A commission to study reparations for Black Washingtonians descended from enslaved people or affected by Jim Crow-era institutional racism is about to move forward after securing funding in the D.C. Council’s 2025 budget, meaning the District is likely to join localities nationwide in searching for concrete ways to reckon with slavery’s generational harm.
The funding for the reparations commission was in the city’s $21 billion budget, which lawmakers finalized Tuesday, including with a provision directing the Office of the Chief Financial Officer to handle allocating money to create a task force to study how reparations could work.
Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (I-At Large), who introduced the legislation to create the task force, said the $1.5 million in “pre-funding” ensures that the nine-member reparations task force could hit the ground running if and when the council advances his bill. He said he is expecting to mark up his legislation, the Reparations Foundation Fund and Task Force Establishment Act, in the fall; nine council members co-sponsored the legislation, making passage likely if it gets a vote.
Under McDuffie’s proposal, the task force would explore ways to deliver restitution to Black residents harmed by generations of racism and institutional discrimination, starting with slavery, in a city that has some of the starkest racial wealth disparities in the nation. The legislation also directs the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking to develop a database of slaveholding records — such as insurance policies that enslavers took out on people they owned. That piece is also included in the budget, McDuffie said.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Meagan Flynn over at The Washington Post
