Black Reparations Fund aims to help local initiatives, as federal efforts stagnate
The Black Reparations Fund plans to award over $150,000 to two cities that have taken steps toward addressing reparations for their Black residents.
Black Voters Matter Fund, a national voting rights organization, launched a first-of-its-kind Black Reparations Fund, to support local initiatives to study reparation efforts that will compensate and invest in Black Americans for the ongoing harms of slavery.
“We certainly believe that sometimes you move faster at the local level on issues,” Cliff Albright, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told Yahoo News.
The grant initiative was launched on June 28 and plans to award over $150,000 to Asheville, N.C., and Boston, cities that have taken steps toward addressing the issue.
“We’re focusing on places that have already made some advances and may in fact already have a policy,” Albright said. “But are now at this critical middle stage of, OK, once you have a policy, and once you've got a commitment to establish a task force, there’s the resource issue. How do you make sure that process actually moves forward?”
Reparations at the local level
In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the city of Asheville approved reparations for Black residents, but they have not received them. The city council unanimously passed a resolution in a 7-0 vote that would form “policy and programs that will establish the creation of generational wealth and address reparations due in the black community.”
Councillor Keith Young proposed the resolution and said at the time it was passed that, “The days of incremental change, I believe, have left us.”
In February, the city of Boston appointed 10 members to a Reparations Task Force to create reparations recommendations.
“For 400 years, the brutal practice of enslavement and recent policies like redlining, the busing crisis and exclusion from city contracting have denied Black Americans pathways to build generational wealth, secure stable housing and live freely,” Boston's mayor, Michelle Wu, said at a ceremony.
Albright says while both cities have made some progress, the Black Reparations Fund will continue to build momentum.
“It's not an easy thing at the local level or federal level. But we do believe that we can get some victories and some progress, which in turn, will keep the federal discussion moving,” Albright said.
Federal legislation remains stagnant
For years, federal legislation for reparations has sat in limbo. In 2021, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, introduced H.R. 40, a house bill that aims to create a national commission to study and develop reparations, first proposed by the late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
More recently, in May, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., introduced H.R. 414, the Reparations Now Resolution, which demands federal reparations. The bill calls for up to $14 trillion in payments to the descendants of African slaves.
"The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people," Bush said. "America must provide reparations if we desire a prosperous future for all."
While a majority of Black Americans support reparations, a Pew Research poll found that 68% of Americans don’t support reparations, and Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed.
Albright says the local initiatives will not replace the lack of federal legislation. “These two things work simultaneously, and they feed off of each other, we wouldn't be talking about these local policies, if there hadn't already been movement around getting federal legislation,” he said.
California reparations
California’s path has shown some promise. Its Reparations task force released its final report on June 29, after two years of examining reparations for Black residents.
The landmark report lists 115 recommendations that were presented to the Legislature. “Some of those involve individual compensation,” Don Tamaki, a member of the California reparations task force, told Yahoo News. “They deal with policy reforms and health care, employment, education, policing [and] among the reforms, is absolutely the need for affirmative action.”
Tamaki says the report is monumental and has sparked conversations nationwide in support of reparations.
“It's time for the Legislature to consider and approve reparations in some form,” he said. “The harm was literally centuries in the making — not an exaggeration — so the repairs have to be long in the implementation.”
