Local lawmakers are lending their support to state legislation that aims to right historic wrongs, and aiming for more. ‘We still have hearts and minds to change,’ one acknowledges.
Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, pictured on Jan. 9, 2024, served on the state’s reparations task force and wants the county board to back a package of legislation based on its recommendations. In January, Black lawmakers in Sacramento released the nation’s first statewide reparations package, a slew of bills intended to compensate the descendants of enslaved Black people.
But as California draws headlines as the first state to tackle reparations, local governments in San Diego are following suit. Then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber, photographed in 2020, authored the legislation that created a task force on reparations for Black Californians. Now she’s urging San Diego council members to support a package of bills based on the group’s recommendations.
The push for reparations in California gained steam in 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer prompted protests for police reform and racial justice nationwide. A swath of policy changes would be later introduced, and in that same year, Weber had enough support to propose and pass legislation to establish the state’s task force.
“We really listened to people’s stories of the type of discrimination, harm and injustice that they and their families had gone through,” Montgomery Steppe told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “A lot of those stories are written in the 1,100-page task force report.”Assembly Bill 1975, she says, can greatly improve medical services by making food and nutrition intervention a permanent part of Medi-Cal benefits.
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