California Will Formally Apologize for Being Complicit in Slavery

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed several bills intended to atone for the state’s role in the oppression of Black Americans, but California legislators so far have sidelined proposals on cash reparations.

California will issue a formal apology for being complicit in slavery during the 19th century and for enforcing segregationist policies against Black residents as one of several new laws that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Thursday to atone for the state’s past discriminatory treatment of African Americans.

Last year, California became the first state in the country to explore concrete restitution for historical racism after a social justice movement was spurred by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. A state reparations task force last year determined, among other acts, that California courts had enforced fugitive slave laws and that more than 2,000 enslaved people were brought to California even after it was admitted as a free state in 1850.

The official request for forgiveness “for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants” was one of the dozens of recommendations the reparations panel made last year.

But the committee’s central suggestion — financial reparations for the descendants of slaves — got little traction.

Costs for a widespread payment plan, which no state has enacted, are estimated to run in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and California has faced budget deficits in the past two years.

Led by the California Legislative Black Caucus, state lawmakers this session introduced more than a dozen initiatives to compensate Black Americans harmed by ancestral enslavement. At the time, the response was hailed as a first-in-the-nation model for other states.