Shirley Weber, photographed in the Los Angeles Times in El Segundo on December 1.
In the triple-digit heat of summer, Thursdays in downtown Sacramento are usually quiet. But not on June 29 of last year.
The March Fong Eu State Secretariat building bounced like a black church on Sunday, and the cries of joy from teary-eyed blacks were impossible to ignore. But Shirley Weber, California's secretary of state, tried it anyway during the final meeting of the state's reparations task force.
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“Your work will live on forever,” the Rev. Amos Brown, a member of the task force, told him. “God bless you.”
Weber, 75, has long been a force in Democratic politics, from the San Diego Board of Education to the state Assembly to her current position, the first for a Black woman. But lately she has achieved almost rock star status as something less official: the “godmother of reparations.”
It was his Assembly Bill 3121 that led California to do what Congress has refused to do: appoint a task force to study the lasting harms of slavery and recommend what compensation is owed for decades of laws and systemically racist policies. State lawmakers are now grappling with many proposed legislation arising from the task force's recommendations. It has been a hard and slow road.
It's work that has breathed new life into the national reparations movement, turning what many Americans had long seen as a joke into a serious and often unavoidable political discussion.
“Your work will live forever.”
— The Rev. Amos Brown, member of the California Reparations Task Force on the contributions of Shirley Weber.
Inspired by California, New York and Illinois they have created their own working groups. Cities across the country have done or are considering doing the same. Meanwhile, long-buried stories of injustice, like that of Bruce's Beach, have been unearthed and addressed.
The timing of AB 3121 helped. Weber introduced it in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, a combination that sparked a national racial reckoning.
But what Weber did was not just a matter of timing; it was also about vision.
On the same Thursday that the reparations task force last met, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. Since then, corporate and nonprofit programs that benefit people of color have also come under attack.
That's why it's notable that Weber focused on harm, not race. Using his influence on the task force, he ensured that reparations did not go to “blacks,” but to people whose ancestors were enslaved. Legally, it's the only way it can work. And in Sacramento, lawmakers have introduced a series of bills this year to ensure that happens.
“When you have done harm,” Weber said, “you have the responsibility to make it right. And to make sure it doesn't happen again.”
