By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
When community organizer Chris Lodgson first started mulling over the issue of addressing the fallout from chattel slavery in a serious way, he put out a call for like-minded individuals to join him, opening his home for the initial meeting. Three people showed up.
Fast-forward five or six years and support for reparations has grown exponentially and California’s reparations work has become a national model with the first-of-its-kind Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
Lodgson and a group of community organizers and mobilizers not only earned a seat at the table, they helped build the table. That group, the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California (CJEC), is an all-volunteer group of community advocates, grassroots organizers and mobilizers joined for the common purpose of reparations and reparative justice. The CJEC consists of five partner organizations: the American Redress Coalition of California-Sacramento, the American Redress Coalition of California-Bay Area, Emend the Mass Media Group, the California Black Lineage Society, and the Lineage Equity Advancement Project.
The CJEC’s commitment and role in advancing the cause of the historic task force has led to its selection by The OBSERVER as its 2023 Persons of the Year. The OBSERVER sat down with lead organizer Chris Lodgson to talk about the landmark year the group had in shaping the reparations conversation and in advancing the moment beyond talk and toward real legislation and real redress for the injustices Blacks have had to endure as a result of American slavery.
“It was important for Sacramento’s voice to be heard and have a presence in getting us to where we are now,” Lodgson says. “This movement in California that we are in is really the result of regular people who actually started to learn more about reparations and then get involved and get politically active for it.
“It’s because [of] folks on the ground – regular people, myself included – who really advocated and urged and pushed our state representatives to take some actual action. That’s part of how this started.”
People throughout the state joined with locals in Sacramento and started talking to their state senators and assemblymembers. Most had no experience doing so.
“We didn’t know who to call or how to even set up a meeting with an assemblymember. We had no idea,” Lodgson admits. “At every decision point I remember hearing things like, ‘This is not going to happen’ or ‘This is not serious’ or ‘This is not real.’ And at every point folks have been proven wrong. I think that’s going to continue. I do think California will be the first state to actually pass and sign into law reparations legislation and I think that’s going to start in 2024.”
When The OBSERVER named then-Assemblymember Shirley N. Weber as its 2019 Person of the Year, she listed reparations as one of the California Legislative Black Caucus’ top priorities moving into the next year. Dr. Weber could confidently speak of that goal because she had the CJEC in her arsenal. The CJEC worked with Dr. Weber’s staff to write language for the bill, AB 3121, that created the reparations task force in 2020.
The discussion came at a time ripe with redress sentiment following the deaths of unarmed Black men like Stephon Clark and George Floyd, as well as the disparities in employment, health care and housing exposed by the global coronavirus pandemic.
The nine-member task force submitted its comprehensive final report and recommendations, including financial compensation, to Gov. Gavin Newsom on June 29. The state Senate and Assembly also have copies. Before the report’s submission, CJEC champions hosted numerous informational sessions throughout the state. The coalition worked diligently to clear up misinformation and misconceptions about what reparations could and would look like in California. Doing so, Lodgson says, cleared a path for a stronger plan more likely to be approved by lawmakers. Team members appeared on several African American podcasts and on radio shows like Keisha Mathews’ “Selling Sacramento” on KDEE 97.5. Kim Mims and Uumoiya Glass of Emend the Mass Media Group filmed all the task force’s community listening sessions and created a documentary, “Reparations Now.”
Educating the community was key and still is, he adds, as the work didn’t end with the report’s submission. The next step is for legislators, specifically members of the California Legislative Black Caucus, to take those recommendations and turn them into actual legislation. The caucus is working on a dozen reparations-related bills they’ll introduce in 2024.
“Within the next month or so, as many as 12 different bills will be introduced based on one or more of the recommendations of the task force,” Lodgson says. “This will be historic in and of itself because there have never been state-level bills on reparations introduced,” adding that Sen. Steven Bradford’s Senate Bill 490 is the exception.
SB 490 is cued up and takes one of the recommendations of the state task force to create the California American Freedmen’s Affairs Agency, where residents would go to show eligibility and start the claims process.
The CJEC is optimistic and anticipates a busy 2024. That includes working to get bipartisan support for reparations passage.
“The math is 41 plus 21 plus one for us,” Lodgson says. “It’s 41 senators, 21 assemblymembers and one governor. That is the math to make reparations law in 2024. That’s the work for us.
“There are 80 assemblymembers and 40 senators in the state of California. That’s, what, 120 people? Twelve of those are in the California Legislative Black Caucus. That’s 12 out of 120 and three of those 12 are actually going into their last year next year.”
Factor in that none of the caucus members represents a majority Black district, where constituents potentially would push representatives toward positive votes. No matter how you do that math, it means folks who will decide whether reparations happen for Black folks will be decidedly un-Black.
“There’s a question about Black political power that we also have to talk about at some point and take action on in this state,” Lodgson says.
“We’re not asked what we think. We’re not asked what we want,” he says. “We’re not a part of the political process early and if we are a part of the political process, usually people want something from us, like their vote. We don’t always have enough influence over what decisions are made before they’re made. So for us having these community events and having task force members come and sit in them and actually talk to folks, was our way of saying this really is about us. It was taking political power in our own hands.”
THE OBSERVER proudly salutes the dedicated members of the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California as its 2023 Persons of the Year.
The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans report is available online at oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/full-ca-reparations.pdf.