Gov. Gavin Newsom signed several bills intended to atone for the state’s role in the oppression of Black Americans, but California legislators so far have sidelined proposals on cash reparations.
California will issue a formal apology for being complicit in slavery during the 19th century and for enforcing segregationist policies against Black residents as one of several new laws that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Thursday to atone for the state’s past discriminatory treatment of African Americans.
Last year, California became the first state in the country to explore concrete restitution for historical racism after a social justice movement was spurred by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. A state reparations task force last year determined, among other acts, that California courts had enforced fugitive slave laws and that more than 2,000 enslaved people were brought to California even after it was admitted as a free state in 1850.
The official request for forgiveness “for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants” was one of the dozens of recommendations the reparations panel made last year.
But the committee’s central suggestion — financial reparations for the descendants of slaves — got little traction.
Costs for a widespread payment plan, which no state has enacted, are estimated to run in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and California has faced budget deficits in the past two years.
Led by the California Legislative Black Caucus, state lawmakers this session introduced more than a dozen initiatives to compensate Black Americans harmed by ancestral enslavement. At the time, the response was hailed as a first-in-the-nation model for other states.
But those calls for cash payments were quietly sidelined as legislators focused instead on less costly proposals to improve job opportunities, education, health care and criminal justice for Black and low-income Californians. That outcome disappointed civil rights groups, who had hoped that California, a state with nearly three million Black residents and a heavily Democratic legislature, would have done more.
“I guess we’re going to take what we can and be positive about it,” said Kamilah Moore, a Los Angeles lawyer who chaired the reparations task force. But without some compensation, if not in cash then in discounted college tuition or mortgage down payments for descendants of slaves in California, she said, the bills that made it to Mr. Newsom’s desk were not true reparations, but rather “the trimmings and not the bird.”
In a poll taken last year by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, 60 percent of California voters felt that Black residents of the state were still being affected by the impact of slavery, but 59 percent opposed cash payments to slave descendants.
“It’s hard for a lot of people, even in California, to wrap their heads around cash reparations,” said David Townsend, a Sacramento-based consultant to moderate Democrats in the California Legislature. “We weren’t a slave state. The South isn’t doing anything. Where would they end, given the way we also treated Native Americans, and the Chinese, and the Latinos? And then to add to all of that, we have a huge budget deficit.”
Mr. Townsend suggested that there was broad support for acknowledging that slavery and segregation were shameful parts of the nation’s history, and that the state should seek to make amends in some ways. But there was not enough backing for the billions of dollars in payments that the task force said would give for past injustices.
Mr. Newsom said in a statement on Thursday that California “accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of racial discrimination.”
“Building on decades of work,” the governor said, “California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past — and making amends for the harms caused.”
Among the bills the governor signed on Thursday were measures to strengthen existing state prohibitions on discrimination based on hairstyle; require grocery stores and pharmacies to give 45 days’ notice before closing to help impoverished communities to avoid food deserts; and allow for a third-party review of book bans in state prisons.
But the most prominent bill in the package was the official acknowledgment that California, which entered the Union as a free state, had turned a blind eye to slave labor during the Gold Rush and enforced fugitive slave laws until the mid-1860s. The state also enabled widespread discrimination through practices such as prohibitions against people of color living in certain neighborhoods and bans on interracial marriages. During the 1920s, cities throughout the state had active Ku Klux Klan chapters with hundreds of members, including mayors, sheriffs and chiefs of police.
“The State of California humbly asks for forgiveness from those affected by past atrocities, both deliberately and negligently, and acknowledges and affirms its responsibility to end ongoing harm,” the proclamation signed by Mr. Newsom asserted. The law requires that the apology be prominently displayed in the Capitol on a plaque and made available in perpetuity in the state archives for viewing by the general public. The apology, which passed the State Legislature with bipartisan support, is widely regarded by civil rights groups as a prerequisite to any meaningful humanitarian redress.
California is not the first state to formally acknowledge its past or seek forgiveness. After 2007, when the Virginia Legislature passed a resolution expressing “profound regret” for that state’s history of slavery, a wave of states publicly apologized for enabling the institution, which President Obama referred to as the nation’s “original sin.”
But the state’s formal consideration of reparations seemed poised to break new ground when Mr. Newsom called for the review in 2020. Later, as the governor’s profile rose nationally and Democrats nominated Vice President Kamala Harris, a Californian, for the White House this summer, the move posed political complications, threatening to buttress the conservative caricature of California as a liberal bastion of identity politics.
Civil rights advocates this week lamented the demise of a bill that had been aimed at narrowing the racial wealth gap by creating a process to review and investigate cases from California residents who claim their land was taken by the government through “racially motivated” eminent domain. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities had displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American.
The task force report pointed to various examples, from cities that razed blocks of homes that belonged to Black and Latino residents in the name of civic improvement to a freeway construction boom that routed multilane roadways through predominantly Black areas.
The eminent domain bill was the closest that the Legislature this year came to authorizing direct compensation to those who were wronged in the past. But even that proposal would not have brought relief anytime soon because state lawmakers did not create the agency that would have reviewed the claims.
On Monday, Mr. Newsom vetoed the eminent domain bill.
“I thank the author for his commitment to redressing past racial injustices,” the governor said in his veto message. “However, this bill tasks a nonexistent state agency to carry out its various provisions and requirements, making it impossible to implement.”
Kavon Ward, the founder of Where Is My Land, a national organization that helps Black families recover lost land or obtain compensation, said the veto left her “deflated, devastated and disgusted” and blamed the governor for the measure’s failure.
“The apology is performative,” she added. “It means nothing at this point without repair to back it up.”
Social justice advocates last year had hoped to ride the momentum after Los Angeles County returned prime beachfront property to the descendants of the Bruce family nearly a century after the land was taken through a racially motivated local government seizure.
“Bruce’s Beach changed the landscape,” said Ms. Ward, who helped lead the effort to return the property to the Bruce family. “It was something that provided hope for our people who had lost faith in the system. What it also did was set a precedent for a statewide bill.”
Areva Martin, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, said she was hopeful that lawmakers would revisit the reparations issue next year.
“I wish there had been more done this legislative term but the bills on the governor’s desk lay the groundwork for this state to do much, much more in the next term and to be a model for the rest of the country and for the federal government,” said Ms. Martin, who is leading a reparations case in Palm Springs.
“We know oftentimes that these kinds of initiatives start at the state level, like marriage equality, before they become federal mandates,” she added. “This could be the same for reparations.”
Assemblywoman Lori D. Wilson, chairwoman of the California Legislative Black Caucus, made clear on Thursday that state lawmakers intend to push for more reparations in the future. Ms. Wilson, in a statement, called the newly signed laws “a meaningful foundation” but said they were the beginning of a multiyear effort.
More than a dozen cities have created task forces or commissions to study reparations after Mr. Floyd’s murder. A Pew Research Center poll in 2021 found that about three-quarters of Black adults were supportive of providing some form of reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. But the majority of other racial groups, including 80 percent of white adults, were opposed.
In 2021, Evanston, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, became the first American city to establish a reparations program, offering eligible Black descendants housing grants for past discriminatory housing practices and segregation. But earlier this year, the city was sued by a conservative organization that contended that the program discriminated against non-Black residents.
(Reporting By Shawn Hubler and Audra D. S. Burch)