Last week, the California Task Force to research and develop compensation proposals gave us a broad but deeply personalized view of the history of slavery, ethnic violence and injustice in the United States. I tracked how I’m shaping my current life.
At the two-day meeting that concludes September 24, participants shared details of the tragic events that took place in California and across the country. Their story is that compensation should be for the descendants of US enslaved people who provided free labor for nearly 250 years and then survived discrimination, lynching, ethnic violence, and Jim Crow laws for over a century. Helps the panel decide which.
The nine-member panel listened to nearly five hours of emotional testimony presented by slave trade experts, scholars, historians, and members of the black community.
“Pain is real,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber after hearing testimony from individuals who share their personal and family experiences of prejudice and slavery.
Weber also testified in front of the Task Force on September 24th.
Weber, who created Assembly Bill (AB) 3121, which signed the bill in 2020, created the California Task Force. We are currently investigating the history and costs of slavery and discrimination in the United States and the extent of California’s involvement.
Weber broadly understood why she wrote AB 3121, and discussed how her family was expelled from Arkansas and fled to Southern California after her father tried to organize a peasant union.
Weber also shared a little-known part of history that is directly related to why compensation is being discussed. She emphasized the 1919 racial riots in Helene, Arkansas. This riot has not attracted the attention of other mob cases of racial terrorism in Chicago, St. Louis, Tulsa, etc.
Historians record the series of massacres that occurred between April and November 1919, when anti-black riots and lynching waves occurred after World War I, as the “Red Summer.” The word “red” symbolizes the color of the fire involved, a burning, black church.
Weber’s family lived near Hope, Arkansas, but during her investigation, a black farmer killed by non-blacks “to strike fear” of African-Americans “in the fields, cotton fields.” I was chased. ” Weber said “hundreds of people” had been killed.
Weber, whose father was born in 1918, a year before the red summer, says he was more interested in his grandfather’s mental state after the incident because he was “afraid of whites.”
“Elaine, Arkansas, had the worst racial riots of any state in the country. It was considered the most deadly racial riot in the United States. (Tulsa) What happened in Oklahoma It’s more deadly than, “Weber said. “While investigations and investigations are currently underway, we must begin to ask ourselves how the 1919 racial riots affected our grandfather.”
Bertha Gaffney Gorman, who worked for The Sacramento Bee newspaper from 1971 to 1978, was one of the only black reporters in the newsroom at the time. She also testified to “tell the history of the family” and the discrimination they experienced in the Golden State.
Gorman is the grandmother of Amanda Gorman, 23, the first national youth poet laureate in 2017 to read her powerful poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. A young Gorman graduate of Harvard University was born and raised in Los Angeles.
Elder Gorman said in Texas, born in 1940, family members were “free on paper, but not really.” Gorman said black law and vagrancy law restricted the freedom of members of her family and restrained them to act as cheap workers.
Her family witnessed the threats, beatings, and hangings of free blacks who “continued to work for slaves, lived in the same hut, and experienced the same cruelty and domination,” she said, of their living conditions and slavery. Draw similarities between living conditions. ancestor.
Gorman shared details about racism with experience working and living in the state capital.
She moved to Sacramento in the late 1950s and attended Sacramento City College. During his tenure, Gorman lost his job as he tried to test his job as a California clerk.
Eventually, Gorman was able to get a job in the California State Legislature, but to prevent her from taking the exam before she realized that it was her skin color that was blocking her. He says he was given every “imaginable excuse”.
“I hope my story will give us a better understanding of the legacy of harm and post-traumatic stress disorders that our ancestors and their descendants suffered (affected) and suffered. The discrimination that followed them from Texas, New Mexico to California, “Gorman said.
In her testimony, Isabel Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of the Other Sun: The Magnificent Story of America’s Great Movement,” said that about 6 million blacks left a deep former slavery in the south. Western and northern states and territories from the 1900s to the 1970s.
After arriving at their destination, they suffered from housing, employment and educational discrimination, the authors said.
“I am the truth and complete history of our country, or the origin of the division we are currently facing, and thus the country’s inherited karma, social, economic, and debt to African Americans. I testify because not enough Americans know about it, “Wilkerson said.
The members of the task force are: Los Angeles-based lawyer, compensation scholar, and activist Camilla V. Moore. Dr. Emmett Brown, a civil rights leader and respected minister of the Bay Area, began his journey as a leader in the 1960s under the guidance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cheryl Grills, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Lisa Holder, a nationally recognized lawyer. Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena); Congressman Reginald Jones Sawyer (D-Los Angeles); Councilor San Diego Monica Montgomery Steps; Dr. Giovanni Scott Lewis, Dean of Geography, University of California, Berkeley. Lawyer Don Tamaki, Esq. Korematsu is the best-known lawyer for his role in the United States Supreme Court. Tamaki overturned Fred Korematsu’s conviction, which refused to be detained during the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The Case for Reparations: Cal Task Force Hears Painful Personal, Family Stories – Los Angeles Sentinel | Los Angeles Sentinel Source link The Case for Reparations: Cal Task Force Hears Painful Personal, Family Stories – Los Angeles Sentinel | Los Angeles Sentinel
