Black leaders in San Francisco have an idea for how the community can be paid reparations. It starts with income from hotels and dividends from marijuana taxes.
The Bay City News reports that the local NAACP branch is calling on the city’s Board of Supervisors to make it happen. They say that the money will “make amends for the city’s historic injustices against its Black residents.”
African Americans currently make up roughly 5 percent of the city’s population. That’s down more than 8 percent at its height in the 1970s following forced removals and prolific gentrification. The NAACP believes that reparations will help what’s left of the Black community remain intact.
The NAACP outlined four initiatives that they want to see created with the funds. They include tutoring and mentoring services for the city’s African American public school students, financial aid to former San Francisco dwellers who were forced to move to neighboring communities, the development of a new housing lottery system, and the creation of a “vibrant Black community” in the Fillmore section of the city.
“The majority of Black folks that live here are on welfare and struggling and being forced out of a community that most of them grew up in and were raised in,” Dan Daniels, NAACP’s coastal area director told Bay City News of the African American population in the city.
On Wednesday night, San Francisco native Danny Glover was in Evanston, Illinois, leading a similar charge for reparations. According to the local CBS affiliate, the actor/activist spoke during a town hall where attendees gathered to discuss using $10 million in tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales to go towards a reparations fund that would address the decline of African Americans in the Chicago suburb, among other things.
“It’s the beginning of a process. This is the most intense conversation, I believe, that we’re going to have in the 21st century, right here – reparations,” Glover said.