California will formally apologize for slavery and its lingering effects on Black Americans in the state under a new law that the governor, Gavin Newsom, signed on Thursday.
The legislation was part of a package of reparations bills introduced this year that seek to offer compensation for decades of policies that drove racial disparities for African Americans. Newsom also approved laws to improve protections against hair discrimination for athletes and increase oversight over the banning of books in state prisons.
“The state of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past – and making amends for the harms caused.”
California’s first constitution, passed in 1849, said that slavery would never “be tolerated in this State”. But it wasn’t accompanied by laws that explicitly made slavery a crime or that protected Black people’s freedom – creating legal ambiguity that was used to protect and empower enslavers. Then, in 1852, California passed a fugitive slave law, which allowed enslaved people who had escaped to be arrested and forced to return to the south with their enslavers.
Even though the idea of cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people remains unpopular, a UCLA study published last year shows that a majority of Californians favor some form of compensation to address the state’s long history of anti-Black racism.
Newsom signed the bills after vetoing a proposal on Wednesday that would have helped Black families reclaim or be compensated for property that was unjustly seized by the government through eminent domain. The bill by itself would not have been able to take full effect because lawmakers blocked another bill to create a reparations agency that would have reviewed claims.
Efforts to study reparations at the federal level have stalled in Congress for decades. Illinois and New York state passed laws in recent years creating reparations commissions. Local officials in Boston and New York City have voted to create taskforces studying reparations. Evanston, Illinois, launched a program to provide housing assistance to Black residents to help atone for past discrimination.
California has moved further along on the issue than any other state. In addition to the creation of the nation’s first state reparations taskforce, California has seen a wave of local reparations efforts. Bruce’s Beach, an oceanfront property seized from a Black family in the 1920s through eminent domain, was finally returned to the family in 2021. And Black residents of Palm Springs have been organizing to demand reparations from the city, which razed a Black and Latino neighborhood in the 1960s to make way for commercial development.
But state lawmakers did not introduce legislation this year to give widespread direct payments to African Americans, which frustrated some reparations advocates.
Newsom approved a $297.9bn budget in June that included up to $12m for reparations legislation that became law.
He already signed laws included in the reparations package aimed at improving outcomes for students of color in K-12 career education programs. Another proposal the Black caucus backed this year that would ban forced labor as a punishment for crime in the state constitution will be on the ballot in November.
State assembly member Isaac Bryan, a Democrat representing Culver City, called legislation he authored to increase oversight over books banned in state prisons “a first step” to fix a “shadowy” process in which the department of corrections and rehabilitation decides which books to ban.
The corrections department maintains a list of disapproved publications it bans after determining the content could pose a security threat, includes obscene material or otherwise violates department rules.
The new law authorizes the office of the inspector general, which oversees the state prison system, to review works on the list and evaluate the department’s reasoning for banning them. It requires the agency to notify the office of any changes made to the list, and directs the office to post the list on its website.
“We need transparency in this process,” Bryan said. “We need to know what books are banned, and we need a mechanism for removing books off of that list.”
