What can be done to compensate the descendants of slaves who walk among us today?
It’s a question the city of South Bend is about to undertake.
This week the city’s common council unanimously passed a resolution forming a Reparatory Justice Commission. The group’s members were selected by council President Sharon McBride.
The commission will meet on its own, separate from the council. McBride has chosen 14 individuals to serve on the commission. In alphabetical order, they are David Buggs, Wilner Cusic, Conrad Damian, Aladean DeRose, John Duffy, Judy Fox, Darryl Heller, Jay Lewis, Cordell Martin, Alma Powell, Trina Robinson, Gilbert C. Washington, Cassy White and Regina Williams-Preston.
“This is a group of diverse members of the community who have a wealth of knowledge in various areas,” McBride said. “So what they’re going to be doing is their own research, and coming back to council on what their findings were and recommendations.”
The city of Providence, Rhode Island last year launched an initiative to create a $10 million reparations budget, using federal COVID-19 response money as the funding source. If Providence’s experience is any indication, South Bend will need to be careful with whatever remedy it comes up with.
Federal rules require that government programs are race-neutral, so Providence can only benefit descendants of slaves by targeting programs to certain Census tracts where more African-Americans live.
Providence is not giving direct cash payments to African-Americans. Rather, it’s taking the shape of investments in small businesses and programs that include workforce training and financial literacy.
In March of this year, Tishaura Jones, St. Louis’ first Black female mayor, appointed a nine-member Reparations Commission. By March of next year, the St. Louis commission plans to issue a report with recommendations on actions that can be taken. The report will be presented to the mayor and city’s Board of Aldermen.
In St. Louis, like South Bend, no money has been earmarked for such actions.
The commission already has met once and elected Heller, who is director of IUSB’s Civil Rights Heritage Center, as its chair.
In South Bend, like any other city, Heller said the practice of redlining stopped Black families from obtaining mortgage loans in certain areas, eliminating a major way that American families accumulate and pass down wealth from generation to generation.
“And it was very deeply complicit between the federal government and local institutions, including municipalities and local real estate companies, that created hierarchies in terms of the resources they were going to invest in various neighborhoods,” Heller said. “And neighborhoods that were neighborhoods of color were at the bottom of that hierarchy.”
Indeed, Heller said the commission won’t need to go all the way back to the days of slavery to identify ways that African-Americans in South Bend have been harmed by racial injustice.
“Ultimately the purpose of the Reparatory Justice Commission is to identify past harms that have been perpetrated, and by past I’m not talking necessarily about 100 years ago,” Heller said. “I’m talking about harms that might have happened last week because the racial inequities are still operative.”
Heller said he hopes the group ultimately will come up with a set of action recommendations for the city to embark upon.
“Our charge or our mission is to look deeply into the historical production of those inequities, to identify the harms to both individuals and to the African-American community more broadly speaking, and as well, to make recommendations as to ways that those harms will cease to exist going forward.”
Heller envisions the commission taking a hard look at health disparities among Black and white residents of South Bend, as well as the racial wealth gap that he said is “very real in South Bend, as it is across the country.”
Mayor James Mueller was quick to note that the commission will be studying Reparatory Justice, rather than “reparations,” a term the general public has largely come to equate with cash payments for the ancestors of slaves.
“This is not a reparations committee in the sense of some other reparations committees around the country that you’ve seen,” Mueller said. “It is a reparatory justice committee, looking at, what are the harms that have been done historically, and some that may even exist to this day. How can we repair and have reconciliation and opportunity extended to everyone?”
