SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — The stories told at the final meeting of the California reparations committee began decades ago. In some cases, they’re centuries old.
For Elmer Fonza, it began in 1790 with the birth of his ancestor, Nelson Bell. His story wove its way through Virginia and New Orleans, ultimately ending in Coloma, California. Enslaved, Bell’s wife and children were sold and taken away. It happened again with his second wife.
In 1850, then in Coloma, Bell became a free man. He bought some 11 acres in the area before dying in 1869.
Fonza said it’s unknown how Bell’s land became part of a state park. Records don’t exist. What Fonza does know is that his forebears would have had better lives if Bell’s property had been passed down through the generations.
“We want to continue to fight for what was denied us as a people,” Fonza told the committee at its Thursday meeting.
The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans delivered its final report to the state Legislature on Thursday. The nearly thousand-page report details what the committee on its website calls “the ongoing and compounding harms experienced by African Americans as a result of slavery and its lingering effects on American society today.”
The nine-member task force identified categories of harm that could be used to estimate monetary losses: health harms, mass incarceration and over-policing of African Americans, housing discrimination, unjust property takings by eminent domain, and devaluation of African American businesses.
Marian Johnson, another speaker at the meeting, said the government forced her from her Russell City home using eminent domain. Her family got only a fraction of the compensation that whites received. Her family was then put in a position to buy a home for twice its value in a red-lined community.
The task force, Johnson said, allowed voices like hers to be heard.
“We need to be repaired, restored and repaid,” Johnson said.
The report also includes recommendations for determining eligibility for reparations. It states that eligibility should be based on lineage, which would be determined by someone being a Black descendant of an enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person in the United States before the 19th century ended.
Yvette Porter-Moore told the committee she was adopted. As she grew into adulthood, she began researching her birth family and met some of them.
Porter-Moore argued that if reparations are determined through lineage, people must have access to adoption records. Any cost for tests to determine lineage should be paid for by reparations.
“Why should adoptees be harmed by this, too?” she asked.
The task force, created in 2020 by Governor Gavin Newsom, was charged with creating a comprehensive reparations proposal. In May 2023, Newsom said that dealing with slavery’s legacy means more than cash payments.
Speaking at a Thursday press conference at Grass Valley’s Cal Fire Air Attack Base, Newsom fielded a question about the report. The governor said he hadn’t yet read it, though he intends to take it seriously.
“I am very mindful of our past,” Newsom said, before referencing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Thursday decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions.
“We have a Supreme Court that wants to bring us back to a 1960’s world,” Newsom added. “You’re seeing this regression in real time.”
Newsom noted that the state has been operating under Proposition 209 since the 1990s, which forbids the state university system and other state agencies from using race, ethnicity or sex when determining public employment, contracting and education.
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
