[Narrator] Did you know that the first act of reparations took place before slavery was even abolished?

In 1783, a Ghanaian woman by the name of Belinda Royall Sutton was granted freedom after being enslaved for 50 years.

She then went on to petition the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations and won.

Belinda received an annual pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings from the Royal estate.

Slavery would only be abolished 82 years later.

Though Belinda's story is inspiring, history has proven that the fight for reparations is an ongoing battle.

In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued special Field Order 15, which granted 400,000 acres of confiscated coastal land to millions of newly freed slaves.

Only 40,000 people received the land distributed in 40 acre plots before President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865.

His successor, Andrew Johnson, a white supremacist and enslaver, overturned the order returning the land back to the slave owners.

The value of the 40 acres would have been worth $640 billion dollars today.

[Kamilah Moore] And this is the last hearing of the California Reparations Task Force.

Let's give it up for ourselves.

[Narrator] Now that the dialogue around reparations has ramped up in the United States and in California, especially after the California task force delivered its landmark 1200 page report with 115 recommendations for reparative measures.

The question is, what could reparations look like today?

[Demnlus Johnson] For me, reparations is [Jamilia Land] so much deeper than giving people financial compensation.

[Kim Mims] It needs to be transformative.

[Raphael Plunkett] I would like to not see descendants on Skid Row.

[Amed Mullins] If, you know, reparations are rewarded that there needs to be some type of financial literacy.

[Jamilia Land] Yes, we need financial compensation.

Yes, we need equal access.

[Raphael Plunkett] I would like to not know that the foster system is overwhelmed with Black children.

[Kim Mims] Policy changes that will impact, you know, quality of life in other areas besides monetarily.

[Kathleen Harmon] We need to be respected.

[Narrator] In this conversation about reparations, often the issues of health care, housing, criminal justice reform and education can be hot topics.

[Charles Toombs] In terms of reparations, I would like to see Black students resourced.

I'd like for them to have free tuition.

I would like to have Black faculty, once they are recruited and hired by the CSU campuses, to have resources so that they can survive and be promoted and tenured.

[Narrator] Though the debate of reparations can feel overwhelming, we can look to certain communities and institutions throughout the United States who have attempted to address the historical wrongs of racial inequality created by slavery on a local level.

Like our great institutions of learning who have been forced to deal with their sordid past.

Georgetown University, which was founded in 1789 by Jesuits, fell on hard times in 1838.

To save the university from ruin, the school sold 272 enslaved persons from their Maryland plantations to plantation owners in southern Louisiana.

This history was discovered in 2004 when Patricia Johnson researched her family tree and brought it to the school's attention.

As a form of reparations, the university renamed two buildings, one for Isaac Hawkins, who was the first enslaved person named on the record of the 1838 sale.

The other was Anne Marie Becraft, a free Black woman who established a school for Black girls in the Georgetown neighborhood in the 1820s.

They also arranged for the descendants of those enslaved persons who were sold to be granted consideration as legacy students in their admission process.

The university established a center to study slavery and its legacy, and gave a public apology for the institution's involvement in slavery.

Just as education is often brought up, so is the concern of equity in health care.

[Edwin Kendrick] California does need to set the standard for health care equality.

That's what we're about.

Methods and practices which dismantle current obstacles in health equity.

[Narrator] Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service ran health experiments in Alabama, where they offered free health care to Black sharecroppers.

When they discovered that 399 Black men had syphilis, instead of informing them of their diagnosis, they gave the men disguise placebos and monitored them for 40 years to study the long term effects of the disease.

Even though by the 1940s they had already discovered a cure for syphilis.

Then in the 1960s, a health statistician by the name of Bill Jenkins, who was working for the U.S. government, learned about this racist study and tried to stop it.

But the government would only address the problem several years later, when Peter Buxton, a venereal disease investigator who also disapproved of the study, leaked the story to the Washington Star, igniting the larger community to demand reparations for the men and their families.

In 1974, the government reached a settlement of $10 million to be awarded to the victim's families, as well as lifelong medical treatment.

It took 23 years before the government made an official apology.

[Bill Clinton] Today, America does remember the hundreds of men used in research without their knowledge and consent.

We remember them and their family members.

Men who were poor and African American without resources and with few alternatives.

They believed they had found hope when they were offered free medical care by the United States Public Health Service.

They were betrayed.

The United States government did something that was wrong.

It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.

What was done cannot be undone.

But we can end the silence.

We can stop turning our heads away and finally say, on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful.

And I am sorry.

[Narrator] With Black Americans being incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans, criminal justice reform is a major issue when talking about reparations.

[Jamilia Land] My husband is formerly incarcerated.

He served 24 years.

When he went into prison in the late 1990s, he received a bill from the California Franchise Tax Board that said that he owed over $36,000 dollars in restitution.

He was earning 74 cents per hour.

Of that, the state of California was taking 50% for restitution and 5% for administrative fees.

He wasn't able to pay $2,000 dollars of restitution.

I would like to see the passage of ACA8, the End Slavery in California Act, because a lot of people don't realize that California is still in fact a slavery state.

[Narrator] Seven states in the U.S. adopted a ballot measure removing language from their state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude for conviction of a crime.

Housing is also a great concern when we understand the racial inequities that the Black communities have faced regarding home ownership.

[Kathleen Harmon] My great grandmother and my grandfather all were slaves, and I was born in 1931.

I'm 91 years old.

I would like to see decent housing and we wouldn't have the homelessness problems we have today.

[Narrator] From 1900 to 1960, Evanston, Illinois, had enacted housing policies that enforced segregation and discrimination against Black residents.

The policies even went as far as dictating occupation, education and prosperity, impacting the Black communities' ability to thrive in the area.

Then in 2019, the Evanston City Council voted 8 to 1 to pass the restorative housing program.

Those qualifying for the grant would receive $25,000 dollars per household or a down payment on a home or home repairs.

This initiative made Evanston the first city in the nation to pass a reparations fund to address the historic racist policies.

Housing, education, health care and criminal justice reform are just scratching the surface of the enduring legacy of slavery that impacts Black people today.

Hopefully through the work of organizations like the California Reparations Task Force, who provided the state legislature with recommendations for reparations, we can create a path of healing and restitution for the next generation of Black Americans.

[Kamilah Moore] Wolof, Bamana, Bambara, Nar, Moor, Pulaar, Fulbe, Mandinka, Kissi, Canga, Chamba, Fon, Hausa, Nago, Edo, Calabar, Ebeo, Kongo, Makua, Ardra, Moko, Dendi, Java, Mina, Ewe, Nupe.

These are some of the indigenous African ethnicities of which members were bartered and sold as human cargo from the great and exploited continent known as Africa.

Through sheer terror and violence, European enslavers attempted to strip these indigenous African human beings of their cultural and ethnic heritages, relying on the power to label them Negro, Black, mulatto or other socially constructed terms to deny them their human right to self-determination.

The vestiges of descent-based chattel slavery that mar my family's history in the United States traveled consequently with us all the way to California, only to be met by Jim Crow again out West.

As the esteemed Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote, "Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we had been free."

As I conclude, it is my hope that the task force's general efforts reinvigorates the Black American community to exercise our human right to self-determination with the renewed spirit and energy that enables us to freely determine our political status and to pursue our economic, social and cultural development via comprehensive reparatory justice policies.

[Applause] [Steven Bradford] This is the story that made America.

The task force report is documented with citations and footnotes.

They can be uncomfortable with the history, but you cannot deny the truth.

Now is the time to face it, folks.

To own up to the debt that is owed.

To right the historic wrongs here in California and across this nation.

And we can do this.

We can do this, if we're committed to it.

[KQED sonic ID]