SAN FRANCISCO– San Francisco supervisors plan to formally apologize to Black residents for decades of racist laws and policies perpetrated by the city, a long-awaited first step in considering reparations.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote Tuesday on the resolution apologizing to African Americans and their descendants. All 11 members have registered as sponsors, guaranteeing passage. It would be one of the first major American cities to do so.
The resolution calls on San Francisco not to repeat harmful policies and practices and to commit to “substantial, ongoing, systemic and programmatic investments” in Black communities. There are approximately 46,000 black residents in San Francisco.
“An apology from this city is very concrete and not just symbolic, as admitting wrongdoing is an important step in making amends,” Supervisor Shamann Walton, the board’s only Black member and leading proponent of reparations, said during a committee hearing on the resolution. earlier this month.
Others say the apology itself is insufficient for true reconciliation.
“An apology is just cotton candy rhetoric,” said the Rev. Amos C. Brown, a member of the San Francisco Recovery Advisory Commission that proposed the apology among other recommendations. “What we need are concrete actions.”
An apology would be the first remedial recommendation to be implemented out of more than a hundred proposals made by the city committee. The African American Reparations Advisory Committee also proposed that every eligible black adult receive a lump sum cash payment of $5 million and a guaranteed income of nearly $100,000 per year to close San Francisco’s deep racial wealth gap.
But no action has been taken on these and other proposals. Mayor London Breed, who is black, has stated that she believes reparations should be handled at the national level. Facing a budget crisis, her administration this year cut $4 million for a proposed reparations agency.
Reparations advocates expressed frustration at the previous hearing over the slow pace of government action, saying Black residents continue to lag behind in health care, education and income.
For example, Black people make up 38% of San Francisco’s homeless population, despite making up less than 6% of the general population, according to a 2022 federal census.
In 2020, California became the first state in the nation to create a reparations task force. The state commission, which was disbanded in 2023, also made numerous policy recommendations, including methodologies to calculate cash payments to descendants of enslaved people.
But the recovery bills introduced this year by the California Legislative Black Caucus also leave out financial redress, although the package includes proposals to compensate people whose land was seized by the government through eminent domain and create a state recovery agency , ban forced prison labor and apologize.
Cheryl Thornton, a Black employee of the city of San Francisco, said in an interview after the commission hearing that an apology alone does little to address current problems, such as shorter lifespans for Black people.
“That’s why reparations are important in health care,” she said. “And that’s just because of the lack of healthy food, the lack of access to medical care and the lack of access to quality education.”
Other states have apologized for their history of discrimination and violence and their role in the enslavement of African Americans, according to the resolution.
In 2022, Boston became the first major US city to issue an apology. That same year, the Boston City Council voted to create a reparations task force.