Reparations Committee Gets Input From Black San Franciscans
and reparations are front and center again today in San Francisco. African American community leaders met again to work on a final plan for reparations. Today's listening session was focused on getting more input from Black San Franciscans about what the plan should look like. As NBC Bay Area's Tom Jensen reports, it's not just about slavery and not just about money. Powerful voices from members of the city's Black community. When I say it's a debt that's owed, that was theft that happened after slavery. Mo McNeely was raised in San Francisco and attended city schools.
She says a school for Black children in San Francisco is one of many ways the city can try to repair its history of policies that enforce segregation and white supremacy. We need transformative change for our collective brighter future. Only reparations can do this. McNeely said for her it's not just atonement for enslavement. It's also about negative stereotypes, unfulfilled government promises, and decades of taxation without providing equal services, continuing with modern-day institutional racism. Black Americans in San Francisco and across the country were legally excluded from economic wealth-building programs like the Homestead Act, the GI Bill, the New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration Mortgages, and that's just to name a few. Glide Memorial Church opened its facilities for the listening session, which was also streamed online.
When we talk about reparations here at Glide, we don't focus on the monetary conversation. We talk about the repair and reparations and how do we repair generational and systemic oppression against Black people and ultimately people of color in general. To really learn about what our history is here and how we can sustain ourselves and move forward, and that could be through education, that could be through health care. There are so many ways that reparations can make an impact on our community. Through public input online and listening sessions like this one, the advisory committee has already put together more than 110 recommendations for reparations beyond monetary compensation. And hopefully today we leave with some more. We can slap on that final report and get the city moving towards what will heal the harm they've committed on us.
The committee will use information from this meeting and others like it to formulate a reparations plan.
San Francisco, Black community, reparations, Bay Area news