St. Paul becomes latest city to study reparations for Black Americans

Jul. 3—In the 1970s, media accounts chronicled a decades-long public health study that had tracked nearly 400 Black men suffering the painful ravages of syphilis. The federally backed Tuskegee Study opened in the 1930s and unfolded without ever offering the men penicillin, a widely available treatment since the early 1940s, or getting their informed consent.

The federal government later ended the study and offered the men, their spouses and children free medical care for life. An out-of-court legal settlement provided $10 million for their families. And in 1997, President Bill Clinton issued the victims of the Tuskegee experiments a formal apology on behalf of the U.S. government.

The last Tuskegee widow died in 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and only a handful of descendent beneficiaries are still alive.

DEBATE OVER REPARATIONS FOR BLACK AMERICANS

As public debate over reparations to Black Americans gains ground in St. Paul and other cities around the country, the Tuskegee case provides an example of how a government might attempt to make amends for searing injury supported by racist practices and policies.

It also underscores a debate over whether narrowly targeted reparations create powerful historical and legal precedents or fail to produce lasting change.

From policy changes and federal apologies to direct cash payments, the question of reparations to Black Americans has gained momentum in St. Paul and other cities across the country, but the scope of the discussion remains almost dizzying.

The National African-American Reparations Commission, for instance, has called for backing "the right of repatriation," or offering Black Americans the opportunity to relocate to the African nation of their choice with sufficient funding to start new lives.

In St. Paul, members of the city's newly convened St. Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission are poised to study the experiences of Indigenous tribes, Japanese families interned on American soil during World War II, and Jewish Holocaust survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany.

They're likely also to look at broader landmark rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended legal segregation of public schools everywhere and found that separate race-based schooling was not equal.

"I thought it was unique that St. Paul was this major city, wading into that agenda, with no other preconceived notions about outcomes," said Yohuru Williams, a history professor at the University of St. Thomas and one of three co-conveners of the reparations committee. "This isn't about essential justice alone. They're actually looking for models that would involve some type of compensation, whether that's grants that involve reparative work in a community or some other form. It's not just about an apology."

Evanston, Ill., for instance, has already begun distributing $400,000 to eligible Black households who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969, a time of rampant housing discrimination, part of an effort to spend $10 million over the next 10 years. Households will receive $25,000 toward housing expenses such as mortgage assistance and home repair.

The Evanston reparations fund is supported by a 3 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana, as well as donations and philanthropy.

'AN OPEN-ENDED THING'

In St. Paul, commission members say they're approaching the question of reparations as an open-ended one, and conducting community surveys to help guide their work.

The possibility of direct cash payments to Black families has been popular in some 200 surveys distributed during the recent Juneteenth celebration, which raises questions about who might fund those payments. Such a request might require private sector, state or even federal buy-in.

"Is it payments, is it tax benefits, housing assistance, educational assistance? That is all an open-ended thing," said St. Paul City Council member Jane Prince, who has been involved in reparations planning with a group of like-minded civic leaders who meet at the East Side Freedom Library. "Nothing is precluded or defined in the resolution of what reparations might consist of."

In a separate but related effort, mayors of 11 cities — including St. Paul; Los Angeles; Denver; Austin, Texas; and Kansas City, Mo. — have committed to paying reparations to at least a small group of Black residents in their cities. St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and the other mayors involved in Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity say they'll work with local commissions and Black leaders to determine how to fund and structure the payments.

WHY REPARATIONS IF MINNESOTA WAS A FREE STATE?

Reparations has struck some critics as an odd discussion in Minnesota, which was always a free territory.

Still, not being a slave state doesn't mean Minnesota wasn't touched by the institution of slavery, or the long-standing racial disparities that followed it. Today, some of those disparities in areas such as housing, income and educational attainment are among the worst in the nation.

Southerners who summered in Minnesota sometimes brought their slaves with them, and city and state leaders would turn a blind eye, said Prince.

The most famous examples were Dred and Harriet Scott, slaves who were owned by a southern soldier stationed at Fort Snelling — which was then part of the Wisconsin territories — and later went to court to fight for their freedom. Their long legal battle fed into a banking crisis that helped foment the Civil War.

"John C. Calhoun used to visit Minnesota often, and he was a slaveowner — one of the biggest slaveowners in history," said Trahern Crews, a co-convener of the city's reparations commission. "Other slaveowners would come from the south and invest in Minnesota. Streets like Iglehart are named after slaveholders. Joseph Lowry was pro-slavery. He was the mayor of St. Cloud and he had his own newspaper, and today that newspaper is called the St. Cloud Times. Dred Scott was held here."

After slavery, Black workers heading north for new opportunities often discovered intense segregation that determined where they could work or live.

"When African-Americans came north following the great migration, they were redlined," Prince said. "Homeownership in Rondo was plowed under. ... We were not a slave state, but we were part of the subjugation of African-Americans."

'THE TIDE IS TURNING'

The question of reparations remains a social lightning rod that, until recently, even many sympathetic minds considered "highly controversial, a proposition generally seen as politically untenable," said two public health experts, Dr. Mary Bassett and Dr. Sandro Galea, in an October 2020 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Though supported by most Black Americans, reparations are opposed by a majority of Americans overall. Yet the tide is turning."

Democratic presidential candidates debated reparations during the 2019 primary debates, and some were supportive. In 2019, Congress held its first hearings on a reparations bill in more than a decade, the doctors noted.

And then the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a uniformed white Minneapolis police officer "unleashed unprecedented global rejection of the human cost of the U.S. racial hierarchy."

Williams said he initially assumed discussions around reparations would focus on the hundreds of Black homeowners who were displaced from St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood when Interstate 94 was built through their living rooms in the 1950s and '60s. Crews and other committee members have made clear they're thinking more broadly.

'FEAR THAT SOMEONE WILL BE LEFT OUT'

In the Rondo example, homeowners received minimal compensation from the state for the demolition of their properties, and were thrust into a segregated housing market where finding comparable properties open to Black buyers was near impossible. The loss of generational wealth has been tallied to be between $90 million and $157 million.

"Literally in the case of Rondo, you can identify the homeowners who were displaced and set a value for the homes," said Williams, founding director of the University of St. Thomas' racial justice initiative. "Rondo is so well-documented, but (consider) some of the harder areas — how did the lack of investment in public education in St. Paul detrimentally impact communities of color? This historically has been the challenge about dialogues about reparations. They get too big.

"Do you look at one or two egregious examples, and win on those examples, and then you can use that to make a similar case?" Williams added. "From a strategic standpoint, there's this question — are you playing for precedent? Typically there's always this fear that someone will be left out. And then there's clearly the question of what happened to other groups, like the Native Americans in Minnesota, and groups that show up and say, 'What about what happened to my people?' "

Even some proponents of reparations fear that national discussions will dissolve into feel-good symbolic gestures and band-aid approaches, rather than lasting solutions to disparities. But there's growing interest in social inequality from unlikely sources, including the medical community. In fact, medical experts have increasingly labeled racial injustice and disparity a public health crisis.

"We cannot ameliorate long-standing Black-White health inequities without addressing the structural forces that pattern them," wrote Bassett and Galea in the New England Journal of Medicine article last year. "Black reparations would not solve racism — structural racism permeates all we do and bars Black Americans from equitable access to housing, occupational opportunities and safe neighborhoods, to name but a few determinants of health. But reparations would represent a monumental break with the past."