In 2020, Dr. Shirley Weber championed Assembly Bill 3121, which created the first state-based reparations task force for African Americans in the nation.
Montgomery Steppe is San Diego City Council president pro tem where she represents District 4 and is one of nine members on the California Reparations Task Force. She lives in Skyline.
In 2020, then-Assemblymember Dr. Shirley Weber championed Assembly Bill 3121, which created the first state-based reparations task force for African Americans in the nation. This task force aims to study the harms of slavery and how the legacy of racism and discrimination uniquely affected African Americans after abolition. Following two years of meetings, in July 2023, the task force will provide a report and recommendations to the California Legislature that consider appropriate remedies to address the lingering impacts of institutional slavery. I was honored to be among the nine members appointed to serve on this task force by Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins.
Over the past year, we have met virtually and in person to explore the history and extent of atrocities both nationally and across California. We have heard hours of public comment and testimony about the pain, discrimination and terror African American people faced before and after the abolition of slavery. Many testimonies challenged the reality of California’s role in the shameful history, even after California entered the Union in 1850 as a state that banned the practice.
California leads the way in many positive initiatives. Still, unfortunately, it has also led the nation in some of the most racist policies since gaining its statehood. In fact, more than 1,500 enslaved African American people resided in California when the state enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1857, which increased the risk of African Americans’ arrest and deportation to the South.
In 1874, the California Supreme Court exacerbated educational disparities by ruling segregation in public schools legal, 22 years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Homeownership became out of reach through racist restrictive covenants and prohibited African American families from purchasing homes or even renting apartments in areas across the state, including San Diego. And the historically Black town, Lanare, is an infamous rural area with no running water until the 1970s and contaminated water until 2019.
Within all this uncovered information, the task force’s objective in designating long-deserved forms of reparations became clear. But a large part of our work became determining how the state should go about dispensing forms of reparations and who would qualify to receive compensation. As part of the eligibility discussion, we voted 5–4 to recommend reparations 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.”
In June 2022, the task force released its preliminary report to the public for review. Among its findings and recommendations was the idea of establishing a California African American Freedmen agency, which would be responsible for oversight and implementation of reparations throughout the state. Within that agency would be an office of genealogy, where professional certified genealogists would assist the most vulnerable populations within the African American community to prove their eligibility for reparations.
Across the world, there is evidence of communities working to repair harm. Part of that involves awakening and acknowledging those wrongs and developing an approach to making things right again. Through the complex web of discrimination, we understand that compensation is just one of five forms of reparations adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. Other forms include rehabilitation, which could look like free legal, social and health care-related services; restitution, which accounts for stolen land, property and intellectual property; satisfaction, which is a symbolic form of reparations; and lastly, the guarantee of non-repetition. Considering the severity of discrimination African Americans have endured, the right approach would include parts of all five of these forms.
From its informative historical research to the implementation proposals, California can right its wrongs by leading our nation as an example of how reparations should occur. As a country built from the labor of enslaved African people, reparations are not a substitution for ending racism or the inequities that plague our society. They’re only the beginning of how to address them.
The reparations task force itself is a monumental step toward transitional justice for African Americans. The task force represents the first time anyone has created a public space to understand the extent of the history of atrocities against African Americans in the United States. It is also the first time there are research-based recommendations for reparations among African American people.
Reparations are a critical step in righting the wrongs that have stripped African Americans of their promised “40 acres and a mule” upon emancipation. By implementing reparations, we are beginning to dismantle the remnants of institutional slavery in our society.
