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.
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