The fight for reparations: Meet the Press Reports

Black Americans endured centuries of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and institutional racism — spurring debate over whether Black citizens are owed reparations. 

The calls for reparations have increased in recent years, including following the death of George Floyd, in what was considered a racial reckoning for the country. An increasing number of cities, states, and universities are weighing reparations in different forms. 

NBC’s Ron Allen has covered the debate over reparations in California, where a task force has worked for two years to determine what, if anything, is owed to Black Americans. 

Attorney Kamiliah Moore, chair of California's reparations task force, says reparations are something that “communities are owed” if they have suffered from “gross human rights" violations.

“We are owed reparations for the debt owned from slavery … due to the broken promises of Reconstruction in this country and the lingering badges and incidents of systemic discrimination that African Americans still face today,” Moore said. 

The California task force highlights issues including housing discrimination and unlawful property seizures, discrimination against Black businesses, over-policing and mass incarceration in Black communities and healthcare inequality. 

The task force issued its final report this June and is expected to make the case for why California owes its residents billions of dollars and make policy recommendations.

‘Generational wealth … was stolen from us:’ Inside the push for reparations for Black Californians

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One family, the Johnsons, are among the thousands of Californians who shared their story with the reparations task force.

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Marian Johnson is a Black American in Northern California who believes that her family is owed reparations. She says that based on stories passed through generations and limited records, local laws were used to unjustly seize and devalue their families' land in Russell City, Calif. 

“There’s generational wealth that was stolen from us,” Johnson said. “We had to continue to rebuild every time. We would be further along if you hadn’t done what was done to our family.”

The reparations task force recommends that any Black Californian able to trace their ancestry to an enslaved or free Black person living in the United States before 1900 should be eligible for reparation payments.

“The harm is massive and so the solution has to be massive as well,” Moore said.

For more on the debate over reparations, check out the latest episode of Meet The Press Reports.