🧵 Excited to share updates on California’s 16 slavery/lineage based-reparations and racial equity bills aimed at addressing historical and ongoing injustices faced by descendants of slaves. These bills are a significant step towards reparatory justice. Let’s break them down: 2/ 📜 SB 1403: Establishes the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to administer all future reparations, laying the foundation for a comprehensive reparations program.
SB 1403 passed on the Senate floor, and now heads to the Assembly!
#CALeg #CRTF #AB3121 #KamilahMoore
Sep 13, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
1/📊 In the latest August 2023 Berkeley IGS Poll, California voters were asked about their support for cash payments to descendants of slaves in California:
52% of “strong Democrats” were in favor, while 33% opposed.
92% of “strong Republicans” opposed, while 6% were in favor. 2/ A substantial 62% of respondents said they had heard about the California Reparations Task Force (CRTF), with 73% of Black respondents being aware of it. Notably, Republicans, property owners, higher education, & higher income groups were more likely to have heard about CRTF.
Jan 26, 2023 • 8 tweets • 12 min read
🧵The California Reparations Task Force meets this Friday and Saturday in San Diego!
Public comment (9:10am-10:10am):
•844-291-5495
•Code: 3968101
Missed the December 2022 hearing in Oakland? Review the meeting minutes here: oag.ca.gov/system/files/m…
My 3x great grand parents, Victor Theophile Haydel (1835-1924) and Marie Celeste Becnel (1840-1885) were both born enslaved on the @WhitPlantation. The couple who would become the ancestors of the African American Haydel family. #DESCENDANTChallenge@Participant@HGMedia
“Victor was the son of an enslaved woman (Anna), who was herself a mulatto. Victor was fathered by Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie Haydel. Celeste was a daughter of Francoise, the enslaved cook of Marie, and was fathered by Florestan Becnel, Marie’s brother-in-law.”
Jan 10, 2023 • 18 tweets • 10 min read
The Rise of the Lost Cause Myth (across U.S. + California):
“After Reconstruction ended, white southerners created the myth of the Confederate “Lost Cause” in order to downplay the horrors of enslavement and terrorize African Americans.”
🧵 “Rose Cannon’s (@Reparationist_1) family moved to Evanston in 1919, when her father and his family arrived from Tennessee and settled in the 5th Ward.” #reparations#ReparationsNow
“African Americans fought for and took advantage of many new legal rights during Reconstruction, but this time period of growing legal equality was short.”
A THREAD 🧵: 1/
“White supremacist terrorist groups, first the KKK and then later militias such as the White League of Louisiana and the Red Shirts of South Carolina, eventually overthrew the Reconstruction governments that Black and white Republicans had established together in the South.”
2/
Jan 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Today is the 212th anniversary of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in American history!
My ancestors were enslaved on the @WhitPlantation (formerly German-enslaver owned Habitation Haydel).
“After the end of the Civil War and the outlawing of enslavement, the United States went through a process known as Reconstruction, a period of rebuilding and reuniting the country. Abraham Lincoln had begun this process during the Civil War.”
Learn more: oag.ca.gov/ab3121/reports
“But Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 put Reconstruction in the hands of his vice-president, Andrew Johnson, and Republicans in Congress.
Johnson wanted to keep white people in charge of the South and opposed giving equal political rights to African Americans.” #Reparations
Jan 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 7 min read
🧵 Part 1:
Watch the end of the year recap on the first-in-the-nation California Reparations Task Force with @TheRevAl@PoliticsNation on @MSNBC!
A THREAD 🧵:
1. “A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions.”