The Washington, D.C., city council approved a budget for next year that includes funds for a reparations task force scheduled to study restitution and to develop proposals to address the harms of slavery.
The allocation makes Washington the latest city to develop legislation aimed at rectifying historical wrongs against Black Americans and their impact on their descendants.
The funding makes up $1.5 million of the city’s $21 billion budget, which the D.C. Council approved Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. The 2025 budget includes a provision directing the chief financial officer to allocate money for the task force.
The legislation to create the task force is aimed at developing reparations for Black residents “directly wronged and traumatized by the ills of slavery, Jim Crow, and structural and institutional racism,” the bill reads. It also requires the commissioner of the Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking to create a slavery-era database of slaveholding records, including life insurance policies on enslaved persons.
The bill was introduced by council member Kenyan McDuffie early last year and discussed at public hearings for several months afterward. In a Racial Equity Impact Assessment, the council’s Office of Racial Equity conducted historical research and offered recommendations to understand the bill’s impact on Black residents. “We can never fully capture the horror that was inflicted on Black people by white enslavers or the governments that supported them,” the report reads.
McDuffie told the Post that the budget allocation is only a first step but that “having the funding included in the budget to establish the creation of the commission, to do all the research that’s going to be required to develop potential proposals, is absolutely critical to moving it forward.”
However, H.R. 40, a federal bill to create a commission to study the effects of slavery — reintroduced more than three decades after it was first introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. — stalled in the House of Representatives after the House Judiciary Committee passed it in 2021.
Several members of California’s Legislative Black Caucus launched a statewide tour to promote 14 bills to address historical racial wrongs in the state, including two constitutional amendments proposed for this year’s ballot. California’s efforts at reparations began with a task force that compiled a 1,100-page report over two years, including a method for calculating financial compensation.
In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to implement a reparations program to address discriminatory policies from 1919 to 1969. The program provides $25,000 to Black residents directly affected by or whose ancestors were affected by practices like redlining. Evanston, which has already issued payments to at least 129 Black residents, faces a lawsuit from a conservative activist group that argues that the program violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
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