California lawmakers pass just one part of reparations legislation

By Michela Moscufo

(Reuters) - California lawmakers passed just one part of a three-bill package addressing reparations for slavery and racism in the waning days of their state house session, amid reports the governor had raised concerns.

Dozens of demonstrators arrived to support the measures proposed by Senator Steven Bradford late Saturday, the last day of the State Assembly session. The bills were moved to the inactive file shortly before the session ended.

Earlier last week, a bill on land restitution that is part of the package passed 56-0. It was unclear how that measure could be implemented without the other two - one creating a fund and the third an agency to determine matters such as who would be eligible for reparations.

The "Sacramento Bee" quoted sources as saying that Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration proposed dropping the implementing agency but setting aside $6 million for university researchers to study reparations and recommend a way to determine eligibility.

The changes would have “removed the substance of what we were trying to do,” Bradford, a Democrat, told Reuters, adding that the administration had expressed “fiscal concerns.”

Newsom, a Democrat who has expressed support for reparations legislation broadly, in July set aside $12 million for reparations initiatives. A recent government analysis projected the cost of the agency Bradford proposed to be between $3 million and $5 million.

Newsom’s office would not comment.

The agency Bradford proposed would have been in charge of implementing the recommendations of the California Reparations Task Force, which spent two years studying the state’s history of slavery and subsequent decades of racial violence, political disenfranchisement and racially exclusionary legislation.

According to a task force report, between 500 and 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s and 1850s, although slavery was illegal in the state.

“Everyone assumed the bills were going to be brought to vote,” Kamilah Moore, lawyer and former chair of the task force told Reuters. “Internal divisions got in the way.”

The legislature did pass eight other bills which were part of a separate reparations package presented by the Black Caucus, which included measures against discrimination of natural hairstyles and requiring grocery stores in under-served communities to notify the state if they plan to close.

Newsom has until the end of the month to sign the bills into law.

(Reporting by Michela Moscufo; editing by Donna Bryson and Mark Porter)