Tennessee House kills bill that would have banned local officials from studying, funding reparations
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s Republican-dominant House on Wednesday strengthened a law that would have banned local governments from paying for college or providing money for slavery reparations.
The move marked a rare defeat on a Republican Party-backed proposal first introduced nearly a year ago. Last April, the Republican-controlled Senate easily cleared the Senate, but lawmakers ultimately went on hiatus when the House was consumed by controversy over the expulsion of two black Democratic lawmakers for their participation in a pro-gun control protest of the House of Representatives. That protest followed a deadly shooting at an elementary school in Nashville.
This year saw renewed interest in the reparations bill just as lawmakers and Republican Gov. Bill Lee were finalizing the removal and replacement of every board member of the state’s only publicly funded historically black public university, Tennessee State University. That sparked further outrage among critics who say Tennessee’s white Republican state leaders have long refused to trust black local leaders.
As the fallout from the TSU mounted, House members seemed reluctant to engage in a potentially explosive debate over reparations. The bill was briefly discussed in the House of Representatives last week, but its support remained unclear.
“The idea of studying reparations doesn’t require anything,” Democratic Rep. Larry Miller, who is black and from Memphis, said during the brief debate in the House of Representatives. ‘What’s in you to say, ‘Look, we can’t study our history. We can’t even talk about our history, you can’t even use your local tax dollars to study it.” That is so old-fashioned.”
Ultimately, House leaders waited until the final week of the session to return to the measure. But as Republican Rep. John Ragan, the bill’s sponsor, approached the front of the House to begin his opening statement, another Republican requested that the body “table” his proposal — a move that effectively put it before the entire House. years would destroy.
Nearly 30 Republicans joined Democrats in the House of Representatives in introducing the bill, including Republican Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton.
Before the vote, Ragan insisted his bill was necessary, arguing that proponents of reparations want to “take money out of our grandchildren’s pockets as judgment for someone else’s actions.”
“Is it right to say that the mistakes of a small percentage of long-gone generations must be borne by all Americans today? No. It is never right to punish an innocent person for an act committed by another,” Ragan said on Wednesday.
Under House rules, no other lawmakers were allowed to speak during the vote.
“We decided to move on and do some other things,” Sexton later told reporters. “You can always come back.”
Lawmakers in Tennessee only began seriously considering banning reparations after the state’s most populous county, which includes Memphis, announced it would spend $5 million to study the feasibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves and find ‘workable items’.
The decision by Shelby County leaders was prompted by the fatal beating of Tire Nichols by officers in January 2023.
Still, the idea of banning reparations has been floated in other states.
A Republican lawmaker from Florida proposed a constitutional amendment this year that would have banned state and local governments from paying reparations, but the measure did not pass. A Missouri Republican introduced a bill that would ban any state or local government entity from spending money on reparations based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or economic class. It has not progressed yet.
Meanwhile, other states have willingly begun studying reparations, including California, New Jersey and Vermont.