A leader of Detroit’s Reparations Task Force plans to “apply pressure” to the incoming mayoral administration and City Council to ensure their policy recommendations are taken seriously.
The task force dissolves at the end of the month, leaving a newly elected mayor and City Council responsible for carrying the effort forward. The task force called on Mayor-elect Mary Sheffield to create a Reparations Administrative Office dedicated to studying and implementing their recommendations.
Co-Chair Cidney Calloway hopes to schedule a January briefing with the newly-seated council and a public forum to highlight the need for a permanent office.
“We need this office so we can figure out if any legal challenges might come, we can scrutinize our own work, we can go through the programs that already exist, we can go through the charter and understand the powers that be within the city,” Calloway said.
Detroit reparations officials recently traveled hundreds of miles to witness something they spent the last three years working to realize back home. Inside an Illinois Baptist church, grants were awarded to Black residents affected by racist housing policies at the National Symposium for State and Local Reparations.
Calloway said the event reaffirmed that securing reparations is a long-term process.
“Generations of harm can’t be repaired within three years and a single report, it has to be repeated actions,” Calloway said. “It’s going to take a lot of time to not only ideate what these programs and what these opportunities need to look like, what repair looks like, but then the implementation is going to take another swath of time.”
The city of Evanston, a northern Chicago suburb, has become a national model since launching the country’s first municipal effort six years ago. Evanston’s program provides $25,000 housing grants to compensate Black residents and their descendants for past housing discrimination.
Detroit took a significant step on its path to reparations when a volunteer task force released its policy recommendations at the end of October. The massive document lists nearly 100 policy goals, including cash payments for descendants of African slaves, but leaves questions around funding and implementation.
Sheffield said she’s committed to continue discussions and will consider whether to create a commission to implement the recommendations. She said the task force submitted “quite a lengthy list” and hasn’t identified which measures should take priority.
Some of the proposals call for deeper investment in initiatives that already exist, like home repair grants for seniors, free skilled trades training and prioritizing local businesses for city contracts. Others are outside the city’s authority, like implementing rent control, ending qualified immunity for police and freezing property taxes for residents who were historically overtaxed.
A few funding mechanisms are suggested, but it’s unclear how the city would pay for projects like a recommended $5 million investment to acquire commercial spaces for Black development districts.
Calloway said it’s unclear how reparations fit into Sheffield’s priorities. Calloway said the task force hasn’t been in contact with her transition team but is connecting with several economists who might better define the total of wealth extracted from residents.
“It’s going to take a lot more pressure and accountability from our constituents and our neighbors,” Calloway said. “We are trying to figure out how we’re going to organize on the ground in order to apply pressure to this new administration. We don’t want to throw (Sheffield) into the lion’s den, but we’re trying to figure out how to encourage her to be a little bit stronger on this topic.”
Keith Williams, the other task force co-chair, worries the task force took a meandering path to ultimately deliver a flawed report. Williams said the work should solely focus on closing the wealth gap between Black and white Americans, which the report states is roughly $350,000.
“You know what I’m afraid of? California did this 1,000-page report and now they cannot fund it, and it’s sitting on the shelf,” Williams said.
Task force member Janis Hazel, who worked with late-Congressman John Conyers to introduce the first federal reparations resolution in 1989, also said she’s disappointed with the final document.
“As it stands, the report is not strong enough,” Hazel said. “It is not specific enough and not honest enough about the scale of wealth extracted from Black Detroiters. My concern is not that the report went too far or that was too long, it didn’t go far enough. If Detroit is serious about reparations, we must be willing to name the damage, measure it and commit to repair that is proportional to the harm.”
The report offers several potential funding sources, like enacting a voluntary contractor fee to create a reparations trust fund and adding a 2% fee on Detroit’s casino tax. The task force supports creating a new entertainment tax, so long as it commits $10 million annually toward reparations work. It suggests a review of clawing back tax breaks from developers that didn’t meet their commitments.
Ambiguity around the prospect of reparations has been a concern raised in public discussions since the beginning. Even the task force report expressed skepticism about fully realizing reparations, despite calling for a serious review of possible solutions.
“Nationally, in today’s environment, realistic reparations for past harm savagely imposed on the backs of African people in the Americas is a doubtful scenario,” the report states. “Local evidence of this doubtful scenario is supported by the fact that the push to raise the question and seek an outcome regarding the historical issue of Black reparations is championed exclusively by the City Council with nary a sound of support from Detroit’s white mayor.”
Voters overwhelmingly supported a 2021 ballot initiative to study reparations, thanks to a resolution Sheffield led. A task force was convened by the City Council in 2023 to identify harms inflicted on Black residents and propose housing and economic development programs. Recommendations released on Oct. 31 mark the official end of their work.
Attorney Krystal Crittendon, a former Detroit corporation counsel, who worked with Williams to launch the ballot initiative, said the fate of reparations hinges on the will of the people.
“Although people may disagree with some of the recommendations that are being made, they are just recommendations,” Crittendon said. “Now is where the hard work begins. This is where people need to show up. They need to tell the City Council what they want. This is not over. This is just the beginning.”
This is utterly ridiculous! I am tired of hearing about “slavery” reparations. Our generation did not cause harm to blacks through slavery, give it a rest!