In the triple-digit heat of summer, Thursdays in downtown Sacramento are usually quiet. But not on June 29 last year.
The March Fong EU Foreign Minister jumped like a black church on Sunday, the joyful cries of black people with tears in their eyes were impossible to ignore. But California Secretary of State Shirley Weber tried anyway at the last meeting of the state’s reparations force.
“Your work will live on forever,” task force member Rev. Amos Brown told her. “God bless you.”
Weber, 75, has long been a driving force in Democratic politics, from the San Diego Board of Education to the State Assembly and her current role — a first for a Black woman. But lately she’s reached near-rockstar status as something less official: the “meter of reparations.”
It was her Assembly Bill 3121 that led California to do what Congress refused to do: appoint a task force to study the lasting harms of slavery and recommend what compensation is due for decades of systemically racist laws and policies. State lawmakers are now grappling with many bills stemming from the task force’s recommendations. It’s been a hard, slow slog.
It’s work that has reinvigorated the movement for national reparations, turning what many Americans had long seen as a joke into a serious, often inescapable policy discussion.
‘Your work will live forever.’
Rev. Amos Brown, member of the California Task Force on Reparations, on Shirley Weber’s contributions
Inspired by California, New York and Illinois have created their own task forces. Cities across the country have done the same or are considering doing the same. Meanwhile, long-hidden stories of injustice, such as Bruce’s Beach, have been unearthed and addressed.
The timing of AB 3121 helped. Weber introduced it in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — the combination that led to a national racial reckoning.
But what Weber did wasn’t just about timing; it was also about vision.
On the same Thursday that the reparations task force met for the final time, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. Since then, corporate and nonprofit programs serving people of color have also been targeted.
So it’s notable that Weber focused on harm, not race. Using her influence on the task force, she ensured that reparations would not go to “black people,” but to people whose ancestors had been enslaved. Legally, this is the only way it can work. And in Sacramento, lawmakers have introduced a series of bills this year to ensure that happens.
“If you’ve caused harm,” Weber said, “you have a responsibility to correct it. And to make sure it never happens again.’
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
