Remembrance and Reparations

The Black Child Legacy Campaign was launched with a multimillion-dollar investment from the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. Money matters, and when paired with a strong infrastructure, can support sustainable improvements. BCLC proved to be a county-based solution, but how would strategic funding at the state level shape the material conditions of African American communities?

California has a unique and powerful opportunity to serve as a model for the nation. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom established the country’s first state-level reparations task force to study and develop proposals that would provide resources to African Americans because of slavery. This initiative prompts us to face the past and understand how inequalities are designed and perpetuated. Although we cannot change history, we can understand it and not repeat it.

It is well known that chattel slavery was the world’s largest economic operation, built solely on the stealing, selling, and ownership of Black bodies as legal property from 1619 to 1865. By 1860, “the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined” (Coates 2014). Although it is difficult to quantify the sheer immensity and intergenerational gravity of slavery, there have been attempts to do so. For example, in January of 1865, Field Order 15 promised formerly enslaved Africans 400,000 acres of land that stretched from South Carolina to Florida. However, four months later, the order was rescinded.

Given the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism in this country, it is shameful that the United States has not acknowledged or sought to repair hundreds of years of systemic oppression, especially when there is legal precedent to do it. Consider that from 1934 to 1941, the Indian Reorganization Act authorized $2 million a year for the reacquisition of land, totaling one million acres.¹ The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted reparations to Japanese Americans who were forced into internment camps from 1942 to 1946. North Carolina now pays reparations to living survivors of the state’s eugenics program that forcibly sterilized more than 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974.² The nonprofit organization, Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, continues to secure material compensation for Jewish Holocaust survivors. To date, the German government has paid more than $90 billion to individuals who were persecuted by Nazis from 1933 to 1945.³

Reparations for African Americans continues to be a dream deferred, but it is not impossible. Some places are trying to reconcile with their past. In Virginia, counties that were pro-segregation closed schools to boycott the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. As a result, a generation of Black children, who are now fifty to sixty years old, lost the opportunity to attend school. The state of Virginia is paying reparations to all these individuals.⁴

As another beacon of hope, in 2019, students at Georgetown University voted to increase their own tuition by $27.20 per student per semester to benefit the descendants of the 272 enslaved Africans who were sold to provide the funds to establish the university. In addition, applicants who are the offspring of these African Americans receive preference in admissions. The school formally acknowledged its role in slavery and has sought to make amends.⁵

Harkening back to 1857, Frederick Douglass’ speech about struggling towards racial justice relate to contemporary debates about reparations. He saw a different America on the horizon and implored us to keep fighting:

If there is no struggle there is no progress.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation

are [people] who want crops without plowing up the ground;

they want rain without thunder and lightning.

They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one,

or it may be a physical one,

and it may be both moral and physical,

but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.

It never did and it never will.⁶

Now, it is February of 2023, and Secretary of State Shirley Weber is at Sacramento State University discussing Assembly Bill 3121, the groundbreaking legislation that demands reparations for Black Californians. Inside this campus auditorium full of faculty, staff, and students, Weber explains that the State of California is the “fourth-largest economy in the world” and can “afford to apologize with actions.” There is growing momentum for AB 3121, and time will tell. To say that reparations for Black people in this country is a long time coming is an understatement; it should have occurred yesterday.

Crossroads

While beacons of Black leadership illuminate a way forward, that is not the only road. I wish I could write that the journey is always just, but there is another path. A lineage laid in bone and poured with blood. A walk in the world that is fear-induced and suffocates, marked with preventable deaths and death ends. It is, in the words of our friend and colleague Rich Milner, “woke without work” and just plain sleep. Current legislation like the “Stop WOKE Act” literally impedes learning. Right now, it is illegal to teach AP African American Studies in Florida⁷ and a teacher in Tennessee was fired for showing a video about white privilege to his students.⁸ These contemporary attacks on civil rights reveal a hard truth: the Eurocentric logic of colonization, censorship, and control still exists and is gaining traction.

My son asked me point-blank: Will white supremacy take the world with it? And I ask: Can our humanity thrive in a state of violence, inequality, and selfish pursuits? No. We will not. We cannot. There must be another way forward.

Freedom Dreaming

Sacramento is not a lost or hopeless place; rather, it is a sociopolitical ecosystem struggling between oppression and liberation. Sometimes, people can agree ideologically and still not achieve equitable results. Unfortunately, siloes and bureaucracies can fuel divisions. Is the City Council member breaking bread with the community activist? Can the poet and the police chief find common purpose? The Black Child Legacy Campaign provided incentives to work together in new ways. And throughout this process, individuals got to know one another beyond institutional barriers and built authentic connections for racial justice.

In 2020, as the world was turning inward because of the COVID-19 pandemic, BCLC leaders like Timothy Poole, Tanya Bean-Garrett, Les Simmons, Berry Accius, Cassandra Jennings, Tina Roberts, and countless others in Sacramento were reaching outward and across the aisle. Low-income African American families were among the hardest hit by COVID-19, and the BCLC was able to pivot its programming and galvanize crisis response teams that took the following actions:

Organizing food pickup stations during quarantine

Leading community peace walks throughout every hood to keep people connected

Offering creative healing sessions over Zoom to help families mourn together the loss of their children

Strategically securing new sources of funding, such as emergency rental assistance to those who lost their jobs so that they would not also lose their homes

These were just some of the tangible solutions—byproducts of collaboration and a larger quest for beloved community.

However, although these efforts are real and inspirational, it would be irresponsible to act as if Sacramento has fixed its problems. There is nothing romantic about the painful realities of oppression. African American leaders in our city persist amidst onslaughts of injustice and preventable deaths. Black mothers and Black babies are still not safe. A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (2023) found that, regardless of wealth, childbirth in California is deadlier for Black families.⁹ And even when children survive, racism saturates our systems. Sacramento, like so many regions across this country, continues to grapple with vast health disparities and youth violence. In April 2022, gunfire erupted in our downtown area that left six people dead (two of whom were only twenty-one years old).

Grief and trauma weigh heavy inside the heart of a neighborhood forced to bury its young. As documented in previous chapters, third-party homicides ceased for a while, but it is important to acknowledge that they have not stopped. Tears continue to amass. Death tolls amass. Funerals amass. I am not here to close our journey with melancholy, but to offer a sobering reminder that we are still wailing. If agony is not treated, it can metastasize and pathologize into various ailments of nihilism. Mental health and wellness investments are needed for the community and for those who hold the community. Healers need healing too.

Doing this kind of work can be exhausting not just to the body but also in the soul. Tricia Hersey (2022) provides a healing balm in Rest Is Resistance. She asserts, “Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.” Amidst the barrage of demands, there is power in the pause. So, even though the fight for justice is nonstop, we will not experience justice unless we stop. Building on this sentiment, poet Nikki Giovanni reminds us, “Sometimes the window is open and a breeze comes through singing a sweet song: it is nap time. Grandmother sits on the front porch; grandpapa cuts the grass. It is a song. You nap. I nap. The angels hug us.”¹⁰ Rest is resistance, and it is also revolutionary. Rest can literally reignite us. Without rest, how will we, in the words of Robin Kelley (2002), freedom dream?

As if answering this call to freedom dream, the New Orleans artist, Brandan “BMike” Odums, created the phrase, I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. This sentiment reaches into the soul of the Black Child Legacy Campaign. In Sacramento, BCLC continues to be co-created through multiple lifelines. Individual efforts are intricately connected across time, just like how a single tree can multiply into a forest. Sacramento is deemed the “City of Trees” and has the potential to leave lessons that grow exponentially. Essentially, BCLC embodies a long, intergenerational tradition of freedom dreaming and freedom fighting.

Radical love gives birth to radical work. From this movement we learn that there is not one single leader, one finding, or one magic bullet that signifies the solution. Rather, the answer is plural and prophetic. A mixed-methods study on intersectional organizing that centered Black people, Black power, and Black prayers. Faith made Flesh sees the future and reminds the children that improving the world is our sacred birthright.

Our love for the circle of life is taught to our children

as we live our ancestors’ teachings daily.

We are all leaders

and when we come to the end of our earthly pathways of life,

we turn around and see what we have taught our children …

we will either smile or we will weep …

our pathways,

our imprints,

our history

will live through the ones we leave behind.

—Great-grandmother Mary Lyons, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe¹¹

As we continue to show up and stand tall in this work,

we look to the future as the future is calling us forward.

—Patrice Hill, Director of Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS)

NOTES

1. 1. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, an attempt to provide land back to Indigenous nations, see https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-5299/pdf/COMPS-5299.pdf.

2. 2. A eugenics program of forced sterilization focused on reducing the Black population. Read more at https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article244411987.html.

3. 3. The Claims Conference has conducted seven surveys across six countries examining the Jewish Holocaust and repercussions worldwide. This site also provides answers about how to obtain reparations: https://www.claimscon.org/survivor-services/comp-faqs.

4. 4. In 1964, a ruling by the Supreme Court forced local officials to reopen schools for all children. However, by this time, many Black children of the 1950s in Virginia had missed out on an education. See https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/education/a-new-hope-for-dreams-suspended-by-segregation.html.

5. 5. While students voted to increase their tuition for reparations, it is unclear what the school itself is paying as a way to reconcile with its financial benefits from slavery. See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/georgetown-reparations.html.

6. 6. The full speech by Douglass is written here: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/.

7. 7. There are trends across the country to erase race from the curriculum. This New York Times article discusses the banning of AP African American Studies in Florida: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/us/florida-ap-african-american-studies.html.

8. 8. Similarly, this article in The Atlantic explains how a teacher was fired for discussing white privilege: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/matt-hawn-tennessee-teacher-fired-white-privilege/619770/.

9. 9. The New York Times shared findings that clearly documents disproportionate Black birth rates in California (irrespective of economic status): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/12/upshot/child-maternal-mortality-rich-poor.html.

10. 10. The description of Rest Is Resistance and Giovanni’s endorsement are listed here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tricia-hersey/rest-is-resistance/9780316365536/.

11. 11. To learn more about the life and lessons of Mary Lyons, please visit: https://rainbowofbeing.wordpress.com/videos-1-8/mary-lyons/.

REFERENCES

• Kelley, Robin. D. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates. 2014. “Slavery Made America,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/slavery-made-america/373288/.
• Hersey, Tricia. 2022. Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark.
• National Bureau of Economic Research. 2023. “Maternal and Infant Health Inequality: New Evidence from Linked Administrative Data” by Kennedy-Moulton, Miller, Persson, Rossin-Slater, Wherry, and Aldana. DOI 10.3386/w30693.
• Winn, Maisha T. 2018. Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education through Restorative Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.