Freedmen’s Bureau Essential for Compensating Slave Descendants Reparations Task Force: Reparations Task Force:

Continued from page A1 funding and “deeply held racist attitudes.”

Holder added that the CAFAA should be the “guiding light” behind reparations efforts in the state of California.

“One of the things I like about this notion of a Freedmen’s Bureau is that it’s in keeping with this concept that reparations and damages for human rights abuses have to create systems that end the harm that causes the harm,” Holder said. “It is also supposed to create institutions that make the community whole in a sense that they get you up to a place where you were before the harm happened.”

Elmer Fonza of Las Vegas and his elder brother Medford Fonza, who lives in the Los Angeles area, have attended task force meetings and activities around the state. Their great, great, great grandfather Nelson Bell was brought to California as an enslaved person around 1850 to mine for gold. He was later freed.

Bell purchased land in Coloma, 48 miles east of Sacramento, but the family lost it all after he died in the 1870s, the brothers told the task force at the September meeting in Los Angeles. Elmer Fonza believes that the property was confiscated through unscrupulous means.

The Fonza family, who visited and toured Gold

Country last summer for the first time in their lives, wants to know how they can benefit from an agency such as CAFAA.

“Now, as we gather more evidence, we want to file a claim through reparations to see if we lost anything or could gain anything,” Fonza said. “We want to know if such an agency (CAFAA) could help us facilitate the process. Right now, we don’t know how that would be done.”

How the CAFAA can be used to determine reparations eligibility for Black Californians has been a topic of public discussion by Black grassroot organizations started before the task force was formed in May 2021. Now it can be addressed. Thanks to new laws that can help reparations eligibility, supporters say.

For the first time in California and American history, a specific category of data collection will be required for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States and living in California, starting with the state’s 2.5 million employees. California is the first state to require its agencies to present a separate demographic category for descendants of enslaved people when collecting state employee data. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2022-2023 budget trailer bill -- Senate

Bill (SB)189 -- includes language directing state agencies to disaggregate or use separate data collection categories for different Black or African American subgroups.

The State Controller’s Office administered by Malia Cohen and the Department of Human Resources can start collecting this information as soon as Jan. 1, 2024.

The Task Force affirmed lineage-based eligibility for California Reparations in March 2022. The 5-4 majority decision by the task force determined that descendants of enslaved people or free Black people in the United States as of the 19th century are the only group of people eligible for any future cash payments.

“There was great care and intentionality around the creation of this proposal, our proposal in the Interim Report that we released almost a year ago,” Moore said of CAAFA. “It just flushed out more to make all the proposed agencies fully reflect the totality of what we discussed in our 500-page report.”

The reparations task force’s next meeting is in on March 3 and March 4. Times and location have yet to be announced.