Cash for slavery reparations gets cool response from California officials

A proposal to pay Black people in California up to $1.2 million in restitution for slavery ran into political headwinds Wednesday as Gov. Gavin Newsom and a lawmaker who was on the state panel raised doubts about the prospect of cash payments.

State Sen. Steven Bradford said he wouldn't count on the Legislature — though dominated by Democrats — to vote in favor of payments, one of the recommendations of a panel expected to release its final recommendations on July 1.

“I'm realistic enough to know that we might not have colleagues who are willing to do that,” Bradford told reporters.

He spoke after Newsom sparked an uproar with a statement that hailed the findings of the task force as a milestone but specifically noted that dealing with the legacy of slavery “is about much more than cash payments.”

The governor was acknowledging political reality, Bradford said.

“I think he’s setting a real realistic expectation that there probably won’t be check payments in the tune of or the amount that we’ve batted around for the last two years since we started this process,” he said.

The comments from Newsom and Bradford illustrated the considerable political obstacles to compensating Black people for the harms of slavery, even in a progressive state that drew praise for creating a groundbreaking task force. Those challenges will be magnified by California's enormous budget deficit, the contentiousness of proposing cash payment and, Bradford acknowledged, resistance from fellow Democrats.

Newsom signed the task force into law in 2020,touting California as being the first state to study reparations and calling the bill a corrective to the “structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions."

After months of meetings and public input, the panel released a semifinal report on May 6 calculating that the cumulative cost of mass incarceration, housing discrimination and healthcare inequity could amount to $1.2 million per person at the high end.

It would be up to the Legislature and Newsom to enact any element of the report.

Many of the recommendations have already begun to be addressed, Newsom noted in a statement.

“We should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country,” he said. “Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.”

Bradford similarly described an array of non-cash solutions that include more funding for healthcare, buying homes and higher education. But he said Newsom's statement also conceded the limitations of what California will be able to accomplish. “I've tried to temper people's expectations that it might not be a check,” Bradford said.

The apparent retreat from payments drew criticism, including from the Rev. Amos Brown, a civil rights activist who was vice-chair of the reparations task force.

“We’re being disingenuous when we all of a sudden want to run away from money,” Brown said.

Any legislation arising from the work of the task force in the coming years could face a challenging path to Newsom’s desk. California is staring down a budget deficit estimated at $22.5 billion in January.

Supporters of reparations have long stressed that the concept encompasses more than monetary payments. The author of the bill creating the panel, then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber, said in 2020 that the measure "does not take a position on the form that reparations should take but does take a clear position on reparations as necessary."

The panel's report recommended offering "the payment of cash or its equivalent" to people who had been harmed by slavery. It also recommended the Legislature offer a "‘down payment’ with an immediate disbursement of a meaningful amount of funds."

California has since moved to more directly compensate the descendants of enslaved people for their losses: A 2021 bill signed by Newsom returned a coastal property called Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of Black owners who’d seen the land stripped away in the early 20th century. But the report noted that losses are not always easy to quantify.

"Not all specific harms perpetrated against the state’s African American residents involve land—or other property that can be easily returned," the panel said. "In those cases, those individual harms must be remedied with monetary compensation."

POLITICO's Alexander Nieves contributed reporting.