The lawmakers in California this week approved some of the most ringfencing laws in the country mainly intended at making amends especially due to policies that have resulted to the differences in aspects such as education, health and housing to the Black Americans.
In none of these axis would this legislation make provision for benefits including cash payments to civil rights abuses toward the African American community. Rather, the legislature approved measures providing for either restitution of the land in question or the payment of damages for the seizure by the State of the properties of families without just cause and also for including an apology for any laws and practices which could have previously harmed the wellbeing of black people.
Yet, the moves undertaken by the lawmakers axed two salient bills that would have established both a fund and functional agency for the endeavor as difficult targets for wishes to be achieved. Assemblymember Lori Wilson, Chair California Legislative Black Caucus, on Saturday reported the ethnic group dropped the bills because ‘it needs more work’ Yesterday, Wilson allowed reporters to make notes. Wilson remarked her colleagues did not act for misdemeanor.
There was no surprise that it came to struggle hard when it could have been avoided by being prepared. There was no surprise either that it was going to take more than one year to implement. Wilson spoke to the press after meeting the speaker of the House of Representatives boot camp discussions.
State Senator Steven Bradford maintains that the legislation was ultimately curtailed because of the risk of the disapproval from the Governor Gavin Newsom.
Bradford said, “We have crossed the finish line and we, as the Black Caucus, must address the words of our ancestors who were chattel slaves, we must address Black Californians and Black Americans to advocate for this legislation,” urging him to change his position in the afternoon session on Saturday.
The Democratic governor has stayed out of most of these bills, except for a June signing of a $297.9 billion budget that allocated up to $12 million on reparation legislative proposals. However the budget did not specify what proposals the money would be used for, and his administration has signalled its disapproval to some of such. As for newsom, he’s got up to sep 30 to consider the propositions which bills that were passed into law.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is Black, Democrat Assemblymember, deemed his bill on official apology for discrimination as a task carried out out of affection or attachment. According to him, his uncle was one of the African American students escorted by horsed soldiers through an angry white mob into Little Rock Central High School three years after the Supreme Court held segregation in school as unconstitutional. These students became famously called the Little Rock Nine that is Ferguson, 2017. Jones-Sawyer said that he and his colleagues were able to achieve that goal almost fifty years later.
It’s like today in particular, I would imagine my grandmother, my grandfather to be very proud of,” Jones-Sawyer said before the legislation whose vote was in favor of was in discussion. Because that is why they fought in ’57, so that I have, and we all have, the opportunity to take our people forward.
In 2020, Governor Newsom signed into law the first task force to look into reparations proposals. Other US states, such as New York state and Illinois, have flickered in and followed up with similar legislation. Last summer, the California task force issued a final report with over 100 recommendations to lawmakers.
Last month Newsom signed a bill requiring those who obtain a portion of educational federal grant funds for the career education program, the school district basis is required to collect information on race and gender of participating students’ performance. The legislation, one of the reparations measures proposed by the California Legislative Black Caucus, intends to improve unequal amounts of outcome in students.
Bringing back confiscated assets Cal Senate voted to introduce the Bill on offering land or any form of compensation to the members of the families whose land was taken away using the tool of eminent domain on grounds of discrimination.
The issue came into new focus in California in 2022 when some officials in the Los Angeles area handed back a beach property to a Black couple nearly half a century after it had been appropriated from their family members.
The Department of Finance in the Newsom administration is against the legislation. It claims the cost to carry out that task is uncontrolled but is “most likely to range from several hundreds of thousands to low millions annually but only depending with the amount of workload that is supposed to be undertaken, in terms of accepting, reviewing and investigating the applications.”
However, it is not clear at once how the initiative will come into existence even if Newsom approves the bill, as lawmakers cut the provision to create an agency which would implement the measure. That proposal would have required establishing a genealogy research office for Black Californians who wish to trace their ancestry in order to ascertain their legal standing and thus entitlement to any future reparations.
Apology on behalf of California will take the blame on its shoulders and offer an official apology for the supporting of segregation and its economy, racial injustices towards the African Americans with a different Bill which the Legislature passed as well.
The new law, mandates the state’s secretary of state to dispatch the last copy of such an apology in writing alongside other documents to be archived in state archives and which the public may gain access to.
The apology would assert that the state, “Recognizes its responsibility of safeguarding not just the descendants of enslaved people, but also the descendants of all Blacks residing in California and their civil, political and socio cultural rights’’
California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and fund The two proposals that have not been passed, would have led to the establishment of an agency to oversee the implementation of reparations programs when they’re eventually passed in California
California Government Operations Agency reviewed the proposals and would like California State to understand that this would have been a reasonable annual running cost for the state for the reparations agency which would have Kwash million dollars and Hawaii five million dollars depending on the completion of the agency activities in the state.
The provisions would however allow for the establishment of a ‘revenues, expenses, transfers and net worth’ separately for reparations programs once laws instituting them are enacted in California. This money would have been aimed at combating the consequences of state actions that adversely affected colonizers’ descendants or the population of the United States of America, who had been free Black people before the 20th century.
