California slavery reparations task force sends final report to uncertain fate in Legislature

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A California task force Thursday presented its first-in-the-nation attempt to address the legacy of slavery to lawmakers who must decide whether to pursue a wide range of proposed remedies, including payments to descendants of enslaved people.

The recommendations of the reparations task force, the product of months of research and public hearings, face an uncertain fate even in a Legislature with a Democratic supermajority and a governor supportive of the commission’s work.

State Sen. Steven Bradford, a member of the task force, has repeatedly said he expected a lengthy and difficult struggle to enact recommendations, especially payments.

“The final report is not the end of the work; it’s really just the beginning,” Bradford said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has avoided publicly committing to specific recommendations — a position he maintained as the final report was presented to the Legislature.

“I am very mindful of our past,” Newsom told reporters, as he shifted the focus to the Supreme Court decision striking down the use of affirmative action in higher education.

“We have a Supreme Court that wants to take us back to a pre-1960s world,” he said. “This reparations report, and the context of that decision today, only reinforced the seriousness of purpose with which we’ll review it.”

Newsom signed legislation setting up the task force in 2020 as the nation seethed with civil justice protests following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. The final report is a comprehensive analysis of the corrosive and persistent legacy of slavery and racism in California — which wasn’t a slave state but where enslaved people were brought to the state and the fugitive slave laws were enforced in the 19th century.

After spending months studying how slavery created enduring disparities in areas like wealth, life expectancy and criminal justice, the nine-member task force embraced a set of prescriptions that include establishing a California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to analyze claims from descendants of slaves, repealing the state’s ban on affirmative action — which voters upheld in 2020 — and issuing a formal apology.

It also examined numerous past instances of cash reparations, including money paid to Japanese Americans in recompense for internment.”

Even before the panel forwarded its final report, both Newsom and Democratic lawmakers had conceded the immense obstacles to some of the report’s preliminary ideas — particularly cash payments that could amount to more than $1 million for some people.

That work will now fall to the Democratically controlled Legislature. Bradford, who sits on the task force, has been blunt about the fact that cash payments would struggle to attract enough votes, instead floating a broader vision that could include assistance for purchasing homes or securing higher education.

“This will be the most impactful public service and policy work I will do in my career,” he said.