As state considers issuing reparations for Black Californians, some Black Sonoma County residents say such redress is long overdue

Pastor John Jackson, who ministers to a Pentecostal congregation in Santa Rosa, was born in Tennessee, a son of Black sharecroppers.

His father farmed a portion of 1,000 acres of cotton and ended each year further in debt to the white man who owned that land, held under by a legal arrangement historians have described as forced labor and economic exploitation.

On a recent Wednesday evening, he took a break from leading a prayer and Bible study group at his church, the Greater Powerhouse Church of God in Christ, to consider the prospect of reparations to Black California residents, which a state task force is now researching.

Jackson recalled that his great-grandparents were emancipated from slavery when his great-grandfather -- whom family members called Papa -- was a 7-year-old. Jackson cannot trace his lineage further back. But he knows that if his great-grandparents were enslaved, most likely their parents were, too.

“There’s no amount of money that can actually take care of that kind of a robbery,” Jackson said. This, he added, is why reparations must be made.

“It’s not up for debate,” the 76-year-old pastor said. “It’s biblical that if you take anything from a man, unjustly or wrongly, that there should be some type of reparation.”

In interviews this month with The Press Democrat, a number of Black Sonoma County residents said, as Jackson did, that reparations are due.

Such conversations come at a time when state and local governments across America, galvanized by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, have been or will start exploring whether and how reparations should be made.

Here in Sonoma County, there are opposing opinions about whether lineage should be the deciding factor in who should get them. And, some express concerns about a backlash should reparations go forward.

There is also some worry that now is not the time to pursue such a remedy. Still, all of the residents who spoke with The Press Democrat agree that money alone is inadequate compensation.

For Jackson, the issue of reparations to Black people comes down to this: “The wealth gap needs to be closed because I think that’s probably 75% of the problems we’re experiencing right now.”

In 2019, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve, white families nationally had a median wealth (as opposed to income) of $188,220; Black families’ median wealth was $24,100. Wealth is defined as the value of all assets a family owns, such as real estate and savings or investment accounts, minus their debts.

Data for California, as well as such smaller communities as Sonoma County, was not available.

“That’s what we’re talking about, the denial of generational wealth,” said D’mitra Smith, 52, the former head of the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission who also serves as 2nd vice president of the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP.

Who would be eligible?

Reparations to Black Americans in one form or another have been sought, proposed and resisted since almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865.

Now, cities across the nation are issuing apologies and exploring how to make amends to Black Americans for wrongs committed against them during and since the days of chattel slavery — when Black people were owned, bought or sold as property.

Reparations commissions have been established from Boston to Kansas City to San Francisco.

In North Carolina, the city of Asheville committed $2.1 million in investments to sectors where Black residents face disparities, such as in housing and economic opportunities.

Evanston, Illinois, home to Northwestern University about 13 miles north of Chicago, in March 2021 became the first U.S. city to initiate reparations to Black residents when its City Council voted to distribute $10 million through a $25,000 housing voucher program as redress for decades of housing discrimination.

And, in September 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill authorizing a nine-member task force to examine ways the state might make reparations.

In a 5-4 vote last March, after 10 months of debate, the task force said Black Californians would be eligible for reparations if they are descendants of free or formerly enslaved people living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century — and that a state office should be set up to help people trace their ancestry.

An estimated 2.5 million Californians would be eligible, Kamilah Moore, an attorney and reparations expert who chairs the task force, said in an interview.

The Reparations Task Force produced a 492-page interim report in June 2022 cataloging in detail generations of harms done to Black Californians and exploring multiple avenues toward compensating that community. Its final report is due this summer.

“The California Task Force would not have been proposed 10 years ago,” said Roy Brooks, a law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, who has studied reparations since the 1990s and is the author of “Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations.”

There is, he said, “a sense after George Floyd that there is something that needs to be done beyond simply African Americans pulling up their own bootstraps.”

Brooks added: “There are a lot of conservatives now who still blame the problem of race on African Americans, on their behavior, their values, their attitudes, that sort of thing. But I think most individuals understand that this notion of systemic racism is real. It is absolutely real. And it’s being documented, every day. So there is today, I think, enough support to give politicians, who are not always the most courageous individuals in the world, enough confidence that they can go forward.”

“Yes,” said Kim Hester Williams, 57, a Sonoma State University professor of American studies and English. “Yes, please. Yesterday. They are overdue and absolutely necessary.”

She made an encompassing gesture and said: “You and I wouldn’t be having a conversation in America, in a very sort of comfortable, solidly middle-class, upper middle-class. The infrastructure, the world’s leading economy. None of that would exist had it not been for slavery. None of it. Now, would there have been a nation? Probably, but a nation like the one we have? Absolutely not.”

Repairing what was broken

Whether reparations are due and deserved is the easiest, simplest part of the equation for the Black Sonoma County residents interviewed for this article: Jackson, the pastor; Williams, the SSU professor; Smith, the former chairperson of the county’s Human Rights Commission; Dan Glover, a winemaker; Damion Square, a recording artist; and Kirstyne Lange, the president of the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP chapter.

“The root word of reparations is repair. So what we’re doing is we’re attempting to repair something that was broken,” said Square, 32, who performs on stage as D.Square.

“What was broken? A group of people were broken through a system of slavery that was endorsed and supported by the United States government.”

More complex is the question of what form reparations should take. And whether they should take into account the 100-year Jim Crow Era, with its legalized forms of public- and private-sector racism, and the various discriminatory practices and roadblocks — in areas ranging from housing to health care, from employment to education — that Black Americans have faced since the Civil Rights Era brought the age of separate, but equal to an official close.

For Square, a combination of cash payments, education vouchers and an exemption from state and federal income taxes would be a start to addressing all of the above.

“It goes back to the financial castration, if you will, of the Black community through 250 years of chattel slavery,” he said. “Where did that money go? And how much value economically in terms of financial sense, dollar wise, was created and distributed throughout America during that 250 years?”

Estimates of the value of enslaved people to slaveholders and the national economy at the time of slavery range up to $14 trillion in today’s dollars.

“Starting off with federal and state tax exemptions is a great way to start to put a dent into that trillions-of-dollars debt that is owed,” Square said.

From education to housing

Education is repeatedly cited as a critical avenue down which reparations should be directed — and some said it would be a more fruitful area to aim for than cash payments.

Glover, 58, the winemaker and founder of L’Objet Wines in Healdsburg, said: “Get these kids that are disadvantaged. Instead of throwing $10,000 at them, let’s take this money and go, ‘OK, well, let’s get you into schools. Let’s get you better schooling. Let’s get you so you can go do a trade. You don’t have to go to college. But let’s get you in a trade where you can work your way up and become successful.’ That would be much better use of however many million, billion dollars we’re going to throw at this.”

Williams, the SSU professor, said reparations should include free admission to the California State University and University of California systems for qualified applicants of any age.

Then her thoughts veered toward housing, another area ripe for remedies to address generations of discrimination against Black Americans.

In Sonoma County, as elsewhere, official and unofficial public and private housing practices made it harder for Black people to buy homes, and forced them into segregated neighborhoods — often with higher rents — that received fewer and poorer services and resources.

Today, for example, 34% of Black families own their own homes, half the rate of white and Asian families.

In addition, Black-owned homes in Sonoma County are valued at $100,000 less than white-owned homes, according to census data analyzed in “A Portrait of Sonoma County 2021,” a county-commissioned report released in January 2022.

Williams suggested a stipend that people could use specifically for down payments toward home purchases as part of a set of programs including “workshops, banks committed to providing loans, financial assistance, help with all the paperwork and the process, the whole package.”

Smith, too, urged grants toward home purchases as one form of reparations.

“The racial exclusion that kept Black people from owning homes, or even renting homes, that’s a denial of generational wealth,” she said.

Smith added: “The systems, the bias that kept people from obtaining jobs. The bias that kept people from having an adequate education. We see that in reduced graduation rates. We can literally see these things playing out in the data today. And so those are things that need to be addressed. It can’t just be a check.”

Jackson, the Santa Rosa pastor, agreed.

“It has to be a kind of a conglomeration of things because there is more than one way that we have to say wealth,” he said. “We talk usually about money. But sometimes when you’re denied a wealth of information, a wealth of education, all of those things equal wealth, power, knowledge. So all of those things have to be taken into consideration.”

A difficult question

To whom they should be made is a question that haunts the reparations discussion, opening the door to complicated calculations and potentially difficult divisions.

For Smith, the former head of the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission who also serves as 2nd vice president of the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP, it’s clear-cut: The wrongs committed against Black people in America have occurred down to today through the years since slavery was ended, and Black people of all backgrounds have been impacted.

“All Black people have been affected by this generational harm,” she said. ”So, my personal opinion is that everyone should be entitled to reparations.”

Square, though, sees it differently.

“Reparations in America is a conversation that revolves around lineage, a specific group of people that encountered a specific harm that resulted in a specific set of damages,” he said. “So in terms of reparations and compensation, it’s definitely lineage-based.”

But his views on the matter don’t end there.

First, Square acknowledged, regarding eligibility being confined to lineage, “there will be some fallout behind that.”

However, he added, as reparations dollars and other resources begin to flow into the Black community, they would help create a sort of Black-centered economic engine with wider impacts.

“In terms of the Black community, a rising tide lifts all boats,” Square said. “As soon as Black Americans get what is rightfully owed to us, Black folks across the planet will begin to reap the benefits of that.”

Moore, the task force chairperson, said lineage ended up as the criteria for eligibility because that was the intent of the legislation that created the task force, and because a criteria based on race would be vulnerable to legal challenge.

“It’s either we try to do a race-based program and know that it’s going to get struck down, and that means nobody gets reparations,” Moore said, “or we go with lineage to maximize the probability that at least some people or the majority will receive reparations.”

‘At what point do we stop?’

Those interviewed agree on this: There will be a backlash if the state’s task force recommends reparations and they come to pass.

“It's going to be a very loud voice,” said Glover. “I don't know if it’s going to be a majority of, let’s say, white folks, but it’s going to be a loud voice.”

He said that’s one reason he would prefer reparations to be targeted toward areas such as education, for example, in the form of scholarships and other aid.

“I think that’s a lot more palatable to that voice, that collective voice, than it would be to just throw a bunch of money at people. But yeah, it’s going to be big.”

For Smith, the pushback is inevitable.

“I think that when you engage in any kind of racial justice, you’re going to see white supremacy, you know, rising to the surface,” she said. “I mean, we receive backlash for everything we do.”

Meanwhile, Williams recalled the bitter controversy that surrounded a 2020 bill that required California State University students to take at least one ethnic studies course, and said that she had come to believe financial payments for reparations were an unwise idea.

“I applaud them for the attempt that they’re making and the work that they’re trying to do. It makes me proud to be a Californian,” she said. “But I do have skepticism about how this is going to go, how far they’re going to be able to go with it, and if it’s the right thing to do at the right time.”

The question is something else entirely for Lange, 33, president of the county’s NAACP chapter.

“At what point do we stop?” she asked. “When will we stop having to prove that we’re humans?”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay.