California task force suggests reparations in report detailing lasting harms of slavery

In a report Wednesday on the lingering effects of slavery, California’s Reparations Task Force offered a sweeping list of preliminary recommendations that include ending voter approval for publicly funded “low-rent housing,” providing free college tuition and creating a new state agency to implement dozens of other forms of reparation for African Americans.

The 492-page report is the first of two the nine-member panel will send to the California Legislature, which is responsible for passing any reparations into law. Much of the initial report focused on defining the harms against African Americans from slavery to present day as the basis for a detailed plan to provide remedies in a second installment next summer.

Kamilah Moore, chair of the task force, said she hopes people “pore into the report and read it with an open mind and an open heart to really understand the African American experience in the state.” She called it the most extensive government-issued report on the African American community in more than 50 years.

Legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 made California the first state government in the country to adopt a law to study and develop proposals for potential reparations to descendants of enslaved people and those affected by slavery.

The task force, composed of elected officials, civil rights leaders, attorneys and reparations experts, voted in March to tie eligibility to lineage, defined as “descendants of African Americans enslaved in the U.S. or of free Black people living in the country before the end of the 19th century.”