Can California right long-past wrongs? This panel says yes.

Even before any dollar amount was suggested for reparations for Black people in California, Donald Tamaki knew some residents would get up in arms over the price tag. He had heard cynical commentary from the Bay Area to San Diego.

But as a member of the state’s Reparations Task Force, he, as well as eight other Californians, has been tasked with crafting a wide-ranging proposal to compensate Black residents for historical harms ranging from Jim Crow laws to redlining to institutionalized racism. The task force wrapped its deliberations in early May and is scheduled to meet one more time on June 29 before delivering its recommendations to the Legislature.

Early drafts of the final proposal sent pundits to calculators. They found that plan could total more than $500 billion for California, with some estimates much higher than that. Individual allocations could amount to as much as $1.2 million for eligible Black people in the state who are proved to be descendants of those once enslaved, or of free Black people living in the state before 1900.

That figure has caused state legislators from both parties to note the challenges in making such payments, especially with the state facing a budget deficit. But the task force submitting the proposal was not charged with figuring out how to pay reparations, only with recommending what they should be and who should receive them. The group also noted the importance of educating the public about the reasons reparations are justified.

“If the narrative is that the playing field is level and if you can’t make it in America, it’s your own fault, ... and [if] information about what’s happened as a result of this racial pathology is buried, suppressed, not discussed, or forgotten, then the narrative is that this is welfare to an undeserving, aggrieved population, and they don’t deserve it,” Mr. Tamaki says from his law offices in San Francisco. “It’s very important for us to shine a light concurrently on what has happened.”

What happened was horrendous and the cost of it is enormous, says Mr. Tamaki, an attorney who specializes in value-driven legal counsel and was one of five task force members appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom; four additional members were picked by the State Legislature. The group was tasked with studying the effects of slavery and the lingering societal ills of other discriminatory practices within the state.

For the past two years, members have met monthly and heard from economists, historians, scholars, and everyday citizens in town hall meetings to gather insight for their final recommendations. 

Mr. Tamaki, the only non-Black member of the group, says he thought he knew a lot about American history, but serving on the task force opened his eyes to the totality of slavery and racial injustice toward Black people in the country and in California in particular. The state should not only make direct cash payments to people, he says, but also invest in ongoing policy initiatives in the areas of housing, education, criminal justice, and other issues negatively affecting the Black community.

One task force recommendation is that California draw up a formal apology for its role in perpetuating the effects of slavery, discrimination, and racial harm toward Black people. Task force members say that although California was admitted into the Union in 1850 as a free state, gold rush opportunists from the Southern United States brought those they had enslaved with them. California also enacted its own Fugitive Slave Act in 1852 and created laws that prevented Black people from testifying against white people in court, so they couldn’t argue for their freedom.

Additionally, California had so-called sundown towns, where danger awaited Black Americans if found there after dark. The state was also a hotbed for Ku Klux Klan members, practiced eminent domain seizures of land belonging to racial minority groups, and perpetuated a system of discriminatory housing, education, health care, and employment opportunities.

Mr. Tamaki acknowledges that all groups of color have faced discrimination in the Golden State, but “Black Californians are at the bottom of every metric,” he says. “Maybe Natives are there with them,” he adds. 

Mr. Tamaki knows about the harm done to marginalized groups. Both of his parents were incarcerated in camps during World War II. His family lost property in San Francisco’s Japantown, similar to the way Black San Francisco residents were removed from the Fillmore District and Black Los Angeles residents were displaced from the Sugar Hill neighborhood. All this was being done while the U.S. government transferred $120 billion in wealth almost entirely to white families via programs like the GI Bill.

“I did not know that 98% of those loans went to white people,” he says. “That is a huge transfer of wealth.” 

Mr. Tamaki says these stories have to be told to alter the minds of opponents of proposed reparations – from everyday citizens to state legislators, who will eventually vote on the task force’s recommendations.

Serving on the task force “has changed me ... because I’ve learned so much in the process,” says Mr. Tamaki. “But one thing that’s motivated me is I now realize how important this is to America as a whole.” 

He hopes the literature that task force members studied from historians becomes recommended reading.

“This buried history is very important to shine a light on,” Mr. Tamaki says. An apology is needed because potential was cut down for Black Americans at every turn, he adds.

Another fight in the struggle

For the Rev. Amos Brown, it’s important that California get reparations right. That is why he agreed to join the task force at Governor Newsom’s behest. 

“It has always been said that as California goes, so goes the nation, so ... we’ve got to set this bar high, and we’ve got to set it with sense,” says Dr. Brown, who has seen a lot of well-intentioned legislation die from disinterest.

Dr. Brown is the senior pastor of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. Not a native Californian, he moved here in 1976 to assume his current post. He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder by a white mob, for allegedly speaking to a white woman in a store in Mississippi, catapulted Dr. Brown into the Civil Rights Movement.

“That freaked my mind when I picked up that Jet magazine and saw that mutilated head. That forced me into the struggle,” he says.

In his youth, the struggle included starting Jackson’s first youth group for the NAACP, being a Freedom Rider, and getting arrested for leading a kneel-down in an Atlanta church after the pastor wouldn’t let Black college students worship there in the early 1960s. He learned from watching Medgar Evars, his mentor and a civil rights activist, organize. He met Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, A. Philip Randolph, and a host of others whose names are etched in history books. Now, in 2023, it is his turn.

“It’s just another phase in my life’s commitment,” he says thoughtfully from his home office.

Dr. Brown says everything started with the denial of 40 acres and a mule, which were promised to 40,000 newly freed Black people after the Civil War ended. Having that would have created generational wealth, and there wouldn’t be a need to have such contentious discussions now.

“Those are the specifics that people ought to be cognizant of when you talk about reparations. It was a matter of land, health, and education,” he says. “Black people live six or seven years less than the majority culture because of bad nutrition and bad medical care. You don’t have the opportunity to talk about making some money or spending money if you are the sickest.”

Dr. Brown says what the task force envisions is that redress can be put into programs that can be paid for over time, such as physical, mental, and environmental health programs. The state needs to get rid of toxic communities and give Black people their fair share of housing opportunities, Dr. Brown adds.

“When people don’t have a sense of identity, presence, and belonging, it’s psychologically injurious to their spirit,” he says. “When the system does not see us, it’s an insult to our humanity, so that’s why we need to make repairs for the harms that were done and the lies that were told.”

It is of utmost importance to Dr. Brown that Black Californians not focus on monetary reparations but take this as a chance to have a stake in the social engineering process of creating opportunities for themselves. Working with people and making sensible recommendations is how legislation gets passed and funds are appropriated, and it is what people must learn, he says.

What redress might look like

A chilly breeze permeates the air in Manhattan Beach, California. Atop a hill on Highland Avenue on a stretch of land between 26th and 27th streets, an older couple are parked on a bench with two leashed dogs at their feet, talking and staring out into the ocean’s abundance. A cargo ship passes in the distance. Near them a young couple sit on a blanket in the grass smiling at each other.

Below them is a parking lot and a lifeguard station in front of the Strand, where passersby jog, walk, hold hands, and zip through on skateboards or bikes.

Charles and Willa Bruce used to live there. They built a booming resort for Black Angelenos, like themselves, to visit and revel on the same beach where teenagers now pass, set, and attack a volleyball on the sand. The town of Manhattan Beach took the Bruces’ property in 1924 via eminent domain. The problem was the color of their skin. Those who instigated the Bruces’ property seizure were white.

“The generational wealth that’s been lost and the consequences of people’s attitudes that persist to this day – there’s so much damage that’s been done that it’s not an easy fix,” says Teri Kirkwood, an attorney who occasionally travels to the beach from her home in the city of Inglewood, near Los Angeles.

Last year, Los Angeles County returned the two beachfront lots that had belonged to the Bruces to their great-grandsons, who sold it back to the county for $20 million early this year. Many, like Ms. Kirkwood, celebrated the return of confiscated land. 

That move, supported by Governor Newsom, could be a precursor of what is to come if the task force’s recommendations are accepted by the California Legislature.

“I would be in favor of it, but it needs to be done correctly and it needs to be done on a wide-ranging basis, because just throwing money at it isn’t going to help,” Ms. Kirkwood says. 

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.