down the Sacramento River.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He wasn’t just wanting to promote the ‘Southern values’ of protecting slavery and slave property in California,” said Smith, who \u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/book/9781469626536/freedoms-frontier/\">chronicled the history of unfree labor in California in her book \u003cem>Freedom’s Frontier\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. “He had a direct, personal economic interest in a fugitive slave law that would allow him to take enslaved people back to the Southern states when he decided that he no longer wanted to have them working in California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith found records of dozens of Black Californians arrested under the act, apprehended by law enforcement in a state that promised freedom. Black people, some of whom came to California to escape racial terror, lived with the fear that they could be seized in the middle of the night and extradited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you had been brought at the height of the Gold Rush, let’s say in early 1849 up through mid-1850 … [then] until March of 1855, so five, six years later, you could be enslaved and returned back to the slave states under California law,” Smith said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pushing to expand slavery\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The national uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the political tide against California’s fugitive slave law and made the support of slavery a losing issue for the state’s Democrats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law allowed new territories to decide whether to permit slavery within their borders, replacing the generation-old Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in new territories north of latitude 36° 30’, spanning the northern borders of Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was evidence that Southerners were not only intent on preserving slavery, they wanted to expand it. The law incensed opponents of slavery, scrambled national and state party alliances and, in the words of historian James McPherson, “may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward war.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite California’s official status as a free state, its representatives in Congress supported the law. And in the weeks leading up to the final vote, the state Legislature passed a resolution supporting “the Nebraska bill,” as it was known at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s show of support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was nonbinding, but it spoke volumes. The only other legislature in a free state to back the proposal, Smith said, was Illinois — home of the bill’s author, U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s fairly unusual for a free state to pass an endorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska Act when a lot of other people in Northern states — free states, especially the Northeast — are just clamoring for the overturn of the [law],” Smith said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Voter backlash in California to the Kansas-Nebraska Act \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/41170744\">helped launch the California Republican Party\u003c/a>, slowing the momentum for further extensions of the state’s fugitive slave law. Pro-slavery lawmakers retained control in Sacramento until the Civil War, at times resorting to violence to achieve their goals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A pro-slavery legislator assaulted an anti-slavery colleague with a cane on the floor of the Senate during debates to extend the fugitive slave law, according to Smith. And in 1859, Broderick, the prominent anti-slavery Democrat, was killed in a duel on the shores of Lake Merced in San Francisco by the Chivalry’s David Terry, a former state Supreme Court justice. As he lay dying, Broderick \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/broderick-terry-duel.htm\">reportedly said his anti-slavery stances were what pushed his political opponents to violence\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Broderick quickly became a martyr for opponents of slavery, and his bust is still on display in the chambers of the state Senate. As the Gold Rush waned, many of the Southerners in California’s government left the state. Some, like Gwin, backed the Confederacy in the Civil War. The decade-long reign of the Chivalry and their enslavers’ agenda became a historical footnote.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Reparations and atonement\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“I think, for the most part, when I say something like ‘slavery in California,’ most people who’ve gone to school in California will say, ‘Oh, the mission system,’” said Smith. “It’s just these other stories, especially about enslaved African Americans, that are a lot less familiar to most Californians.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kamilah Moore, a reparatory justice scholar who chairs the state Reparations Task Force, said confronting the Legislature’s pro-slavery history should start in the state’s K–12 schools. She said the task force would like to see a curriculum that acknowledges and teaches California’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Kamilah Moore, chair, California Reparations Task Force\"]‘I grew up in California, born and raised, and so were my parents. And none of us learned about this history in school.’[/pullquote]“I grew up in California, born and raised, and so were my parents. And none of us learned about this history in school,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the task force presents its financial recommendations to the Legislature this summer, the possibility of monetary compensation for the descendants of 19th-century Black Americans will likely stir up the most interest and debate in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At KQED’s gubernatorial debate in October, when asked where he stood on the issue of potential payments, Newsom demurred, saying he would first “want to see the recommendations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By definition, we created the work group to adjudicate the merits of different strategies,” Newsom said. “And so this task force is convening, we’ll see where their recommendations come out and we’ll make a determination after the fact.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore is interested in atonement by the Legislature. Lawmakers today routinely celebrate its history at the vanguard of environmentalism and protections for labor, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But that history also includes support for the brutality of chattel slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Part of our work as the task force is thinking about how we can get the California state Legislature not only to adopt our final recommendations as proposed, but then also for the body itself to take some self-accountability,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Wouldn’t want to live under a rock’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Ryan’s pursuit of his family history introduced him to members of his extended family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Along the way, I’ve been finding a lot of new families that are like first cousins, second cousins, third cousins and then getting to share my information with them, and that’s been a lot of fun getting to meet people,” Ryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of his relatives found Estill’s story too painful to confront — like the cousin in New York whose first name was Estill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She had seen those pictures of him and knew that he existed but had no idea what his history was or his dealings and stuff,” Ryan said. “And so she was very upset.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other relatives have told Ryan to stop doing his research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people are very sensitive to it,” he said. “I never would have thought that — although, by finding out all this stuff about Estill I can kind of understand it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added, “But I also wouldn’t want to live under a rock. So you have to kind of learn from history, right? You don’t want to whitewash history.”\u003cbr>\n[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers held outsize influence in its early Legislature, enacting laws aiding enslavers, and supporting the expansion of human bondage across the country — a legacy now being reexamined as the state considers reparations.",
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"title": "California's Legislature Has Roots in Slavery. Are Lawmakers Ready to Confront That? | KQED",
"description": "Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers held outsize influence in its early Legislature, enacting laws aiding enslavers, and supporting the expansion of human bondage across the country — a legacy now being reexamined as the state considers reparations.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">S\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>ean Ryan was unaware of the most brutal chapters of American history when he started high school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He spent much of his adolescence in what he described as a religious cult that his mother joined, near Redding. While children his age constructed models of Spanish missions using sugar cubes and popsicle sticks, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-california-mission-models-20170919-story.html\">longtime popular assignment in California’s fourth-grade classrooms\u003c/a>, Ryan was placed in a series of rotating apprenticeships. Starting when he was 8, Ryan chainsawed tree limbs with lumberjacks near Mount Shasta, paved roads in Arizona and went to Reno for a plumbing gig — work organized by his mother’s church.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan moved in with his father in San José when he was 14. He enrolled in school in the adjacent suburb of Los Gatos, an upscale community tucked in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. His first class — U.S. history — required reading about the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of 60,000 Indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the southeastern part of the United States. Thousands died as they were marched to reservations west of the Mississippi River.\u003cu> \u003c/u>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The brutality of American history, like the forced labor of Indigenous people in the 18th and 19th centuries to build the Spanish missions, startled Ryan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just cried in front of the whole class,” Ryan, now 53, recalled. “They were like, ‘What is going on?’ And I was like, ‘I never knew any of this stuff. This is all completely new to me.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed was an insatiable desire to learn more about his family’s history. Did his ancestors have a role in the subjugation and forced removal of people? Ryan’s research revealed that he had a direct connection to California’s foundational years, when a veneer of frontier freedom and prosperity concealed an agenda anchored in racist hostility and terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942343\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942343 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg\" alt=\"A bearded white man with glasses holds an old photo of another white man, dressed formally in 19th century garb.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1484\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-800x618.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-1020x788.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-160x124.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/Sean-Ryan-photo-3-1536x1187.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sean Ryan holds a daguerreotype of his great-great-great grandfather, James Madison Estill, an early California legislator who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme to reinstate enslavement in the new state. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Sean Ryan)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It began with a photo. A great-aunt on Ryan’s mother’s side heard about his interest in genealogy, and asked whether a box of records she had would help his hunt. Among the documents included was a picture of his great-great-great grandfather: James Madison Estill, a founder of California’s system of mass incarceration, who was an early California legislator and who enslaved more than a dozen people as he advanced a scheme in the 1850s to reinstate enslavement in the newly formed state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California is now going through a similar unearthing of its past. The state’s Reparations Task Force is \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">examining the historic harms of slavery and anti-Black racism in California\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although California entered the nation as a free state, pro-slavery lawmakers, including enslavers like Estill, held outsize influence in its early Legislature. They enacted laws aiding enslavers, and supported the expansion of human bondage across the country.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB3121\">The bill creating the Reparations Task Force\u003c/a> was passed with bipartisan support in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It was heralded as a transformative step for racial justice. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill that September, he vowed the state would not “turn away from this moment to make right the discrimination and disadvantages that Black Californians and people of color still face.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday and Saturday, that task force will meet in Sacramento, the state Capitol where Estill and his allies sought to create a western outpost for the ideals that would galvanize the Confederacy. On the task force agenda: how to potentially provide financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Slavery is an afterthought in the popular California origin story of rugged Gold Rush frontierism. But hundreds of enslaved Black people were involuntarily brought to the state to work in the gold mines by Southerners who hoped to replicate the system of chattel slavery and plantation agriculture on the Pacific Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last summer, the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">task force released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> detailing California’s history of enslavement and its many decades of discriminatory policies — in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and other areas — that established the systemic racism that persists. In July, the task force will present recommendations on how Black residents should be compensated for this enduring oppression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942341\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942341 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg\" alt=\"An older bald, Black man wearing a jacket and tie, sitting at a desk, smiling pleasantly at the camera with his hands folded in front of him on a desk.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1371\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-800x571.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-1020x728.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-160x114.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4305-1536x1097.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of California’s Reparations Task Force, in his office in Sacramento. \u003ccite>(Guy Marzorati/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But at the state Capitol, the preliminary report has been largely ignored \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11916026/no-the-reparations-task-force-report-isnt-a-watershed-moment-action-will-be\">in the months since its release\u003c/a>, according to state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), a member of the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m sad to report not a single one of my colleagues have even mentioned this report, and I doubt very seriously if any of them have really taken time to read it,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They need to read this report, they need to understand what’s there and understand the history instead of the whitewash that we’ve been allowed to perpetuate itself as American history for almost 400 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘A bit hard to swallow’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Estill, whose surname is also documented in some places as “Estell,” brought his family from Kentucky to Missouri in the 1840s. He sought fortune by starting a military prison, a grain mill and a postal route. When the ventures stalled, Estill journeyed on to California. He left his wife and young children behind, but took his most prized possessions: the people he owned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the census taken on Nov. 20, 1850, just 10 weeks into California’s statehood, Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County, with real estate valued at $15,000. Listed beneath his name are 14 men and one woman — with surnames of either Brown or Smith — who ranged in age from 18 to 40.\u003c/p>\n\u003cpre>June Brown\r\nJoe Brown\r\nIsaac Brown\r\nJohn Brown\r\nBill Brown\r\nPeter Brown\r\nThomas Brown\r\nMid Brown\r\nBolin Brown\r\nComins Brown\r\nJoe Smith\r\nHigins Smith\r\nWhitehead Smith\r\nGeneral Smith\r\nMinerva Smith\u003c/pre>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942342\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 463px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942342\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A hand-written census ledger, with a list of names.\" width=\"463\" height=\"631\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-scaled.jpg 1879w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-800x1090.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1020x1390.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-160x218.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1127x1536.jpg 1127w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1503x2048.jpg 1503w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/James-Estill-1850-Solano-census-record-1920x2616.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 463px) 100vw, 463px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">On this copy of a page from the 1850 census, James Estill was recorded as a farmer in Solano County. His assets included 14 men and one woman. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ancestry.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The following note is scribbled in the margin next to the list of names: “These men were slaves in Missouri and have contracted to work in this state and then be free after two years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as Estill was elected to the state Senate in 1851, representing Napa and Solano counties, he began to pursue laws that would allow him to keep his human property in California, a “free state,” and advance the institution of chattel slavery. As some of his peers found fortunes mining for gold, Estill charted a path toward a more lucrative American hustle: the construction and management of state prisons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Estill won a contract to run the prison system the year he was elected to the Legislature. He pocketed profits from the forced labor of incarcerated people, who, under his authority, built a monument to mass incarceration: San Quentin State Prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No man has received one tenth the money from the State that General Estill did; and no man made greater profit on what he received,” read a scathing obituary in \u003cem>The Sacramento Bee\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper Ryan dug into his great-great-great grandfather’s past, the more he found the man “despicable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a great research project, but at the end of the day, it was kind of a bit hard to swallow,” Ryan said. “It was obvious people hated him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryan’s research was guided by a trove of records, articles and photographs. The same documents don’t exist for the descendants of enslaved people, like the Browns and the Smiths listed on the 1850 census — a vexing issue for the task force currently grappling with who could become eligible for compensation from the state of California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The pursuit of his family history took Ryan around the world. He learned that Estill’s granddaughter was married to an anatomist who moved his family to Bangkok for work. Inspired, Ryan moved with his family to Bangkok and stayed overseas for a decade. Now he lives with his wife and four kids in Oregon, where he works as an oceanographer on devices that collect energy from waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve definitely made life choices based on some of this stuff,” said Ryan. “To me, finding out about the history of my family was very cathartic, I guess. It filled a lot of holes. I really kind of dug into it and it became very important to me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Fugitives in a ‘free state’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Pro-slavery politicians like Estill were instrumental in California’s formation as a state. The issue of slavery was clearly on the minds of the delegates who gathered in Monterey to write California’s constitution in the fall of 1849. In fact, the slavery debate literally shaped the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historians of early California history like Franklin Tuthill and Rockwell D. Hunt have detailed how the state’s current eastern boundary was forged through a debate with pro-slavery delegates who wanted to create a massive state that would stretch into present-day Utah. They believed that a state so large would inevitably be broken into two states: one where slavery would be allowed, the other free. Even though the delegates officially banned slavery in California, the meeting at Colton Hall in Monterey was “understood to be under the management, imaginary if not real, of southern men,” according to historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. And men like William Gwin, a Mississippi enslaver who moved to California and became one of its first U.S. senators, would dominate early state politics under the pro-slavery “Chivalry” wing of the Democratic Party.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would say in terms of the people who came to California thinking about elected office, rather than just the gold mining, that tended to be Southerners,” said Alex Vassar of the California State Library, who wrote a book on the history of state legislators. “And so they brought their values, they brought the customs of their place and their time to California with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And some, Vassar said, “actually served in the state Legislature owning slaves.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Vassar has documented members such as state Sen. William B. Norman, who brought an enslaved person from Mississippi to California, and Charles S. Fairfax, who traveled west from his family’s Virginia slave plantation and eventually became speaker of the state Assembly. The Marin County town where Fairfax built his manor now bears his name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1850s, enslavers and their allies were part of the legislative majority in California that took two dramatic actions in support of enslavement: passing the state’s fugitive slave law and backing the explosive Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the federal law allowing the expansion of slavery into the territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that it wasn’t just always a symbolic issue,” said Stacey Smith, associate professor of history at Oregon State University, who is advising California’s Reparations Task Force. “Certainly there were specific members of the state Legislature and the congressional delegation who had a direct interest in enslaving people in California and keeping control over them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal Fugitive Slave Act, which required residents and law enforcement in free states to assist with the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, was included in the agreement that ushered California into the union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the federal law only dealt with enslaved persons escaping across state lines, and California’s enslavers had no legal recourse if their captives escaped within the new, free state. To account for this, pro-slavery lawmakers drafted the state’s own fugitive slave bill, that would give enslavers a one-year window to recapture formerly enslaved people they had brought to California pre-statehood, and forcibly take them out of the state and back to slaveholding states in the South. The legislation, officially “an Act respecting Fugitives from labor, and Slaves brought into this State prior to her admission into the Union,” passed the Assembly in February of 1852.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942340\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942340 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg\" alt=\"A white marble bust of a man, with hair that's a bit long on top and a slight beard, whose chest is draped in a toga.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1371\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-800x571.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-1020x728.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-160x114.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/03/IMG_4303-1536x1097.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A bust of David Broderick, a California state senator in the 1850s known for his opposition to slavery, on display at the California State Library in Sacramento. Broderick was killed in a duel, purportedly over his anti-slavery stance. \u003ccite>(Guy Marzorati/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the Senate, where the proposal had been defeated the year before, the Chivalry had to overcome opposition from anti-slavery Democrats, most notably San Francisco Sen. David Broderick. The bill was carried in the state Senate by Estill. Lawmakers deliberated the bill for days before a final vote. Opponents hatched a series of roadblocks, desperately trying to weaken the proposal with amendments or at least find a majority willing to adjourn for the night. But Estill and his allies prevailed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Senate Journal for April 13, 1852, shows that after more than a dozen procedural votes, the bill passed 14–9, and was signed by Gov. John Bigler. One-year extensions of the law were subsequently passed in 1853 and 1854. Not included in the record is the fact that Estill was fighting to protect his ownership of the 15 people who toiled without compensation on his Solano County farm, less than 50 miles down the Sacramento River.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He wasn’t just wanting to promote the ‘Southern values’ of protecting slavery and slave property in California,” said Smith, who \u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/book/9781469626536/freedoms-frontier/\">chronicled the history of unfree labor in California in her book \u003cem>Freedom’s Frontier\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. “He had a direct, personal economic interest in a fugitive slave law that would allow him to take enslaved people back to the Southern states when he decided that he no longer wanted to have them working in California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith found records of dozens of Black Californians arrested under the act, apprehended by law enforcement in a state that promised freedom. Black people, some of whom came to California to escape racial terror, lived with the fear that they could be seized in the middle of the night and extradited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you had been brought at the height of the Gold Rush, let’s say in early 1849 up through mid-1850 … [then] until March of 1855, so five, six years later, you could be enslaved and returned back to the slave states under California law,” Smith said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pushing to expand slavery\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The national uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the political tide against California’s fugitive slave law and made the support of slavery a losing issue for the state’s Democrats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law allowed new territories to decide whether to permit slavery within their borders, replacing the generation-old Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in new territories north of latitude 36° 30’, spanning the northern borders of Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was evidence that Southerners were not only intent on preserving slavery, they wanted to expand it. The law incensed opponents of slavery, scrambled national and state party alliances and, in the words of historian James McPherson, “may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward war.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite California’s official status as a free state, its representatives in Congress supported the law. And in the weeks leading up to the final vote, the state Legislature passed a resolution supporting “the Nebraska bill,” as it was known at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s show of support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act was nonbinding, but it spoke volumes. The only other legislature in a free state to back the proposal, Smith said, was Illinois — home of the bill’s author, U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s fairly unusual for a free state to pass an endorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska Act when a lot of other people in Northern states — free states, especially the Northeast — are just clamoring for the overturn of the [law],” Smith said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Voter backlash in California to the Kansas-Nebraska Act \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/41170744\">helped launch the California Republican Party\u003c/a>, slowing the momentum for further extensions of the state’s fugitive slave law. Pro-slavery lawmakers retained control in Sacramento until the Civil War, at times resorting to violence to achieve their goals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A pro-slavery legislator assaulted an anti-slavery colleague with a cane on the floor of the Senate during debates to extend the fugitive slave law, according to Smith. And in 1859, Broderick, the prominent anti-slavery Democrat, was killed in a duel on the shores of Lake Merced in San Francisco by the Chivalry’s David Terry, a former state Supreme Court justice. As he lay dying, Broderick \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/broderick-terry-duel.htm\">reportedly said his anti-slavery stances were what pushed his political opponents to violence\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Broderick quickly became a martyr for opponents of slavery, and his bust is still on display in the chambers of the state Senate. As the Gold Rush waned, many of the Southerners in California’s government left the state. Some, like Gwin, backed the Confederacy in the Civil War. The decade-long reign of the Chivalry and their enslavers’ agenda became a historical footnote.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Reparations and atonement\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“I think, for the most part, when I say something like ‘slavery in California,’ most people who’ve gone to school in California will say, ‘Oh, the mission system,’” said Smith. “It’s just these other stories, especially about enslaved African Americans, that are a lot less familiar to most Californians.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kamilah Moore, a reparatory justice scholar who chairs the state Reparations Task Force, said confronting the Legislature’s pro-slavery history should start in the state’s K–12 schools. She said the task force would like to see a curriculum that acknowledges and teaches California’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I grew up in California, born and raised, and so were my parents. And none of us learned about this history in school,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the task force presents its financial recommendations to the Legislature this summer, the possibility of monetary compensation for the descendants of 19th-century Black Americans will likely stir up the most interest and debate in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At KQED’s gubernatorial debate in October, when asked where he stood on the issue of potential payments, Newsom demurred, saying he would first “want to see the recommendations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“By definition, we created the work group to adjudicate the merits of different strategies,” Newsom said. “And so this task force is convening, we’ll see where their recommendations come out and we’ll make a determination after the fact.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore is interested in atonement by the Legislature. Lawmakers today routinely celebrate its history at the vanguard of environmentalism and protections for labor, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But that history also includes support for the brutality of chattel slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Part of our work as the task force is thinking about how we can get the California state Legislature not only to adopt our final recommendations as proposed, but then also for the body itself to take some self-accountability,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Wouldn’t want to live under a rock’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Ryan’s pursuit of his family history introduced him to members of his extended family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Along the way, I’ve been finding a lot of new families that are like first cousins, second cousins, third cousins and then getting to share my information with them, and that’s been a lot of fun getting to meet people,” Ryan said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of his relatives found Estill’s story too painful to confront — like the cousin in New York whose first name was Estill.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She had seen those pictures of him and knew that he existed but had no idea what his history was or his dealings and stuff,” Ryan said. “And so she was very upset.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other relatives have told Ryan to stop doing his research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of people are very sensitive to it,” he said. “I never would have thought that — although, by finding out all this stuff about Estill I can kind of understand it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added, “But I also wouldn’t want to live under a rock. So you have to kind of learn from history, right? You don’t want to whitewash history.”\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "reversal-of-oakland-school-closures-renews-hope-of-reparations-for-black-students",
"title": "Reversal of Oakland School Closures Renews Hope of Reparations for Black Students",
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"headTitle": "Reversal of Oakland School Closures Renews Hope of Reparations for Black Students | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>The decision by Oakland’s new school board to rescind a school closure plan has renewed hope in the reparations movement to improve the outcomes of Oakland Unified School District’s Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the movement remains in limbo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In March 2021, the school board passed the \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knTRaGliW06LnPCATRmaILnwrgViLgsC/view\">Reparations for Black Students\u003c/a> resolution, an initiative to provide more resources for almost 8,000 Black students. For some observers, the resolution acknowledged the inequitable education students have received for generations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resolution created a task force to monitor academic performance and, among other things, provide anti-racism training to district teachers and staff. Early versions of the resolution included a ban on school closures where more than 30% of the students are Black, a line item that was opposed by the school district and Chris Learned, the state trustee who oversaw the district’s finances. It was ultimately removed from the final resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For two decades, the school district has been under state receivership because of a $100 million bailout in 2003. To address budget shortfalls, the school board voted in January 2022 to close what it deemed were underperforming schools with low enrollment. The vote sparked protests, which included a hunger strike, a 125-day occupation of Parker Elementary School after the district closed it, and a State Department of Justice inquiry into claims that the plan continued a trend of discrimination against the district’s Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942027\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942027 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-800x599.jpg\" alt=\"A group of protesters hold signs against school closures as they march on a city street.\" width=\"800\" height=\"599\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-1020x763.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-1536x1150.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Educators, parents, youth and supporters protest during a citywide rally at Oakland City Hall on Feb. 4, 2022. The rally was one of several events last year in support of the Reparations for Black Students campaign. \u003ccite>(Amaya Edwards/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The closures derailed the reparations effort to hold the school district accountable for improving the education of Black students. But the reversal, which was approved during a special meeting in January, has activists and community members cautiously optimistic about OUSD’s future. The action was made possible by newly elected board members who opposed the previous board’s decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">California Reparations Task Force\u003c/a> continues to study and develop proposals for the entire state, a look into Oakland’s effort reveals just how difficult reparations can be to implement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are now finally positioned to start doing things differently,” said Mike Hutchinson, the school board’s new president. “We have to embed this work in the district so it becomes a core part of what we do, and I think we are starting to do that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Luz Cázares, the current trustee, will have to sign off for the reversal to be permanent. The Alameda County Office of Education must also approve. \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/01/19/ousd-oakland-school-closures-hutchinson-alameda-county-castro/\">As \u003cem>The Oaklandside\u003c/em>’s Ashley McBride reported\u003c/a>, “the board’s decision could also threaten a separate influx of state cash the district was expecting as a result of closing schools.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if the decision is confirmed by the state, it will save five elementary schools that serve predominantly students of color — Brookfield, Grass Valley, Horace Mann, Carl B. Munck, Fred T. Korematsu Discovery Academy and Hillcrest Elementary School, which would also continue to serve kindergarten through eighth grade. The majority of students at Grass Valley and Carl B. Munck are Black.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Having the board make that decision as soon as it did has really given the system a breath of fresh air,” said Pecolia Manigo, chair of the Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force, the body created to implement the reparations resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Ongoing fight against systemic racism\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jordan Rancifer was captivated by the stories of anti-Black racism in Oakland’s public schools that he heard in the Oakland High School auditorium in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It piqued my interest because it’s like, damn, I’m not the only one having these racial experiences in OUSD,” he recalled in an interview with KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The event was one of a series of community listening sessions held by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.oaklandkidsfirst.org/programs/j4os/\">Justice for Oakland Students coalition\u003c/a>. Students described being called racist slurs by peers. They said they felt ignored when they brought concerns to school administrators, and alienated by curricula that neglected Black experiences. Parents described years of limited enrollment in programs meant to support Black students and funding that always seemed to quickly run out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942014\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942014 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"A young Black man with a black hoodie and shoulder-length black twists looks at the camera while standing on a sidewalk in an urban street.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jordan Rancifer poses for a photo on Grand Avenue in Oakland on April 15, 2022. Rancifer spoke at the listening sessions that led to the Reparations for Black Students resolution when he was a senior at Oakland Technical High School. Now he’s studying political science at Cal State East Bay. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Rancifer was then a senior struggling in math at Oakland Technical High School. He shared his experience in a room full of teachers, students and parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just didn’t feel like, as a Black man, I was being helped or noticed,” said Rancifer, now 23 and studying political science at Cal State East Bay. “They just kind of let me fail.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black students accounted for \u003ca href=\"https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Snapshot?:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:display_count=n&:showVizHome=n&:origin=viz_share_link\">20.5% of district enrollment\u003c/a> — roughly 10,000 out of 50,000 students — in the 2021–2022 academic year, according to OUSD’s dashboard. Two decades ago, Black students accounted for nearly half. Since then, the district has shuttered 16 majority Black schools, fracturing school communities and separating students from friends and familiar teachers. At the listening sessions, speakers said the closures contributed to the exodus of Black families from district schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The listening sessions laid the foundation for the reparations resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resolution promised to address the declining enrollment and poor outcomes of Black students, and set its sights on ending the achievement gap, also called the opportunity gap, by 2026.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Pecolia Manigo, chair, Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force\"]‘Having the board make that decision as soon as it did has really given the system a breath of fresh air.’[/pullquote]In September 2021, the district created the \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PlZalR3MLPd6M4XK5_ORtdu8oK0d26Ox/view\">Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force\u003c/a>, a 25-member volunteer body to carry out the resolution. By that time, Rancifer was in college. His mother, Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, an Oakland teacher and vice president of the Oakland teachers union, became the task force secretary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing that makes me so excited about our work is being able to bring Black folks into a safe space, and for them to know that they’re not alone in their experiences and that other folks are experiencing the same thing, but that they can also come up with the solutions,” said Manigo, who is also executive director of the Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network, an Oakland-based nonprofit that empowers parents to advocate for their children in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Manigo and Hutchinson, things were going smoothly for months after the task force began its work. The volunteer group of Black parents, educators, district employees and community activists met regularly on Zoom, gathering virtually to view colorful slide decks put together by Manigo, mother of two OUSD students and one OUSD graduate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OUSD receives special state funding for students from lower-income families and foster youth, many of whom are Black. The task force aims to track how OUSD invests that money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland has been trying to improve the outcomes for Black students for decades. OUSD founded the African American Male Achievement program in 2010 and what is now known as the African American Female Excellence program in 2015. Data shows the programs improved graduation rates and lowered rates of suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the impact of other, more diffuse efforts like curriculum changes and diversifying staff is harder to trace. The task force set out to build a system to quantify the impact of district interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Being able to say whether something is effective or not effective, and whether it’s helping to close opportunity gaps or not … we knew that that was a big challenge,” said Manigo, who was unsuccessful in her bid for a school board seat in November.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Manigo, the school closure plan, announced four months after the task force began its work, revealed that the district was unwilling “to understand the implications of the lived experience and wisdom that so many of us had been putting before them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The closure plan felt like a betrayal. “By saying reparations, there is an immediate demand to stop the harm,” Manigo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942012\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942012 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-800x596.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman with a purple top and short cropped hair smiles at the camera as she stands in a park.\" width=\"800\" height=\"596\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-800x596.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-1020x760.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-160x119.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-1536x1145.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pecolia Manigo poses in Maxwell Park in Oakland on Aug. 25, 2022. Manigo is the chair of the Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Instead of focusing on improving outcomes for Black students, conflict grew among members of the task force who found themselves on opposing sides of the closure debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are in a highly polarized political context and I think our minds are pretty trained to put a stake in the ground and not move from that,” said Dr. Dexter Moore Jr., the superintendent’s representative on the task force. “It put a wedge in the work. No question about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last March, a report presented by Moore to the school board on behalf of the district superintendent showed that a year after the reparations resolution was passed, many of the worrying trends affecting Black students continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black students were being suspended at more than twice the district average, and more than half of Black students were chronically absent, which Moore attributed in part to the impact of a surge in COVID-19 cases at the time. Between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, \u003ca href=\"https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Historic?%3Aembed=y&%3AshowShareOptions=true&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no&%3Arender=false#7\">Black student enrollment dropped by more than 400 students\u003c/a>, continuing the decades-long pattern of Black students leaving the district, according to OUSD data. Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, district superintendent, instructed the task force to pause indefinitely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force initially refused to stop holding meetings, but momentum waned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We went from 25 folks being able to meet in the very early days and having really great conversations looking over different indicators and putting metrics to those things, to then eventually 15, 16, 17, to slowly but surely many individuals just stepping back,” Manigo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force stopped holding public meetings in April. Not enough members were regularly attending to have a quorum. Ten months later, meetings have yet to resume. But developments since the new year might signal a change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hutchinson has nominated board members Clifford Thompson and VanCedric Williams, co-author of the reparations resolution, to new positions as board liaisons to the task force. He hopes Thompson and Williams will help the task force rebuild its membership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942017\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11942017\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-800x589.jpg\" alt='A Black man with clean shaven head and wearing a blue hoodie that reads \"Protect West Oakland Mural\" smiles at the camera with people in the background.' width=\"800\" height=\"589\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-800x589.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-1020x751.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-160x118.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-1536x1130.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mike Hutchinson, an outspoken opponent of school closures in Oakland, became the president of Oakland’s school board in January. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Manigo feels frustrated that so much time was lost fighting the district, especially in a year with a massive state budget surplus. Instead of galvanizing energy around petitioning the state for more funding for Oakland schools, Manigo said community organizers like her spent the year fighting with the district to keep schools open.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What was lost was the opportunity to really tell the Oakland story, to give lawmakers and the larger community hope that we really can create a district where all students are valued, where racially just schools are real,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That model could be important, because what Black students are up against in Oakland is similar to what Black students face throughout the state. \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-interim-report-preliminary-recommendations-2022.pdf\">California remains the sixth most segregated state in the country for Black students (PDF)\u003c/a>, according to the interim report published by the state reparations task force in June. “In California’s highly segregated schools, schools attended by white and Asian children receive more funding and resources than schools with predominantly Black and Latino children,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a reality with deep roots. \u003ca href=\"https://clerk.assembly.ca.gov/sites/clerk.assembly.ca.gov/files/archive/Statutes/1855/1855.PDF\">In 1855, California passed a law that withheld state funds from schools that taught Black and Chinese children (PDF).\u003c/a> Although California taxed Black residents to pay for public schools, the money was only used for the education of white children.[aside label=\"Related Stories\" postID=\"news_11941976,news_11941469\"]Systemic racism continues to affect Black students. According to statewide data, in 2021–2022 \u003ca href=\"http://www.ed-data.org/state/CA/ps_NTI5Mjg%5E?_gl=1*1dpu79i*_ga*MTI4MDk1MjYxOS4xNjc1NzEyMjg0*_ga_475QR6J62K*MTY3NTcxMjI4NC4xLjEuMTY3NTcxMzM5NC42MC4wLjA.\">only 30% of Black students met English language arts standards and less than 16% met the standard in math\u003c/a>, placing Black students behind all other racial groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023–2024 budget attempted to address some of this inequity, but \u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2023/critics-say-newsoms-proposal-for-low-performing-students-fails-black-students/684148\">the budget proposal drew criticism\u003c/a> from advocates who say they want to see more funding and support specifically for Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What has played out in Oakland’s school district is not an anomaly when it comes to reparations, said Dr. Cheryl Grills, a state task force member.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s sometimes harder to implement things in the spirit in which they were intended than it is to get the win on the books,” said Grills, professor at Loyola Marymount University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state task force, which \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/meetings\">meets Friday and Saturday in Sacramento\u003c/a>, is expected to publish its plan for repairing almost 200 years of anti-Black racism in the state in June. To address racial disparities in public education, \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-agenda-consolidated-prelim-props.pdf\">preliminary policy proposals (PDF)\u003c/a> being considered include an increase in funding to schools through the local control funding formula, which determines how much money schools receive from the state. The preliminary proposals include repealing or amending Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure that prohibits state and local government affirmative action programs in the areas of public employment, public education and public contracting. “Proposition 209 is widely viewed as an impediment to the adoption of remedial measures,” the task force stated in the proposal document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No part of a reparations plan will become law without the support of the governor and the state Legislature. Like the reparations push in Oakland, it will require consistent public pressure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is a historic moment that could happen in California,” Manigo said. “And I believe that the time is now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The group redesigning how OUSD supports its Black students was stalled by the district's school closure plan. But that plan was rescinded — and now the group's leadership is hopeful for a renewed commitment to the district's Black families.",
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"title": "Reversal of Oakland School Closures Renews Hope of Reparations for Black Students | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The decision by Oakland’s new school board to rescind a school closure plan has renewed hope in the reparations movement to improve the outcomes of Oakland Unified School District’s Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the movement remains in limbo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In March 2021, the school board passed the \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knTRaGliW06LnPCATRmaILnwrgViLgsC/view\">Reparations for Black Students\u003c/a> resolution, an initiative to provide more resources for almost 8,000 Black students. For some observers, the resolution acknowledged the inequitable education students have received for generations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resolution created a task force to monitor academic performance and, among other things, provide anti-racism training to district teachers and staff. Early versions of the resolution included a ban on school closures where more than 30% of the students are Black, a line item that was opposed by the school district and Chris Learned, the state trustee who oversaw the district’s finances. It was ultimately removed from the final resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For two decades, the school district has been under state receivership because of a $100 million bailout in 2003. To address budget shortfalls, the school board voted in January 2022 to close what it deemed were underperforming schools with low enrollment. The vote sparked protests, which included a hunger strike, a 125-day occupation of Parker Elementary School after the district closed it, and a State Department of Justice inquiry into claims that the plan continued a trend of discrimination against the district’s Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942027\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942027 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-800x599.jpg\" alt=\"A group of protesters hold signs against school closures as they march on a city street.\" width=\"800\" height=\"599\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-1020x763.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut-1536x1150.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS53519_20220204-IMG_2625-2-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Educators, parents, youth and supporters protest during a citywide rally at Oakland City Hall on Feb. 4, 2022. The rally was one of several events last year in support of the Reparations for Black Students campaign. \u003ccite>(Amaya Edwards/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The closures derailed the reparations effort to hold the school district accountable for improving the education of Black students. But the reversal, which was approved during a special meeting in January, has activists and community members cautiously optimistic about OUSD’s future. The action was made possible by newly elected board members who opposed the previous board’s decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">California Reparations Task Force\u003c/a> continues to study and develop proposals for the entire state, a look into Oakland’s effort reveals just how difficult reparations can be to implement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are now finally positioned to start doing things differently,” said Mike Hutchinson, the school board’s new president. “We have to embed this work in the district so it becomes a core part of what we do, and I think we are starting to do that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Luz Cázares, the current trustee, will have to sign off for the reversal to be permanent. The Alameda County Office of Education must also approve. \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/01/19/ousd-oakland-school-closures-hutchinson-alameda-county-castro/\">As \u003cem>The Oaklandside\u003c/em>’s Ashley McBride reported\u003c/a>, “the board’s decision could also threaten a separate influx of state cash the district was expecting as a result of closing schools.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if the decision is confirmed by the state, it will save five elementary schools that serve predominantly students of color — Brookfield, Grass Valley, Horace Mann, Carl B. Munck, Fred T. Korematsu Discovery Academy and Hillcrest Elementary School, which would also continue to serve kindergarten through eighth grade. The majority of students at Grass Valley and Carl B. Munck are Black.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Having the board make that decision as soon as it did has really given the system a breath of fresh air,” said Pecolia Manigo, chair of the Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force, the body created to implement the reparations resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Ongoing fight against systemic racism\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jordan Rancifer was captivated by the stories of anti-Black racism in Oakland’s public schools that he heard in the Oakland High School auditorium in 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It piqued my interest because it’s like, damn, I’m not the only one having these racial experiences in OUSD,” he recalled in an interview with KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The event was one of a series of community listening sessions held by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.oaklandkidsfirst.org/programs/j4os/\">Justice for Oakland Students coalition\u003c/a>. Students described being called racist slurs by peers. They said they felt ignored when they brought concerns to school administrators, and alienated by curricula that neglected Black experiences. Parents described years of limited enrollment in programs meant to support Black students and funding that always seemed to quickly run out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942014\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942014 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"A young Black man with a black hoodie and shoulder-length black twists looks at the camera while standing on a sidewalk in an urban street.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62640_Jordan-Photo-2-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jordan Rancifer poses for a photo on Grand Avenue in Oakland on April 15, 2022. Rancifer spoke at the listening sessions that led to the Reparations for Black Students resolution when he was a senior at Oakland Technical High School. Now he’s studying political science at Cal State East Bay. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Rancifer was then a senior struggling in math at Oakland Technical High School. He shared his experience in a room full of teachers, students and parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just didn’t feel like, as a Black man, I was being helped or noticed,” said Rancifer, now 23 and studying political science at Cal State East Bay. “They just kind of let me fail.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black students accounted for \u003ca href=\"https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Snapshot?:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:display_count=n&:showVizHome=n&:origin=viz_share_link\">20.5% of district enrollment\u003c/a> — roughly 10,000 out of 50,000 students — in the 2021–2022 academic year, according to OUSD’s dashboard. Two decades ago, Black students accounted for nearly half. Since then, the district has shuttered 16 majority Black schools, fracturing school communities and separating students from friends and familiar teachers. At the listening sessions, speakers said the closures contributed to the exodus of Black families from district schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The listening sessions laid the foundation for the reparations resolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resolution promised to address the declining enrollment and poor outcomes of Black students, and set its sights on ending the achievement gap, also called the opportunity gap, by 2026.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In September 2021, the district created the \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PlZalR3MLPd6M4XK5_ORtdu8oK0d26Ox/view\">Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force\u003c/a>, a 25-member volunteer body to carry out the resolution. By that time, Rancifer was in college. His mother, Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, an Oakland teacher and vice president of the Oakland teachers union, became the task force secretary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing that makes me so excited about our work is being able to bring Black folks into a safe space, and for them to know that they’re not alone in their experiences and that other folks are experiencing the same thing, but that they can also come up with the solutions,” said Manigo, who is also executive director of the Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network, an Oakland-based nonprofit that empowers parents to advocate for their children in public schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Manigo and Hutchinson, things were going smoothly for months after the task force began its work. The volunteer group of Black parents, educators, district employees and community activists met regularly on Zoom, gathering virtually to view colorful slide decks put together by Manigo, mother of two OUSD students and one OUSD graduate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>OUSD receives special state funding for students from lower-income families and foster youth, many of whom are Black. The task force aims to track how OUSD invests that money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland has been trying to improve the outcomes for Black students for decades. OUSD founded the African American Male Achievement program in 2010 and what is now known as the African American Female Excellence program in 2015. Data shows the programs improved graduation rates and lowered rates of suspensions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the impact of other, more diffuse efforts like curriculum changes and diversifying staff is harder to trace. The task force set out to build a system to quantify the impact of district interventions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Being able to say whether something is effective or not effective, and whether it’s helping to close opportunity gaps or not … we knew that that was a big challenge,” said Manigo, who was unsuccessful in her bid for a school board seat in November.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Manigo, the school closure plan, announced four months after the task force began its work, revealed that the district was unwilling “to understand the implications of the lived experience and wisdom that so many of us had been putting before them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The closure plan felt like a betrayal. “By saying reparations, there is an immediate demand to stop the harm,” Manigo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942012\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11942012 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-800x596.jpg\" alt=\"A Black woman with a purple top and short cropped hair smiles at the camera as she stands in a park.\" width=\"800\" height=\"596\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-800x596.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-1020x760.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-160x119.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut-1536x1145.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62641_Manigo-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Pecolia Manigo poses in Maxwell Park in Oakland on Aug. 25, 2022. Manigo is the chair of the Black Students and Families Thriving Task Force. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Instead of focusing on improving outcomes for Black students, conflict grew among members of the task force who found themselves on opposing sides of the closure debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are in a highly polarized political context and I think our minds are pretty trained to put a stake in the ground and not move from that,” said Dr. Dexter Moore Jr., the superintendent’s representative on the task force. “It put a wedge in the work. No question about it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last March, a report presented by Moore to the school board on behalf of the district superintendent showed that a year after the reparations resolution was passed, many of the worrying trends affecting Black students continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black students were being suspended at more than twice the district average, and more than half of Black students were chronically absent, which Moore attributed in part to the impact of a surge in COVID-19 cases at the time. Between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, \u003ca href=\"https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Historic?%3Aembed=y&%3AshowShareOptions=true&%3Adisplay_count=no&%3AshowVizHome=no&%3Arender=false#7\">Black student enrollment dropped by more than 400 students\u003c/a>, continuing the decades-long pattern of Black students leaving the district, according to OUSD data. Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, district superintendent, instructed the task force to pause indefinitely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force initially refused to stop holding meetings, but momentum waned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We went from 25 folks being able to meet in the very early days and having really great conversations looking over different indicators and putting metrics to those things, to then eventually 15, 16, 17, to slowly but surely many individuals just stepping back,” Manigo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force stopped holding public meetings in April. Not enough members were regularly attending to have a quorum. Ten months later, meetings have yet to resume. But developments since the new year might signal a change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hutchinson has nominated board members Clifford Thompson and VanCedric Williams, co-author of the reparations resolution, to new positions as board liaisons to the task force. He hopes Thompson and Williams will help the task force rebuild its membership.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942017\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11942017\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-800x589.jpg\" alt='A Black man with clean shaven head and wearing a blue hoodie that reads \"Protect West Oakland Mural\" smiles at the camera with people in the background.' width=\"800\" height=\"589\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-800x589.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-1020x751.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-160x118.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut-1536x1130.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS62639_Hutchinson-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mike Hutchinson, an outspoken opponent of school closures in Oakland, became the president of Oakland’s school board in January. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Manigo feels frustrated that so much time was lost fighting the district, especially in a year with a massive state budget surplus. Instead of galvanizing energy around petitioning the state for more funding for Oakland schools, Manigo said community organizers like her spent the year fighting with the district to keep schools open.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What was lost was the opportunity to really tell the Oakland story, to give lawmakers and the larger community hope that we really can create a district where all students are valued, where racially just schools are real,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That model could be important, because what Black students are up against in Oakland is similar to what Black students face throughout the state. \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-interim-report-preliminary-recommendations-2022.pdf\">California remains the sixth most segregated state in the country for Black students (PDF)\u003c/a>, according to the interim report published by the state reparations task force in June. “In California’s highly segregated schools, schools attended by white and Asian children receive more funding and resources than schools with predominantly Black and Latino children,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a reality with deep roots. \u003ca href=\"https://clerk.assembly.ca.gov/sites/clerk.assembly.ca.gov/files/archive/Statutes/1855/1855.PDF\">In 1855, California passed a law that withheld state funds from schools that taught Black and Chinese children (PDF).\u003c/a> Although California taxed Black residents to pay for public schools, the money was only used for the education of white children.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Systemic racism continues to affect Black students. According to statewide data, in 2021–2022 \u003ca href=\"http://www.ed-data.org/state/CA/ps_NTI5Mjg%5E?_gl=1*1dpu79i*_ga*MTI4MDk1MjYxOS4xNjc1NzEyMjg0*_ga_475QR6J62K*MTY3NTcxMjI4NC4xLjEuMTY3NTcxMzM5NC42MC4wLjA.\">only 30% of Black students met English language arts standards and less than 16% met the standard in math\u003c/a>, placing Black students behind all other racial groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023–2024 budget attempted to address some of this inequity, but \u003ca href=\"https://edsource.org/2023/critics-say-newsoms-proposal-for-low-performing-students-fails-black-students/684148\">the budget proposal drew criticism\u003c/a> from advocates who say they want to see more funding and support specifically for Black students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What has played out in Oakland’s school district is not an anomaly when it comes to reparations, said Dr. Cheryl Grills, a state task force member.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s sometimes harder to implement things in the spirit in which they were intended than it is to get the win on the books,” said Grills, professor at Loyola Marymount University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state task force, which \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/meetings\">meets Friday and Saturday in Sacramento\u003c/a>, is expected to publish its plan for repairing almost 200 years of anti-Black racism in the state in June. To address racial disparities in public education, \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-agenda-consolidated-prelim-props.pdf\">preliminary policy proposals (PDF)\u003c/a> being considered include an increase in funding to schools through the local control funding formula, which determines how much money schools receive from the state. The preliminary proposals include repealing or amending Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure that prohibits state and local government affirmative action programs in the areas of public employment, public education and public contracting. “Proposition 209 is widely viewed as an impediment to the adoption of remedial measures,” the task force stated in the proposal document.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No part of a reparations plan will become law without the support of the governor and the state Legislature. Like the reparations push in Oakland, it will require consistent public pressure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is a historic moment that could happen in California,” Manigo said. “And I believe that the time is now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "reparations-are-also-about-black-safety-and-that-means-taking-on-policing",
"title": "Reparations Are Also About Black Safety — and That Means Taking on Policing",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dropcap]T[/dropcap]yre Nichols was mercilessly beaten by Memphis police officers after a traffic stop last month — and it was his fault. That’s if you believe the five officers accused of killing Nichols, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the story officers, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157756023/memphis-tyre-nichols-police-officers-court-charges\">who pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges on Feb. 17\u003c/a>, wanted the public to buy: Nichols, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/news/equity-lab/article272243108.html\">lived in Sacramento\u003c/a> before moving to Memphis, was driving recklessly, a misdemeanor in Tennessee, before he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After being forcibly removed from his car at gunpoint, he fled. The officers, then-part of an elite crime suppression unit, chased Nichols. They punched and kicked Nichols and struck him with a baton, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/us/tyre-nichols-arrest-videos.html\">justifying the violence in a false police report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The release of police and traffic camera footage revealed the glaring disparity that often exists between the police narrative and what actually occurs. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, wasn’t violent or aggressive, and he didn’t reach for an officer’s gun, as the initial report falsely asserted. So why did Nichols flee? In my bones, I know he was running to his mother’s house in search of what many police officers decline to provide Black people: safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The safety of Black people in America has been imperiled for four centuries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The safety of Black people in America is at the core of the California Reparations Task Force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wish more Californians were aware of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">the first statewide body to consider reparations for Black people\u003c/a>. The task force has presented an irrefutable examination of how systemic racism was woven into the fabric of America and California. I can think of at least 1,619 reasons why the work is largely unnoticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think about it: After the unpaid workforce of millions was emancipated, laws were enacted to restrict economic and social mobility. The emancipated population was terrorized by white supremacists intent on preserving the racial hierarchy as promises of land, opportunity and security were abandoned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t safe for Black people to look white people in the eye. It wasn’t safe for Black people to vote. It wasn’t safe for Black people to be in some towns after dark. It wasn’t safe for Black people to prosper. To maintain institutionalized social order, first it was the slave patrols, and now it’s the police.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]Racial terror swept this country for decades after emancipation as white mobs — some dressed in robes and hoods, some flashing badges and guns — destroyed homes, towns and lives. The racial segregation enforced in the South initiated the migration of Black people to states like California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For more than a year, the reparations task force, \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-notice-agenda-03032023-03042023.pdf\">which meets Friday and Saturday in Sacramento (PDF)\u003c/a>, has documented the unsavory truth about Black history — a history that is more than the cherry-picked sections of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream speech. Honoring Black history must include the centuries of state-sanctioned violence that America willfully ignores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black history is American history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After I watched the footage of Nichols being brutalized by the officers who immediately began constructing a false narrative as they gasped for air, I thought about Rodney King, the Black man who was savagely beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991, an assault recorded by an amateur videographer. The grainy footage of King writhing in pain as officers swung batons as if they were chopping sugarcane will stick in my mind forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I thought about Delphine Allen, the Black man who, while walking in West Oakland in 2000, was kidnapped and assaulted by rogue Oakland police officers. His feet were struck with a baton before he was driven to a secluded highway overpass, where the beating continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Allen was the lead plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit that alleged \u003ca href=\"https://clearinghouse.net/case/5541/\">misconduct and excessive use of force by four Oakland police officers\u003c/a> — and a lack of discipline and accountability for officer misconduct within the Oakland Police Department. More than 100 residents alleged mistreatment — brutal beatings, unlawful detention, intimidation — in the lawsuit that led to the federal monitoring of the OPD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quartet of officers known as “The Riders” rampaged West Oakland, an area once patrolled by the Black Panthers \u003cem>because of\u003c/em> police brutality, after sunset. An enduring vestige of enslavement is the over-policing of Black neighborhoods. As part of the $11 million settlement with the plaintiffs in 2003, the police department was forced to comply with court-ordered reforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost two decades after the settlement, \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/02/15/oakland-police-chief-leronne-armstrong-fired-mayor-sheng-thao/\">LeRonne Armstrong, OPD’s police chief, was fired on Feb. 15\u003c/a>, in part, because of an independent report that detailed the police department’s mishandling of officer misconduct — the kind of violation that led to federal monitoring in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942048\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11942048\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A bald Black man in a blue police uniform stands outside in the sun holding a microphone and squinting\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1278\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, pictured at a 2021 NAACP event paying tribute to George Floyd, was fired by Mayor Sheng Thao on Feb. 15. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Last month, I interviewed Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston, co-authors of \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/01/13/oakland-police-darwin-bondgraham-riders-ali-winston-book-opd/\">\u003cem>The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, as part of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/video/uncovering-brutality-cover-and-corruption-oakland\">Commonwealth Club of California event\u003c/a>. In the book, BondGraham, news editor for The Oaklandside, and Winston, an independent journalist, present a riveting and profound portrait of out-of-control policing in Oakland. \u003cem>The Riders Come Out at Night\u003c/em> is a compelling argument for why the police can’t be trusted with reforming the institution of policing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2016, OPD cycled through three police chiefs in eight days, an infamous stretch initiated by another misconduct scandal, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11080955/alameda-county-da-charges-7-cops-with-sexually-exploiting-teenager\">sex-trafficking of a minor by Oakland police officers and officers from multiple Bay Area jurisdictions\u003c/a>. The same year, two officers were suspended because of a racist text scandal. In 2021, nine officers were disciplined for racist and sexist social media posts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what led to the firing of Armstrong, who is from West Oakland and became chief two years ago this month: In 2021, an OPD sergeant driving a police vehicle hit a parked car in the garage of his San Francisco apartment building. The driver, Sgt. Michael Chung, who was instrumental in OPD’s response to crime in Chinatown, didn’t report the accident. In 2022, Chung fired his gun in an elevator at police headquarters. Again, no report was filed. An investigation by a law firm found that an OPD captain had Chung’s violations reduced so his punishment was less severe. According to the investigators with Clarence Dyer & Cohen LLP, Armstrong was aware of the light discipline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Jan. 18, the federal judge monitoring OPD’s reform efforts made the report by Clarence Dyer & Cohen public. The investigation “revealed systemic failures far larger and more serious than the actions of one police officer,” the \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/OPD-IA-cases-NSA-compliance-report.pdf\">blistering report (PDF)\u003c/a> concluded. The next day Armstrong was placed on paid administrative leave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when he should’ve copped a plea and said, “My bad, y’all.” Instead, he campaigned for his job at a rally on the steps of Oakland City Hall. The NAACP held another rally on Feb. 20. I called Terry Wiley, the former Alameda County prosecutor who is handling press around the firing for the NAACP. Wiley told me that Armstrong had made the kind of progress people of color want to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942080\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11942080\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A profile shot of a group of roughly 10 people, most of them Black, listening while a woman in the middle claps her hands\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1291\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-800x538.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-1020x686.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-1536x1033.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Community members listen to speakers during a rally in support of terminated Oakland police Chief LeRonne Armstrong at City Hall on Feb. 16. \u003ccite>(Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“When you look at the balance of all of the positives he has brought to the department as the chief, the question becomes, was this incident such that he should be terminated?” said Wiley, who lost the November election for district attorney to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11940920/when-da-boudin-investigated-police-killings-arrests-slowed-that-may-not-happen-with-da-pamela-price\">progressive Pamela Price\u003c/a>. “Our conclusion was that the mayor went too far on this, and that there should have been much more contemplation about the decision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement released by Sam Singer, a crisis manager, shortly after Armstrong was terminated, Armstrong referred to himself as a “loyal and effective reformer.” But reform isn’t possible without zero tolerance for misconduct, and the failure to issue appropriate discipline is inexcusable, especially for someone who pledges loyalty to reform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The police are incapable of policing the police. Just look around the Bay Area. In Vallejo, a city that blithely dodges police scrutiny, \u003ca href=\"https://openvallejo.org/2023/02/05/vallejo-destroyed-evidence-of-police-killings/\">the city destroyed evidence in multiple police killings\u003c/a> despite being under investigation by the state attorney general, according to reporting by Open Vallejo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/10/exclusive-fbi-criminal-investigation-of-antioch-pittsburg-cops-grows-grand-jury-convening/\">Officers in Antioch and Pittsburg are under investigation by the FBI and the Contra Costa district attorney\u003c/a> for fraud and civil rights violations, and federal prosecutors have already dismissed more than a dozen cases that hinged on officer testimony, according to \u003cem>The Mercury News\u003c/em>. And in Berkeley, the city’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11932420/berkeley-postpones-hiring-of-new-police-chief-amid-controversy-over-another-officers-alleged-racist-texts\">former police union head allegedly sent racist, anti-unhoused text messages\u003c/a> to officers while pushing for more arrests, as multiple newsrooms, including KQED, reported in November.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Wesley Lowery, journalist, author and contributing editor to The Marshall Project\"]‘What type of resources are we pouring into communities if our aim is to cut down on crime? Is the resource we’re sending in a bunch of armed guys told to rough people up?’[/pullquote]In January, the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board published a report that found that \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ripa-board-report-2023.pdf\">police searched Black people at twice the rate of white people in 2021 (PDF)\u003c/a>. And get this: Officers were more likely to find contraband on white people than Black and Latino people, according to the report, which also found that police were twice as likely to use force against Black people than white people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2021, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/data-reveals-racial-disparities-police-stops-bay-17763091.php\">Black people were six times as likely to be stopped in Oakland than white people\u003c/a>, according to the\u003cem> San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>’s analysis of the police-stop data recently released by the state attorney general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Black people were at least five times as likely to be stopped than white people. This is a city where officers accused of, among other infractions, sexual misconduct, domestic violence and sharing racist and antisemitic texts work desk duty in a windowless room while raking in millions collectively, according to the San Francisco Standard’s \u003ca href=\"https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/cop-used-drugs-had-car-sex-with-a-teenager-then-sf-spent-1-2m-to-keep-him-on-desk-duty/\">three-part series on police accountability\u003c/a>. This is the city where \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/jenkins-police-investigate-17782463.php\">the law-and-order district attorney gutted the unit that investigates police misconduct and violence\u003c/a>, according to reporting by the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101892172/wesley-lowery-on-americas-elusive-racial-reckoning\">episode of Forum\u003c/a>, Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, talked with host Mina Kim about “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/tyre-nichols-death-memphis-george-floyd-police-reform/672986/\">Why There Was No Racial Reckoning\u003c/a>,” a piece he wrote for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>. George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis in May 2020 sparked nationwide uprisings not seen since 1967. Floyd’s death was supposed to also spark a reimagining of policing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That, of course, hasn’t happened. Instead, the backlash against protests that demanded more funding for social services has empowered cities to continue criminalizing poverty. Posturing by police and politicians isn’t going to provide relief for families who have been living in poverty for generations. The police are trained in coercion, which renders their skills insufficient to respond to the circumstances which allow criminal activity to flourish: disinvestment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What type of resources are we pouring into those communities if our aim is to cut down on crime?” Lowery said on Forum. “Is the resource we’re sending in a bunch of armed guys told to rough people up?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label='Reparations Coverage' tag='california-reparations']In July, the task force will deliver reparations recommendations, which are expected to include direct payments to eligible Black Californians. But reparations are more than compensation. Last summer, the task force \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-interim-report-preliminary-recommendations-2022.pdf\">released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> with recommendations to address, among other things, the unjust legal system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The police are the gatekeepers of that system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The preliminary report suggests reducing “the scope of law enforcement jurisdiction within the public safety system” and shifting “more funding for prevention and mental health care.” The report also calls for the elimination of “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force and racial profiling” of Black people; the elimination of racial disparities in police stops; and the elimination of over-policing of predominantly Black communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force could pave the road to viable racial equity in America. But to get to that place, it’s guaranteed to be a bumpy journey. Make sure you buckle up for safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "California's reparations task force could pave the road to viable racial equity in America. But when police can't be trusted to reform policing — with the ouster of OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong and the killing of Tyre Nichols as just the latest examples — it's going to be a bumpy journey.",
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"title": "Reparations Are Also About Black Safety — and That Means Taking on Policing | KQED",
"description": "California's reparations task force could pave the road to viable racial equity in America. But when police can't be trusted to reform policing — with the ouster of OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong and the killing of Tyre Nichols as just the latest examples — it's going to be a bumpy journey.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">T\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>yre Nichols was mercilessly beaten by Memphis police officers after a traffic stop last month — and it was his fault. That’s if you believe the five officers accused of killing Nichols, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the story officers, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157756023/memphis-tyre-nichols-police-officers-court-charges\">who pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges on Feb. 17\u003c/a>, wanted the public to buy: Nichols, who \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/news/equity-lab/article272243108.html\">lived in Sacramento\u003c/a> before moving to Memphis, was driving recklessly, a misdemeanor in Tennessee, before he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After being forcibly removed from his car at gunpoint, he fled. The officers, then-part of an elite crime suppression unit, chased Nichols. They punched and kicked Nichols and struck him with a baton, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/us/tyre-nichols-arrest-videos.html\">justifying the violence in a false police report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The release of police and traffic camera footage revealed the glaring disparity that often exists between the police narrative and what actually occurs. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, wasn’t violent or aggressive, and he didn’t reach for an officer’s gun, as the initial report falsely asserted. So why did Nichols flee? In my bones, I know he was running to his mother’s house in search of what many police officers decline to provide Black people: safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The safety of Black people in America has been imperiled for four centuries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The safety of Black people in America is at the core of the California Reparations Task Force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wish more Californians were aware of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">the first statewide body to consider reparations for Black people\u003c/a>. The task force has presented an irrefutable examination of how systemic racism was woven into the fabric of America and California. I can think of at least 1,619 reasons why the work is largely unnoticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think about it: After the unpaid workforce of millions was emancipated, laws were enacted to restrict economic and social mobility. The emancipated population was terrorized by white supremacists intent on preserving the racial hierarchy as promises of land, opportunity and security were abandoned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t safe for Black people to look white people in the eye. It wasn’t safe for Black people to vote. It wasn’t safe for Black people to be in some towns after dark. It wasn’t safe for Black people to prosper. To maintain institutionalized social order, first it was the slave patrols, and now it’s the police.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Racial terror swept this country for decades after emancipation as white mobs — some dressed in robes and hoods, some flashing badges and guns — destroyed homes, towns and lives. The racial segregation enforced in the South initiated the migration of Black people to states like California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For more than a year, the reparations task force, \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/task-force-notice-agenda-03032023-03042023.pdf\">which meets Friday and Saturday in Sacramento (PDF)\u003c/a>, has documented the unsavory truth about Black history — a history that is more than the cherry-picked sections of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream speech. Honoring Black history must include the centuries of state-sanctioned violence that America willfully ignores.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Black history is American history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After I watched the footage of Nichols being brutalized by the officers who immediately began constructing a false narrative as they gasped for air, I thought about Rodney King, the Black man who was savagely beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991, an assault recorded by an amateur videographer. The grainy footage of King writhing in pain as officers swung batons as if they were chopping sugarcane will stick in my mind forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I thought about Delphine Allen, the Black man who, while walking in West Oakland in 2000, was kidnapped and assaulted by rogue Oakland police officers. His feet were struck with a baton before he was driven to a secluded highway overpass, where the beating continued.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Allen was the lead plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit that alleged \u003ca href=\"https://clearinghouse.net/case/5541/\">misconduct and excessive use of force by four Oakland police officers\u003c/a> — and a lack of discipline and accountability for officer misconduct within the Oakland Police Department. More than 100 residents alleged mistreatment — brutal beatings, unlawful detention, intimidation — in the lawsuit that led to the federal monitoring of the OPD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quartet of officers known as “The Riders” rampaged West Oakland, an area once patrolled by the Black Panthers \u003cem>because of\u003c/em> police brutality, after sunset. An enduring vestige of enslavement is the over-policing of Black neighborhoods. As part of the $11 million settlement with the plaintiffs in 2003, the police department was forced to comply with court-ordered reforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost two decades after the settlement, \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/02/15/oakland-police-chief-leronne-armstrong-fired-mayor-sheng-thao/\">LeRonne Armstrong, OPD’s police chief, was fired on Feb. 15\u003c/a>, in part, because of an independent report that detailed the police department’s mishandling of officer misconduct — the kind of violation that led to federal monitoring in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942048\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11942048\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A bald Black man in a blue police uniform stands outside in the sun holding a microphone and squinting\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1278\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS49478_044_Oakland_NAACPGeorgeFloyd_05252021-qut-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, pictured at a 2021 NAACP event paying tribute to George Floyd, was fired by Mayor Sheng Thao on Feb. 15. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Last month, I interviewed Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston, co-authors of \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2023/01/13/oakland-police-darwin-bondgraham-riders-ali-winston-book-opd/\">\u003cem>The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, as part of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/video/uncovering-brutality-cover-and-corruption-oakland\">Commonwealth Club of California event\u003c/a>. In the book, BondGraham, news editor for The Oaklandside, and Winston, an independent journalist, present a riveting and profound portrait of out-of-control policing in Oakland. \u003cem>The Riders Come Out at Night\u003c/em> is a compelling argument for why the police can’t be trusted with reforming the institution of policing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2016, OPD cycled through three police chiefs in eight days, an infamous stretch initiated by another misconduct scandal, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11080955/alameda-county-da-charges-7-cops-with-sexually-exploiting-teenager\">sex-trafficking of a minor by Oakland police officers and officers from multiple Bay Area jurisdictions\u003c/a>. The same year, two officers were suspended because of a racist text scandal. In 2021, nine officers were disciplined for racist and sexist social media posts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what led to the firing of Armstrong, who is from West Oakland and became chief two years ago this month: In 2021, an OPD sergeant driving a police vehicle hit a parked car in the garage of his San Francisco apartment building. The driver, Sgt. Michael Chung, who was instrumental in OPD’s response to crime in Chinatown, didn’t report the accident. In 2022, Chung fired his gun in an elevator at police headquarters. Again, no report was filed. An investigation by a law firm found that an OPD captain had Chung’s violations reduced so his punishment was less severe. According to the investigators with Clarence Dyer & Cohen LLP, Armstrong was aware of the light discipline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Jan. 18, the federal judge monitoring OPD’s reform efforts made the report by Clarence Dyer & Cohen public. The investigation “revealed systemic failures far larger and more serious than the actions of one police officer,” the \u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/OPD-IA-cases-NSA-compliance-report.pdf\">blistering report (PDF)\u003c/a> concluded. The next day Armstrong was placed on paid administrative leave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s when he should’ve copped a plea and said, “My bad, y’all.” Instead, he campaigned for his job at a rally on the steps of Oakland City Hall. The NAACP held another rally on Feb. 20. I called Terry Wiley, the former Alameda County prosecutor who is handling press around the firing for the NAACP. Wiley told me that Armstrong had made the kind of progress people of color want to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11942080\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11942080\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut.jpg\" alt=\"A profile shot of a group of roughly 10 people, most of them Black, listening while a woman in the middle claps her hands\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1291\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-800x538.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-1020x686.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/02/RS63165_GettyImages-1466897640-qut-1536x1033.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Community members listen to speakers during a rally in support of terminated Oakland police Chief LeRonne Armstrong at City Hall on Feb. 16. \u003ccite>(Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“When you look at the balance of all of the positives he has brought to the department as the chief, the question becomes, was this incident such that he should be terminated?” said Wiley, who lost the November election for district attorney to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11940920/when-da-boudin-investigated-police-killings-arrests-slowed-that-may-not-happen-with-da-pamela-price\">progressive Pamela Price\u003c/a>. “Our conclusion was that the mayor went too far on this, and that there should have been much more contemplation about the decision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement released by Sam Singer, a crisis manager, shortly after Armstrong was terminated, Armstrong referred to himself as a “loyal and effective reformer.” But reform isn’t possible without zero tolerance for misconduct, and the failure to issue appropriate discipline is inexcusable, especially for someone who pledges loyalty to reform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The police are incapable of policing the police. Just look around the Bay Area. In Vallejo, a city that blithely dodges police scrutiny, \u003ca href=\"https://openvallejo.org/2023/02/05/vallejo-destroyed-evidence-of-police-killings/\">the city destroyed evidence in multiple police killings\u003c/a> despite being under investigation by the state attorney general, according to reporting by Open Vallejo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/10/exclusive-fbi-criminal-investigation-of-antioch-pittsburg-cops-grows-grand-jury-convening/\">Officers in Antioch and Pittsburg are under investigation by the FBI and the Contra Costa district attorney\u003c/a> for fraud and civil rights violations, and federal prosecutors have already dismissed more than a dozen cases that hinged on officer testimony, according to \u003cem>The Mercury News\u003c/em>. And in Berkeley, the city’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11932420/berkeley-postpones-hiring-of-new-police-chief-amid-controversy-over-another-officers-alleged-racist-texts\">former police union head allegedly sent racist, anti-unhoused text messages\u003c/a> to officers while pushing for more arrests, as multiple newsrooms, including KQED, reported in November.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘What type of resources are we pouring into communities if our aim is to cut down on crime? Is the resource we’re sending in a bunch of armed guys told to rough people up?’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In January, the California Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board published a report that found that \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ripa-board-report-2023.pdf\">police searched Black people at twice the rate of white people in 2021 (PDF)\u003c/a>. And get this: Officers were more likely to find contraband on white people than Black and Latino people, according to the report, which also found that police were twice as likely to use force against Black people than white people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2021, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/data-reveals-racial-disparities-police-stops-bay-17763091.php\">Black people were six times as likely to be stopped in Oakland than white people\u003c/a>, according to the\u003cem> San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>’s analysis of the police-stop data recently released by the state attorney general.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Black people were at least five times as likely to be stopped than white people. This is a city where officers accused of, among other infractions, sexual misconduct, domestic violence and sharing racist and antisemitic texts work desk duty in a windowless room while raking in millions collectively, according to the San Francisco Standard’s \u003ca href=\"https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/cop-used-drugs-had-car-sex-with-a-teenager-then-sf-spent-1-2m-to-keep-him-on-desk-duty/\">three-part series on police accountability\u003c/a>. This is the city where \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/jenkins-police-investigate-17782463.php\">the law-and-order district attorney gutted the unit that investigates police misconduct and violence\u003c/a>, according to reporting by the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101892172/wesley-lowery-on-americas-elusive-racial-reckoning\">episode of Forum\u003c/a>, Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, talked with host Mina Kim about “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/tyre-nichols-death-memphis-george-floyd-police-reform/672986/\">Why There Was No Racial Reckoning\u003c/a>,” a piece he wrote for \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>. George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis in May 2020 sparked nationwide uprisings not seen since 1967. Floyd’s death was supposed to also spark a reimagining of policing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That, of course, hasn’t happened. Instead, the backlash against protests that demanded more funding for social services has empowered cities to continue criminalizing poverty. Posturing by police and politicians isn’t going to provide relief for families who have been living in poverty for generations. The police are trained in coercion, which renders their skills insufficient to respond to the circumstances which allow criminal activity to flourish: disinvestment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What type of resources are we pouring into those communities if our aim is to cut down on crime?” Lowery said on Forum. “Is the resource we’re sending in a bunch of armed guys told to rough people up?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In July, the task force will deliver reparations recommendations, which are expected to include direct payments to eligible Black Californians. But reparations are more than compensation. Last summer, the task force \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-interim-report-preliminary-recommendations-2022.pdf\">released a preliminary report (PDF)\u003c/a> with recommendations to address, among other things, the unjust legal system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The police are the gatekeepers of that system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The preliminary report suggests reducing “the scope of law enforcement jurisdiction within the public safety system” and shifting “more funding for prevention and mental health care.” The report also calls for the elimination of “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force and racial profiling” of Black people; the elimination of racial disparities in police stops; and the elimination of over-policing of predominantly Black communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force could pave the road to viable racial equity in America. But to get to that place, it’s guaranteed to be a bumpy journey. Make sure you buckle up for safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The hunt for racial equity in the United States may strike gold in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least that’s how many hope the work of the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/members\">California Reparations Task Force\u003c/a>, the first statewide body to study reparations for Black people, will pan out. The task force could potentially change the course of history by creating a malleable reparations model that the federal government could adapt for a nationwide package.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11906054/it-means-to-repair-what-you-should-know-about-reparations-for-black-californians#definition\">The term “reparation” is derived from “repair.”\u003c/a> But before we can seriously consider atonement and financial restitution for more than two centuries of enslavement, America, like California, must first acknowledge that, because of enslavement, racial inequities persist. Even though California staked a claim as a free state, Black people have endured marginalization and systemic racism since the state’s inception, as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">KQED’s yearslong project on reparations continues to report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anti-Black racism in America is a vestige of chattel slavery. The task force has mined the lingering effects on society, releasing an \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">interim report (PDF)\u003c/a> last year that provided nuggets on how closely linked California’s past is to the present. The durability of systemic racism can be difficult to digest. That’s why Manjula Varghese, a digital producer and editor for KQED Arts and Culture, produced a five-part video series that enriches the reparations debate and, most importantly, provides enlightenment on why reparations are a necessary tool to achieve equity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnwBMVDCx_M\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Directed by Varghese, with assistance from Lakshmi Sarah, a weekend digital producer and reporter, and Chinwe Oniah, a Bay Area-based filmmaker, the series explores how the perpetual influence of chattel slavery — disparities in education, health, wealth and more — affects the lives of Black people in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The series will delve into the history of the reparations movement in America, while also exploring a part of California history that is rarely discussed: the hostility toward Black settlements, and how thriving Black communities were systematically torn apart and turned into ghost towns. KQED’s viewers will be introduced to the nine-member task force and, as part of the lead-up to the release of the task force’s landmark report this summer, viewers will meet people who have been digging for reparations for decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"Reparations in California\" link1=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations,Explore why California launched the first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations for Black people\" hero=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/2022/02/RiCLandingPageGraphic-1020x574.png\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force has until July 1 to deliver reparations recommendations, which are expected to include direct payments to eligible Black Californians. From there, California’s state Legislature will determine what to do with the recommendations to address, among other things, political disenfranchisement, housing segregation, environmental racism and an unjust legal system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anything less than a significant investment in the communities that have historically been denied opportunity will signal that the report was fool’s gold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The hunt for racial equity in the United States may strike gold in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least that’s how many hope the work of the \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/members\">California Reparations Task Force\u003c/a>, the first statewide body to study reparations for Black people, will pan out. The task force could potentially change the course of history by creating a malleable reparations model that the federal government could adapt for a nationwide package.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11906054/it-means-to-repair-what-you-should-know-about-reparations-for-black-californians#definition\">The term “reparation” is derived from “repair.”\u003c/a> But before we can seriously consider atonement and financial restitution for more than two centuries of enslavement, America, like California, must first acknowledge that, because of enslavement, racial inequities persist. Even though California staked a claim as a free state, Black people have endured marginalization and systemic racism since the state’s inception, as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/reparations\">KQED’s yearslong project on reparations continues to report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anti-Black racism in America is a vestige of chattel slavery. The task force has mined the lingering effects on society, releasing an \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/ab3121-reparations-interim-report-2022.pdf\">interim report (PDF)\u003c/a> last year that provided nuggets on how closely linked California’s past is to the present. The durability of systemic racism can be difficult to digest. That’s why Manjula Varghese, a digital producer and editor for KQED Arts and Culture, produced a five-part video series that enriches the reparations debate and, most importantly, provides enlightenment on why reparations are a necessary tool to achieve equity.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/vnwBMVDCx_M'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/vnwBMVDCx_M'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Directed by Varghese, with assistance from Lakshmi Sarah, a weekend digital producer and reporter, and Chinwe Oniah, a Bay Area-based filmmaker, the series explores how the perpetual influence of chattel slavery — disparities in education, health, wealth and more — affects the lives of Black people in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force has until July 1 to deliver reparations recommendations, which are expected to include direct payments to eligible Black Californians. From there, California’s state Legislature will determine what to do with the recommendations to address, among other things, political disenfranchisement, housing segregation, environmental racism and an unjust legal system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anything less than a significant investment in the communities that have historically been denied opportunity will signal that the report was fool’s gold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "California Tries to Find and Compensate Victims of Forced Sterilization Program",
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"content": "\u003cp>About 600 people alive today can’t have children because California’s government sterilized them either against their will or without their knowledge, and now the state is trying to find them so it can pay them at least $15,000 each in reparations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But after a year of searching, the state has approved just 51 people for payments out of 310 applications. There’s one year left to look before the $4.5 million program shuts down and the challenges remain steep. State officials have denied 103 people, closed three incomplete applications and are processing 153 others — but they say it’s difficult to verify the applications as many records have been lost or destroyed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two groups of people are eligible for the money: Those sterilized by the government during the so-called eugenics movement that peaked during the 1930s and a smaller group who were victimized while in state prisons about a decade ago.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Lynda Gledhill, executive officer, California Victim Compensation Board\"]‘We take that mission very seriously to find these folks. Nothing we can do can make up for what happened to them.’[/pullquote]“We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own,” said Lynda Gledhill, executive officer of the California Victim Compensation Board that oversees the program. “We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California in 2021 was \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/12/31/california-launches-program-to-compensate-survivors-of-state-sponsored-sterilization/\">the third state to approve a reparations program for forced sterilizations\u003c/a>, joining North Carolina and Virginia. But California was the first state to also include more recent victims from its state prison system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eugenics movement sought to prevent some people with mental illness or physical disabilities from being able to have children. California had the nation’s largest forced sterilization program, sterilizing about 20,000 people beginning in 1909. It was so well known that it later \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-business-science-health-government-and-politics-bb019f426cdbb839790ac98d420a0224\">inspired practices in Nazi Germany\u003c/a>. The state did not repeal its eugenics law until 1979.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the 51 people approved for reparations so far, just three were sterilized during the eugenics era. With surviving victims from that time in their 80s, 90s and beyond, state officials have sent posters and fact sheets to 1,000 skilled nursing homes and 500 libraries across the state in hopes of reaching more of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state also signed a $280,000 contract in May with JP Marketing, based in Fresno, to launch a social media campaign that will run through the end of 2023. The biggest push will begin this month, when the state will pay for TV and radio ads in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento that will run through next October.[aside postID=forum_2010101884559 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/43/2021/07/iStock-682483084-1020x631.jpg']The hope is that victims’ friends or relatives will see the ads and help their loved one apply for the program. Only victims are eligible for payments. But if a victim dies after being approved but before receiving the total payment, they can designate a beneficiary — such as a family member — to receive the money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We take that mission very seriously to find these folks,” Gledhill said. “Nothing we can do can make up for what happened to them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second group eligible for reparations comprises people who were sterilized in California prisons. A state audit found 144 women were sterilized between 2005 and 2013 with little or no evidence they were counseled or offered alternative treatments. State lawmakers responded by passing a law in 2014 to ban sterilizations in prison for birth control purposes while still allowing for other medically necessary procedures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been much easier to find records verifying those victims, as their procedures happened recently. State officials have sent letters to incarcerated people believed to have been sterilized and urged them to apply while also putting up fliers in state prisons advertising the program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendy Carrillo, a Democratic member of the California Assembly who pushed to get the program approved, said she will ask lawmakers to extend the application deadline beyond 2023. She wants to give victims more time to apply, and she wants to expand the program to include victims who were sterilized at county-funded hospitals. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized in 2018 after more than 200 women were sterilized at the Los Angeles-USC Medical Center between 1968 and 1974.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not thrilled with the numbers that we are seeing so far, but I believe that as we exit out of COVID and we begin to fully work at our full capacity — meaning that we are able to do community meetings and in-person meetings and more direct outreach other than behind a computer and through Zoom — things will change,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finding incarcerated people who were sterilized is still a challenge, Gledhill said. “It’s a population that may not be very trusting of government, given what happened to them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those people is Moonlight Pulido, who was serving a life sentence for premeditated attempted murder. While in prison in 2005, Pulido said a doctor told her he needed to remove two “growths” that could be cancer. She signed a form and had surgery. Later, something didn’t feel right. She was constantly sweating and not feeling like herself. She asked a nurse, who told her she had had a full hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes other parts of the reproductive system.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Moonlight Pulido\"]‘I’m Native American, and we as women, we’re grounded to Mother Earth. We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me. I felt like less than a woman.’[/pullquote]Pulido was shocked. She was 41 years old at the time, already had children and was serving a life sentence. But she said the doctor took away her right to start another family — something that deeply affected her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m Native American, and we as women, we’re grounded to Mother Earth. We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me,” she said. “I felt like less than a woman.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido was released on parole in January 2022. Working with the advocacy group Coalition for Women Prisoners, she applied for reparations and was approved for a $15,000 payment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I sat there and I looked at it and I cried. I cried because I have never had that much money ever in my life,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido could get more money. The state has $4.5 million for reparations and whatever is left over once the program ends will be divided up evenly among approved victims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido said she spent some of the money fixing up a car someone gave her when she got out of prison. She’s trying to save the rest. Known as DeAnna Henderson for most of her life, Pulido said she changed her name shortly before being released from prison — taking inspiration from gazing at the moon outside the window of her cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“DeAnna was a very hurt little girl that carried a lot of hurt baggage, and I got tired of carrying all that around,” she said. “I’ve lived in the darkness for so long, I want to be part of the light that’s going to be part of my name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "California has $4.5 million that officials want to pay as reparations for government-forced or coerced sterilizations that were part of a so-called eugenics movement that peaked in the 1930s. But finding the victims is proving difficult.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>About 600 people alive today can’t have children because California’s government sterilized them either against their will or without their knowledge, and now the state is trying to find them so it can pay them at least $15,000 each in reparations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But after a year of searching, the state has approved just 51 people for payments out of 310 applications. There’s one year left to look before the $4.5 million program shuts down and the challenges remain steep. State officials have denied 103 people, closed three incomplete applications and are processing 153 others — but they say it’s difficult to verify the applications as many records have been lost or destroyed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two groups of people are eligible for the money: Those sterilized by the government during the so-called eugenics movement that peaked during the 1930s and a smaller group who were victimized while in state prisons about a decade ago.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own,” said Lynda Gledhill, executive officer of the California Victim Compensation Board that oversees the program. “We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California in 2021 was \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/12/31/california-launches-program-to-compensate-survivors-of-state-sponsored-sterilization/\">the third state to approve a reparations program for forced sterilizations\u003c/a>, joining North Carolina and Virginia. But California was the first state to also include more recent victims from its state prison system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eugenics movement sought to prevent some people with mental illness or physical disabilities from being able to have children. California had the nation’s largest forced sterilization program, sterilizing about 20,000 people beginning in 1909. It was so well known that it later \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-business-science-health-government-and-politics-bb019f426cdbb839790ac98d420a0224\">inspired practices in Nazi Germany\u003c/a>. The state did not repeal its eugenics law until 1979.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the 51 people approved for reparations so far, just three were sterilized during the eugenics era. With surviving victims from that time in their 80s, 90s and beyond, state officials have sent posters and fact sheets to 1,000 skilled nursing homes and 500 libraries across the state in hopes of reaching more of them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state also signed a $280,000 contract in May with JP Marketing, based in Fresno, to launch a social media campaign that will run through the end of 2023. The biggest push will begin this month, when the state will pay for TV and radio ads in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento that will run through next October.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The hope is that victims’ friends or relatives will see the ads and help their loved one apply for the program. Only victims are eligible for payments. But if a victim dies after being approved but before receiving the total payment, they can designate a beneficiary — such as a family member — to receive the money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We take that mission very seriously to find these folks,” Gledhill said. “Nothing we can do can make up for what happened to them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second group eligible for reparations comprises people who were sterilized in California prisons. A state audit found 144 women were sterilized between 2005 and 2013 with little or no evidence they were counseled or offered alternative treatments. State lawmakers responded by passing a law in 2014 to ban sterilizations in prison for birth control purposes while still allowing for other medically necessary procedures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s been much easier to find records verifying those victims, as their procedures happened recently. State officials have sent letters to incarcerated people believed to have been sterilized and urged them to apply while also putting up fliers in state prisons advertising the program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wendy Carrillo, a Democratic member of the California Assembly who pushed to get the program approved, said she will ask lawmakers to extend the application deadline beyond 2023. She wants to give victims more time to apply, and she wants to expand the program to include victims who were sterilized at county-funded hospitals. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized in 2018 after more than 200 women were sterilized at the Los Angeles-USC Medical Center between 1968 and 1974.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m not thrilled with the numbers that we are seeing so far, but I believe that as we exit out of COVID and we begin to fully work at our full capacity — meaning that we are able to do community meetings and in-person meetings and more direct outreach other than behind a computer and through Zoom — things will change,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finding incarcerated people who were sterilized is still a challenge, Gledhill said. “It’s a population that may not be very trusting of government, given what happened to them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of those people is Moonlight Pulido, who was serving a life sentence for premeditated attempted murder. While in prison in 2005, Pulido said a doctor told her he needed to remove two “growths” that could be cancer. She signed a form and had surgery. Later, something didn’t feel right. She was constantly sweating and not feeling like herself. She asked a nurse, who told her she had had a full hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes other parts of the reproductive system.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Pulido was shocked. She was 41 years old at the time, already had children and was serving a life sentence. But she said the doctor took away her right to start another family — something that deeply affected her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m Native American, and we as women, we’re grounded to Mother Earth. We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me,” she said. “I felt like less than a woman.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido was released on parole in January 2022. Working with the advocacy group Coalition for Women Prisoners, she applied for reparations and was approved for a $15,000 payment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I sat there and I looked at it and I cried. I cried because I have never had that much money ever in my life,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido could get more money. The state has $4.5 million for reparations and whatever is left over once the program ends will be divided up evenly among approved victims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pulido said she spent some of the money fixing up a car someone gave her when she got out of prison. She’s trying to save the rest. Known as DeAnna Henderson for most of her life, Pulido said she changed her name shortly before being released from prison — taking inspiration from gazing at the moon outside the window of her cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“DeAnna was a very hurt little girl that carried a lot of hurt baggage, and I got tired of carrying all that around,” she said. “I’ve lived in the darkness for so long, I want to be part of the light that’s going to be part of my name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "California Reparations Task Force Meets in Oakland to Weigh Eligibility Requirements",
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"content": "\u003cp>After more than a year delving into history and studies to make its case for reparations to California descendants of enslaved Black people, a first-in-the-nation task force is meeting again for deliberations at Oakland City Hall on Wednesday and Thursday to quantify how financial compensation might be calculated and what might be required to prove eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conversations on how to determine payments are in the early stages, with task force members acknowledging they have more questions than answers. Economists hired by the task force are seeking guidance on five harms experienced by Black people: \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-janice-hahn-a3e320018f6770e156c0862d12317ea5\">government taking of property\u003c/a>, devaluation of Black-owned businesses, housing discrimination and homelessness, mass incarceration and over-policing, and health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s task force met Wednesday at Oakland's City Hall. Oakland was the birthplace of the Black Panthers but has lost some of its African American population as rising home prices have forced people out.[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Max Fennell, coffee company owner\"]'It's a debt that's owed. We worked for free. We're not asking. We're telling you.'[/pullquote]The task force must determine when each harm began and ended and who should be eligible for monetary compensation in those areas. For example, the group could choose to limit cash compensation to people incarcerated from 1970 — when more people started being imprisoned for drug-related crimes — to the present. Or they could choose to compensate everyone who lived in over-policed Black neighborhoods, even if they were not themselves arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force has a July 1 deadline to complete its final report for the Legislature listing recommendations for how the state can atone for and address its legacy of discriminatory policies against Black Californians. Lawmakers will need to pass legislation for payments and other policy changes to take place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The work that you all are doing statewide will help us guide the same process through the entire state of California, because the harm is real,\" said Oakland City Council member Carroll Fife, who opened the meeting by welcoming the task force to Oakland. \"And the people here today to testify about that and the work that you all have done, collecting this robust set of suggestions to bring back to the state, is invaluable. It is literally priceless. And I'm grateful for your work. I'm grateful for your participation. And I look forward to accountability when this gets back to our legislators so that we can have real action. Thank you all for being here today. I appreciate you all. I appreciate your work. And welcome to Oakland.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935326\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935326\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-scaled.jpeg\" alt=\"A black woman wearing a purple suit speaks behind a dais in a large hall with columns and press behind her.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-scaled.jpeg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-800x600.jpeg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1020x765.jpeg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-160x120.jpeg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1920x1440.jpeg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Oakland City Council member Carroll Fife welcomes the California Reparations Task Force to Oakland on Dec. 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Earlier this year, the committee made the controversial decision to limit reparations to descendants of Black people in the United States as of the 19th century, either as freed or enslaved people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force member Monica Montgomery Steppe said Wednesday they need to take more time addressing time frames, payment calculations and residency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is the foundation of all the other recommendations,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the task force, giving hope to reparations advocates who had despaired that anything might happen at the federal level. Since then, reparations efforts have bubbled up in cities and counties and at colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Wednesday, the\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/politics-boston-slavery-government-and-6a5e36f746db813b2f42444e180be7b2\"> Boston City Council voted to form a task force to study reparations\u003c/a> and other forms of atonement to Black residents for the city’s role in slavery and its legacy of inequality. Lawmakers in other parts of the country have pushed their states and cities to study reparations, without much progress. But Evanston, Illinois, became the first U.S. city last year to make reparations available for Black residents, and public officials in New York will try anew to create a reparations commission in that state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 60 people attended Wednesday’s meeting, nodding in agreement as task force members spoke of the generational trauma suffered by Black children amid inaccurate and ongoing depictions of white families as ideal and Black families as not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max Fennell, a 35-year-old coffee company owner, said that every person should get $350,000 in compensation to close the racial wealth gap and that Black-owned businesses should receive $250,000, which would help them to flourish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a debt that’s owed. We worked for free,\" he said. \"We’re not asking. We’re telling you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Demnlus Johnson III, a Richmond City Council member, said it's remarkable that the issue is even being talked about publicly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to name a problem in order to address it,\" he said. “Of course we want to see it addressed now, the urgency is now, but just having it all aired out and put on the line is a major feat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Members of the committee will make preliminary policy recommendations, such as audits of government agencies that deal with child welfare and incarceration with the aim of reducing disparities in how Black people are treated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group discussed how the state may address its impact on Black families whose property was seized through eminent domain. The topic garnered renewed attention after lawmakers last year voted to return a beachfront property in Southern California known as \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-janice-hahn-a3e320018f6770e156c0862d12317ea5\">Bruce's Beach\u003c/a> to descendants of the Black residents who owned it until it was taken in the 20th century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935349\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935349\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"People of various races sit and listen in Oakland City Hall.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">General view of the meeting with the Reparations Task Force, Dec. 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Officials from Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles and other California cities planned to present about local reparations efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That included Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad, vice chair of Los Angeles’ Reparations Advisory Commission, created last year under then-Mayor Eric Garcetti. The goal of that commission is to advise LA on a pilot program for distributing reparations to a group of Black residents, but it doesn't have a timeline set in stone for finishing its work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, economists started listing preliminary estimates for what could be owed by the state as a result of discriminatory policies. But they said they need more data to come up with more complete figures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kamilah Moore, the task force's chair, said the group has not decided on any dollar amounts or what form reparations could take, nor where the money would come from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a former Assembly member, authored the bill that created the state's task force, and the group began its work last year. The bill was signed into law in September 2020 after a summer of \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-shootings-race-and-ethnicity-or-state-wire-racial-injustice-9035ecdfc58d5dba755185666ac0ed6d\">nationwide protests\u003c/a> against racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minnesota.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In June, the task force released \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-san-francisco-voter-registration-0cb66f61c4b9f0136c43a17408720d98\">a 500-page report describing discriminatory policies\u003c/a> that drove housing segregation, criminal justice disparities and other realities that harmed Black Californians in the decades since the abolition of slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Former Russell City and current Oakland resident Marian Johnson and her brother came to Oakland City Hall for public comment where Johnson shared her story with the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My grandparents came to California in the 1940s, landing in West Oakland. They were pushed out of there by the I-980 project. Then they landed in Russell City, where my mother and my father met and married. They were forced out of there when I was an infant, placing us in a place that was not safe. I can’t tell you how many times we went to developments to look at new model homes. They let us go in. By the time we got back to our paperwork, offices were empty every time. In 1968 we were forced to leave Russell City, forced out of our land and our property, and we were given nothing in order for us to move on. We were forced into East Oakland, which was the only place we were able to live. We weren’t allowed in other communities. We were over-policed. We were disenfranchized. It felt like there was no room for us, that we weren’t worthy of anything. The only comfort we felt for a short period of time was when the Black Panthers came into our neighborhood and they would make sure we were safe and that we had food. But other than that, the police were not there to help us. My brothers were brutalized and put into prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I see that this task force is here to provide reparation for our community. I don’t know anything about things. I know what happened to my family and my mother is still here. And I’m hoping that she’s able to see what comes from this and that she gets some form of justice and some form of peace. Thank you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED's Lakshmi Sarah and Annelise Finney contributed to this story. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "California's first-in-the-nation task force studying reparations for Black residents is meeting in Oakland to discuss potential eligibility requirements and what form reparations could take.",
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"description": "California's first-in-the-nation task force studying reparations for Black residents is meeting in Oakland to discuss potential eligibility requirements and what form reparations could take.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After more than a year delving into history and studies to make its case for reparations to California descendants of enslaved Black people, a first-in-the-nation task force is meeting again for deliberations at Oakland City Hall on Wednesday and Thursday to quantify how financial compensation might be calculated and what might be required to prove eligibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conversations on how to determine payments are in the early stages, with task force members acknowledging they have more questions than answers. Economists hired by the task force are seeking guidance on five harms experienced by Black people: \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-janice-hahn-a3e320018f6770e156c0862d12317ea5\">government taking of property\u003c/a>, devaluation of Black-owned businesses, housing discrimination and homelessness, mass incarceration and over-policing, and health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s task force met Wednesday at Oakland's City Hall. Oakland was the birthplace of the Black Panthers but has lost some of its African American population as rising home prices have forced people out.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The task force must determine when each harm began and ended and who should be eligible for monetary compensation in those areas. For example, the group could choose to limit cash compensation to people incarcerated from 1970 — when more people started being imprisoned for drug-related crimes — to the present. Or they could choose to compensate everyone who lived in over-policed Black neighborhoods, even if they were not themselves arrested.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The task force has a July 1 deadline to complete its final report for the Legislature listing recommendations for how the state can atone for and address its legacy of discriminatory policies against Black Californians. Lawmakers will need to pass legislation for payments and other policy changes to take place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The work that you all are doing statewide will help us guide the same process through the entire state of California, because the harm is real,\" said Oakland City Council member Carroll Fife, who opened the meeting by welcoming the task force to Oakland. \"And the people here today to testify about that and the work that you all have done, collecting this robust set of suggestions to bring back to the state, is invaluable. It is literally priceless. And I'm grateful for your work. I'm grateful for your participation. And I look forward to accountability when this gets back to our legislators so that we can have real action. Thank you all for being here today. I appreciate you all. I appreciate your work. And welcome to Oakland.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935326\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935326\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-scaled.jpeg\" alt=\"A black woman wearing a purple suit speaks behind a dais in a large hall with columns and press behind her.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-scaled.jpeg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-800x600.jpeg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1020x765.jpeg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-160x120.jpeg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/Carol_Fife-1920x1440.jpeg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Oakland City Council member Carroll Fife welcomes the California Reparations Task Force to Oakland on Dec. 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Earlier this year, the committee made the controversial decision to limit reparations to descendants of Black people in the United States as of the 19th century, either as freed or enslaved people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Task force member Monica Montgomery Steppe said Wednesday they need to take more time addressing time frames, payment calculations and residency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is the foundation of all the other recommendations,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2020 creating the task force, giving hope to reparations advocates who had despaired that anything might happen at the federal level. Since then, reparations efforts have bubbled up in cities and counties and at colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Wednesday, the\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/politics-boston-slavery-government-and-6a5e36f746db813b2f42444e180be7b2\"> Boston City Council voted to form a task force to study reparations\u003c/a> and other forms of atonement to Black residents for the city’s role in slavery and its legacy of inequality. Lawmakers in other parts of the country have pushed their states and cities to study reparations, without much progress. But Evanston, Illinois, became the first U.S. city last year to make reparations available for Black residents, and public officials in New York will try anew to create a reparations commission in that state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 60 people attended Wednesday’s meeting, nodding in agreement as task force members spoke of the generational trauma suffered by Black children amid inaccurate and ongoing depictions of white families as ideal and Black families as not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max Fennell, a 35-year-old coffee company owner, said that every person should get $350,000 in compensation to close the racial wealth gap and that Black-owned businesses should receive $250,000, which would help them to flourish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a debt that’s owed. We worked for free,\" he said. \"We’re not asking. We’re telling you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Demnlus Johnson III, a Richmond City Council member, said it's remarkable that the issue is even being talked about publicly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to name a problem in order to address it,\" he said. “Of course we want to see it addressed now, the urgency is now, but just having it all aired out and put on the line is a major feat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Members of the committee will make preliminary policy recommendations, such as audits of government agencies that deal with child welfare and incarceration with the aim of reducing disparities in how Black people are treated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group discussed how the state may address its impact on Black families whose property was seized through eminent domain. The topic garnered renewed attention after lawmakers last year voted to return a beachfront property in Southern California known as \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-janice-hahn-a3e320018f6770e156c0862d12317ea5\">Bruce's Beach\u003c/a> to descendants of the Black residents who owned it until it was taken in the 20th century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11935349\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11935349\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"People of various races sit and listen in Oakland City Hall.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1920\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/IMG_9115-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">General view of the meeting with the Reparations Task Force, Dec. 14, 2022. \u003ccite>(Annelise Finney/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Officials from Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles and other California cities planned to present about local reparations efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That included Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad, vice chair of Los Angeles’ Reparations Advisory Commission, created last year under then-Mayor Eric Garcetti. The goal of that commission is to advise LA on a pilot program for distributing reparations to a group of Black residents, but it doesn't have a timeline set in stone for finishing its work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, economists started listing preliminary estimates for what could be owed by the state as a result of discriminatory policies. But they said they need more data to come up with more complete figures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kamilah Moore, the task force's chair, said the group has not decided on any dollar amounts or what form reparations could take, nor where the money would come from.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a former Assembly member, authored the bill that created the state's task force, and the group began its work last year. The bill was signed into law in September 2020 after a summer of \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-shootings-race-and-ethnicity-or-state-wire-racial-injustice-9035ecdfc58d5dba755185666ac0ed6d\">nationwide protests\u003c/a> against racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minnesota.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In June, the task force released \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-san-francisco-voter-registration-0cb66f61c4b9f0136c43a17408720d98\">a 500-page report describing discriminatory policies\u003c/a> that drove housing segregation, criminal justice disparities and other realities that harmed Black Californians in the decades since the abolition of slavery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Former Russell City and current Oakland resident Marian Johnson and her brother came to Oakland City Hall for public comment where Johnson shared her story with the task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My grandparents came to California in the 1940s, landing in West Oakland. They were pushed out of there by the I-980 project. Then they landed in Russell City, where my mother and my father met and married. They were forced out of there when I was an infant, placing us in a place that was not safe. I can’t tell you how many times we went to developments to look at new model homes. They let us go in. By the time we got back to our paperwork, offices were empty every time. In 1968 we were forced to leave Russell City, forced out of our land and our property, and we were given nothing in order for us to move on. We were forced into East Oakland, which was the only place we were able to live. We weren’t allowed in other communities. We were over-policed. We were disenfranchized. It felt like there was no room for us, that we weren’t worthy of anything. The only comfort we felt for a short period of time was when the Black Panthers came into our neighborhood and they would make sure we were safe and that we had food. But other than that, the police were not there to help us. My brothers were brutalized and put into prison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I see that this task force is here to provide reparation for our community. I don’t know anything about things. I know what happened to my family and my mother is still here. And I’m hoping that she’s able to see what comes from this and that she gets some form of justice and some form of peace. Thank you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED's Lakshmi Sarah and Annelise Finney contributed to this story. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Approved Change of Controversial Road Name in Contra Costa County Hits a Snag in Concord",
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"headTitle": "Approved Change of Controversial Road Name in Contra Costa County Hits a Snag in Concord | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Contra Costa County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to rename one section of Kirker Pass Road in the city of Pittsburg and unincorporated areas, but not the stretch that runs through Concord, where residents opposed the name change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county’s Board of Supervisors has sought since February to rename the winding road that connects Concord and Pittsburg, after officials learned that its namesake, James Kirker, was a bounty hunter who allegedly was involved in the murders of hundreds of Apache men, women and children in the early 1800s while working for the Mexican state of Chihuahua.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the name-change effort recently hit a snag, Supervisor Karen Mitchoff explained during the board’s meeting Tuesday, because Concord residents who live along the road said they didn’t want to have to change their home addresses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not think there were that many residents whose property affronted Kirker Pass Road,” said Mitchoff, whose district includes some of area the road runs through. “\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I understand it, but I really am disappointed that we will continue to perpetuate a name [of someone] who … just had a pretty bad reputation.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mitchoff added that she did not initially view the change of address as a significant burden and was “a little irritated” by that reasoning, but has since come to better understand residents’ concerns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is quite inconvenient,” she acknowledged. “It is your driver’s license, it is your medical records, it is your voting records, it is your tax records, it is your property taxes, it’s your children’s school records. And that really would be a burden.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county will now pursue changing the name of the road only between the point where it exits Concord’s city limits and its junction with Railroad Avenue in Pittsburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label=\"related coverage\" tag=\"native-american\"]A new name for Kirker Pass Road has yet to be proposed, Mitchoff said Tuesday, and it likely will be finalized after county officials hold a community meeting with local residents to gather feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County officials first started considering the name change after Daniel Kelly, a retired San Francisco social worker and a master’s degree candidate in Arizona State University’s history program, outlined Kirker’s history as a “homicidal racist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kelly made the case for the name change in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/The-Washington-Football-team-rebranded-16832829.php\">San Francisco Chronicle opinion article\u003c/a>, and then appealed directly to the board in February, prompting Mitchoff and fellow Supervisor Federal Glover to submit an official renaming request to the county.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker, an Irish immigrant, worked as a trapper in what was then northern Mexico and is now southern New Mexico before becoming a mercenary of the Mexican government, which was seeking to extract copper ore from the area, according to Kelly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Apaches in the area attempted to prevent the mining effort in a bid to defend their lands, the Mexican government issued bounties of “100 pesos for the scalp of an Apache man, 50 for a woman’s and 25 pesos for a child’s scalp,” he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker and others seeking to claim the government’s bounties, Kelly said, raided an Apache camp outside the town of Galeana in the state of Chihuahua in June 1846, bludgeoning between 130 and 170 Apache men, women and children and mounting their scalps on poles outside the camp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An essay \u003ca href=\"https://www.cocohistory.org/essays-kirker.html\">penned by local historian William Mero\u003c/a> in the archives of the Contra Costa County Historical Society corroborates Kelly’s portrayal of Kirker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kirker organized militias in many of the villages in Chihuahua State against growing Apache attacks,” Mero wrote. “Later James Kirker led a large band of Mexican, American, Delaware and Shawnee warriors. They fought the Apaches who were raiding deeper and deeper into northern Mexico. Kirker’s band was just one of many such mercenary gangs of American and Mexican Apache scalp hunters working for the State of Chihuahua.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker later defected to the U.S. during the Mexican-American War and fled the region after Mexico declared him a traitor, eventually settling in Contra Costa County, where he died several years later. The county officially named the road after him in 1892.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Tuesday’s meeting, Supervisor John Gioia argued that any short-term inconvenience is far outweighed by the moral imperative to change the name of the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “And all I can say is I would continue to encourage the cities to make the same change and even over any short-term concern that residents or businesses may have because ultimately, name changes occur on streets all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story includes reporting from KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/AnaOphLin\">Anaïs-Ophelia Lino\u003c/a> and Bay City News’ Eli Walsh.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "County supervisors voted unanimously to rename part of Kirker Pass Road, whose namesake was a 19th-century bounty hunter responsible for killing scores of Apache people. But the name will remain on the stretch running through Concord, after residents balked at having to potentially change their addresses.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Contra Costa County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to rename one section of Kirker Pass Road in the city of Pittsburg and unincorporated areas, but not the stretch that runs through Concord, where residents opposed the name change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county’s Board of Supervisors has sought since February to rename the winding road that connects Concord and Pittsburg, after officials learned that its namesake, James Kirker, was a bounty hunter who allegedly was involved in the murders of hundreds of Apache men, women and children in the early 1800s while working for the Mexican state of Chihuahua.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the name-change effort recently hit a snag, Supervisor Karen Mitchoff explained during the board’s meeting Tuesday, because Concord residents who live along the road said they didn’t want to have to change their home addresses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did not think there were that many residents whose property affronted Kirker Pass Road,” said Mitchoff, whose district includes some of area the road runs through. “\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I understand it, but I really am disappointed that we will continue to perpetuate a name [of someone] who … just had a pretty bad reputation.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mitchoff added that she did not initially view the change of address as a significant burden and was “a little irritated” by that reasoning, but has since come to better understand residents’ concerns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It is quite inconvenient,” she acknowledged. “It is your driver’s license, it is your medical records, it is your voting records, it is your tax records, it is your property taxes, it’s your children’s school records. And that really would be a burden.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county will now pursue changing the name of the road only between the point where it exits Concord’s city limits and its junction with Railroad Avenue in Pittsburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>A new name for Kirker Pass Road has yet to be proposed, Mitchoff said Tuesday, and it likely will be finalized after county officials hold a community meeting with local residents to gather feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>County officials first started considering the name change after Daniel Kelly, a retired San Francisco social worker and a master’s degree candidate in Arizona State University’s history program, outlined Kirker’s history as a “homicidal racist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kelly made the case for the name change in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/The-Washington-Football-team-rebranded-16832829.php\">San Francisco Chronicle opinion article\u003c/a>, and then appealed directly to the board in February, prompting Mitchoff and fellow Supervisor Federal Glover to submit an official renaming request to the county.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker, an Irish immigrant, worked as a trapper in what was then northern Mexico and is now southern New Mexico before becoming a mercenary of the Mexican government, which was seeking to extract copper ore from the area, according to Kelly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Apaches in the area attempted to prevent the mining effort in a bid to defend their lands, the Mexican government issued bounties of “100 pesos for the scalp of an Apache man, 50 for a woman’s and 25 pesos for a child’s scalp,” he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker and others seeking to claim the government’s bounties, Kelly said, raided an Apache camp outside the town of Galeana in the state of Chihuahua in June 1846, bludgeoning between 130 and 170 Apache men, women and children and mounting their scalps on poles outside the camp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An essay \u003ca href=\"https://www.cocohistory.org/essays-kirker.html\">penned by local historian William Mero\u003c/a> in the archives of the Contra Costa County Historical Society corroborates Kelly’s portrayal of Kirker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Kirker organized militias in many of the villages in Chihuahua State against growing Apache attacks,” Mero wrote. “Later James Kirker led a large band of Mexican, American, Delaware and Shawnee warriors. They fought the Apaches who were raiding deeper and deeper into northern Mexico. Kirker’s band was just one of many such mercenary gangs of American and Mexican Apache scalp hunters working for the State of Chihuahua.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kirker later defected to the U.S. during the Mexican-American War and fled the region after Mexico declared him a traitor, eventually settling in Contra Costa County, where he died several years later. The county officially named the road after him in 1892.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Tuesday’s meeting, Supervisor John Gioia argued that any short-term inconvenience is far outweighed by the moral imperative to change the name of the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “And all I can say is I would continue to encourage the cities to make the same change and even over any short-term concern that residents or businesses may have because ultimately, name changes occur on streets all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story includes reporting from KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/AnaOphLin\">Anaïs-Ophelia Lino\u003c/a> and Bay City News’ Eli Walsh.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"masters-of-scale": {
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"morning-edition": {
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"pbs-newshour": {
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
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"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
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"politicalbreakdown": {
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"order": 5
},
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
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