[Dr. Grills] If day in and day out, you are told repeatedly you're not a human being.

You are not intelligent, you're not beautiful.

You don't know how to raise your children.

You're a criminal.

The list goes on and on.

If you're getting steady doses of that, even the best Black family is going to struggle to offset those messages.

(confident hip-hop beat with emotional piano and strong male vocals) ♪ We ain't giving up ♪ ♪ Fight!

Stand!

Push!

Kick!

Punch!

Move!

♪ ♪ We ain't giving up ♪ (music abruptly fades out) (Mysterious, propulsive xylophone melody) [Don Tamaki] On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd was murdered and that triggered the largest protests in U.S. history.

By September of 2020, the legislature acted to pass Shirley Weber's bill, creating the California Task Force.

We had three goals that we had to do.

One was to document the harm of enslavement, Jim Crow, exclusion, and connect the dots between that and today's consequences.

Second thing is to find ways to educate the American public over this history that's really been erased.

The third requirement is to make recommendations.

[Reginald Jones-Sawyer] We're really a study group that come up with recommendations to give to the legislature.

Then we'll hopefully pass that on to the governor.

And hopefully the governor will sign it.

[Narrator] On June 1st, 2022, The California Reparations Task Force issued its nearly 500 page interim report to the state legislature.

[Lisa Holder] The report lays out the deep history of extraordinary racism and exclusion that African-Americans have faced since day one in this state.

[Reginald Jones-Sawyer] You will read some things in here that you thought that only happened in the South, that chattel slavery and the aftermath with the Jim Crow, redlining, all of that just moved west.

[Don Tamaki] The fact of the matter is the American public knows little about it.

[Lisa Holder] The disparities and outcomes that we're seeing in terms of wealth, health, education, access are not about anything that Black people did wrong, but it's about a system that has actually been designed to keep Black people at the bottom.

[Narrator] The task force uses the international law definition of reparations, which consists of five forms.

[Kamilah Moore] It's about how do you restore the victim group to a position before the harm was done.

So, compensation is one of those forms.

So, cash payments or money.

(minimal electronic track with bell-like synthesizer sounds) Second form is rehabilitation.

Free health care, free social services, free legal services, for instance.

Restitution is the third form of reparations.

So, stolen land, stolen property, real or intellectual.

The fourth form of reparations is satisfaction.

And that really gets to more symbolic forms of reparations, like a formal apology, or the taking down of confederate monuments in this country, similar to de-Nazification in Germany.

And then lastly, the fifth form of reparations under international law is guarantee of non-repetition.

So that gets at more structural and institutional policy change.

[Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] We have an interim report organized principally around 12 areas.

And so we're focusing on the kind of financial compensation around five out of the 12.

(electronic track fades out) (atmospheric clock-like ticking synthesizer pulses) [Dr. Cheryl Grills] The effects of enslavement and post enslavement, Jim Crow, lack of civil rights, the impact of all of those things on the Black psyche are multifold.

(emotional, minimalist piano track) I was born before the Civil Rights Act.

I'm originally from Charleston, South Carolina.

(piano track continues) My grandfather was a sharecropper.

My mother picked cotton growing up.

(piano track continues) My parents relocated part of that Great Migration.

(piano track continues) Both had stories about racism, like the burning of a Ku Klux Klan cross on the front lawn of my grandparents' friend's home, which is right next door.

Heartbreaking stories of my grandfather with other men in the town going to cut down Black bodies that were lynched.

(piano track continues with added violins) Of people being run out of town because of potential lynching.

(piano track fades) (slow, hopeful vintage piano chords) [Steven Bradford] At the turn of the century in 1900, there were more African American institutions of higher learning than any other group in the country.

Understanding what made that possible after slavery and the promise of, you know, reparations that wasn't fulfilled.

So they had to find a way of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps on their own and developing this.

(slow, hopeful vintage piano chords continue) [Reginald Jones-Sawyer] I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas.

My uncle was one of the Little Rock Nine, the nine kids that integrated Central High school in 1957.

The all the atrocities they went through.

Hundreds of angry white Ku Klux Klan people coming after them.

I've had no problems with my education because of the sacrifices that those nine brave Black kids did to get into high school.

In a lot of ways my past experience has led me to this work.

(piano fades) (atmospheric clock-like ticking synthesizer pulses) (menacing synthesizer sounds layered on top of clock-ticking track) [Dr. Amos Brown] I first became conscious of this evil of race and its effects (clock-ticking track continues) when at the age of 14, Jet magazine, it had that horrifying image of Emmett Till.

(clock-ticking track continues) And I was so shaken by it that I ran to Mr. Medgar Wiley Evers, field director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in my state of Mississippi.

He said to me, "Amos, I understand how hurt you are, but don't just be angry.

Let's be smart so that you'd be able to fight this evil of race and injustice.

(clock-ticking track continues) [Lisa Holder] My consciousness was raised fairly early on with a case called the Central Park Five.

Because of the arrest, prosecution and wrongful imprisonment.

(clock-ticking track continues) I began thinking very critically, especially having four older brothers, how Black youth was being criminalized.

That's the lived experience that I've carried with me in the work of systems change, racial justice and social justice.

(bouncy hi-hat rhythm) [Steven Bradford] My grandfather was, had the only Black barbershop in the town that they grew up in and the only Black cab company.

And my grandmother owned the only Black beauty shop.

So understanding how segregation work.

Just hearing those stories, hearing, you know, what they had to overcome in order to survive.

But at the same time, looking today and seeing where are those Black businesses today?

(atmospheric, solemn guitar track) [News anchor] In California, cities like San Francisco, with affirmative action programs in place, are coping with a new Supreme Court action, essentially upholding Proposition 209.

The measure, passed by 54% of voters, outlaws state and local government affirmative action programs.

[Monica Montgomery Steppe] I call myself a Prop 209 baby.

My parents were running a proficient professional construction business, and then Prop 209 was passed.

And because the mandate left for companies to have to do business with Black owned companies.

(atmospheric, solemn guitar track with added mournful trumpet) My father started to struggle in his business and so that's part of why I'm so passionate about reparations and just equity and making sure that we're fair, especially here in California.

(atmospheric, solemn guitar track) [Dr. Cheryl Grills] I lived in a housing project.

Mind you, both of my parents were college educated, but because of racism, they could not really thrive professionally.

(atmospheric, solemn guitar track with added mournful trumpet slowly fades) (mournful, peaceful trumpet solo) [Steven Bradford] Learning about all the medical experimentations that were conducted on slaves and even after slavery on Black men and women and all the experimentation that happened to them simply because of their race.

Operations that are now standard practice were done on Blacks, on slaves, on free folks, on their corpses.

(mournful, peaceful trumpet solo with added piano) [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] The idea of being racialized in the United States, um, is closely tied to one's economic and class based experience.

I have seen a lot of those same, you know, issues and instances and experiences in African American communities.

(contemplative electric guitar with delay and reverb) [Don Tamaki] I thought I knew something about American history.

I thought I was pretty well read.

After working on this near 500 page interim report, which traces and connects the dots between 246 years of enslavement, 90 years of Jim Crow, and decades of exclusion to follow, was I knew next to nothing, frankly.

(electric guitar track with determined drumbeats) And despite the fact that Black people and their struggle really opened the door for women, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and all other historically disfavored groups.

And so we owe a debt to make it right and change that dynamic going forward.

[Lisa Holder] This process that we have engaged is the roadmap for doing reparations.

Whether you want to do it at the hyper local level or whether we want to do it at the federal level, California's reparations process will be a beacon for this work going forward.

♪ life is a fight ♪ (KQED sonic ID)