After nearly two years of work, a South Bend group has released a report documenting harms from discrimination against African Americans and offering recommendations on what can be done about them.
The South Bend Common Council appointed the 11-member South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission in June 2023. They formed subcommittees that met monthly, gathering public comment and researching the city’s past through interviews and documents.
Earlier this month the commission released their interim report, broken down into the focus areas of education; employment, economic opportunity and the wealth gap; health care and mental health; housing; and policing and criminal/legal. Each subcommittee has issued a set of recommendations for actions to address harms that still affect Black residents today.
Commission Chair Trina Robinson, president of the South Bend NAACP, says that this does not call for reparations in the form of cash payments to Black residents.
"We can identify all that happened," Robinson says. "The recommendations need to address, how do we rectify these? And it's not to put cash into people's hands but to implement programs and opportunities so that we can have that economic wealth."
She says the commission hopes to receive more public feedback at two meetings Aug. 9 and 23. It plans to issue a final report by Dec. 31.
Serving on the council-appointed commission with Robinson have been former chair Darryl Heller, director of Indiana University South Bend's Civil Rights Heritage Center, who stepped down earlier this year for health reasons; Conrad Damian, president of Southeast Organized Area Residents; Aladean DeRose, a retired city attorney; Judy Fox, retired Notre Dame Law Clinic director; Jay Lewis, an attorney; Alma Powell, a retired educator; Pastor Gilbert Washington; Cassy White, with Beacon Health System; Regina Williams-Preston, an educator and former common council member; Takisha Jacobs, and Richard Warfield, chief information officer for St. Joseph County.
That’s six Black members, five white. WVPE hoped to learn about their varied perspectives and views of the experience in attacking such a difficult subject. But commission members declined our interview requests, saying they wanted only Robinson to speak for this story.
To make sure the report doesn’t ultimately just collect dust on a shelf somewhere, Robinson hopes the city will appoint an oversight group, preferably with paid members, to help implement recommendations. She says it’s not enough to simply acknowledge the harms that Black people have suffered.
“This is not something that a bunch of individuals got together, like the Reparations Working Group, which doesn’t have the backing of the council," Robinson says. "We were asked to do this specifically, and so therefore if you’re asking us to do this, then you definitely need to back it.”
Robinson says the commission’s final report will come too late for next year’s city budget but she wants the council to have action items next year that it can start to fund in 2027.
