Reparations efforts in Georgia gain traction despite political challenges.
After officially creating its Reparations Task Force in 2021, Fulton County is finally moving ahead with its plan to study reparations for descendants of people who were either enslaved or lived under Jim Crow. According to WABE, the City of Atlanta established a commission to study reparations in November 2023, and members of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus have planned a “Reparations Day” for Feb. 15 so they can discuss issues related to reparations in Georgia.
There have been several initiatives across the country aimed at taking action on reparations, spurred on in part by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, most recently, California’s first in the country’s state reparations bills. Because there has been virtually no action on reparations at the federal level, the efforts have been increasing at the local and state levels.
Linda Mann, the co-founder of the African American Redress Network, a network that tracks reparations efforts in the United States, told WABE that although the bills intended to address reparations are passing, many of the bills don’t have any money attached to them. “Bills are being passed, or these task forces are being passed,” said Mann. “But a lot of them are being passed without any money, and that’s a huge issue. Because they’re being tasked to do actual research — significant research, actually.”