'$5 million is too little:' Activists call for California to pony up more in reparations
Activists on Wednesday demanded that the state of California pay millions of dollars to each Black resident as reparations for slavery and subsequent discrimination, dismissing payments of $5 million per person as "nothing" and "too little."
San Francisco's proposed reparation payments to eligible Black residents could cost the city over $100 billion dollars, the New York Times reported Friday.
San Francisco's African American Reparations Advisory Committee unveiled its recommendation in January, arguing that the city owed millions of dollars in compensation to Black residents for decades of discrimination.
"The $5 million payments could top $100 billion — many times the $14 billion annual budget in San Francisco — and London Breed, the city’s mayor, has not committed to cash reparations," the Times said.
A local activist lamented the city's "urban renewal" period in the 1960s and '70s was the city's own "apartheid" against Black residents. San Francisco’s Black population shrank from 13 percent in 1970 to about 5 percent in 2023, "driven first by cycles of redevelopment and then by the gentrifying forces of tech employers," the Times explained.
NEWSOM'S CALIFORNIA REPARATIONS PANEL IS A DISASTER ALL BLACK AMERICANS SHOULD REJECT
A new report found that San Francisco's proposed reparations plan could cost the city $100 billion. (iStock)
However, the high cost is viewed as "unrealistic" for a city already struggling with its budget and a lack of agreement over the issue, the Times said.
The committee's chair, consultant Eric McDonnell, told The Washington Post the $5 million number came as a result of a "journey" rather than a "math formula."
"There wasn’t a math formula. It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed," he said.
McDonnell admitted figuring out how to afford the payments was not the committee's goal. "Our mission was not a feasibility study," he said. "It was, assess the harm, assign the value."
Los Angeles, CaliforniaSept. 22, 2022Los Angeles long-time resident, Walter Foster, age 80, holds up a sign as the Reparations Task Force meets to hear public input on reparations at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Another activist who successfully pushed for reparations in Evanston, Illinois told CNN that she does not know how San Francisco will pay eligible Black residents $5 million each.
"I don’t know. And so those are the challenges that we all have as municipalities," Robin Rue Simmons said.
However, reparations task force member Rev. Amos Brown previously suggested to the Times that the billionaires in San Francisco could help the task force achieve its goal in the city. "Of all these billionaires in San Francisco, you could establish a reparations fund" to pay millions to Black residents, he previously told the paper.
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While San Francisco's reparations committee has offered one-time $5 million dollar payments, the state's reparations task force has also proposed cash reparations of up to $1.2 million per person.
Fox News' Anders Hagstrom and Alcontributed to this report.