Anti-racism activists descended on Atlanta on Thursday to push lawmakers to back their $80 billion reparations package, warning of ‘serious political consequences’ if they don’t greenlight the plan.
Anqous Cosby with ReparationsPush and others want House politicians to create the Georgia Equity and Fairness Commission, which would devise a compensation package for the descendants of slaves.
Republicans oppose the plan, saying it’s not fair to single out one group for payments — especially when Georgia’s cash-strapped hospitals are shuttering and the state’s overcrowded prisons need more space.
‘Georgia could be looking at, with economic compensation, policies and laws to protect us, and forgiveness of debt, it could be upwards of $80 billion,’ Cosby told DailyMail.com.
‘But it’s not just a check. This is about us being independent as a people again, within the nation, and being able to help the United States.’
The bill is sponsored by State Rep Roger Bruce and is also supported by the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, the Georgia NAACP and the Urban League of Greater Atlanta.
Hubert Bass, a campaigner with Afrodescendant Nation, warned in a statement of ‘serious political consequences’ if Georgia lawmakers don’t create the commission.
‘The reparations movement is not playing anymore,’ Bass added.
African Americans make up nearly a third of Georgia’s nearly 11 million people.
They will play an outsize role in November’s election — President Joe Biden trails rival Donald Trump by six percentage points in the key swing state, according to a Morning Consult poll released on Thursday.
Reparations campaigners have achieved only mixed results in Georgia, a state with a history of colonial cotton-picking and then industrial-scale plantation slavery.
Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, last year approved a similar reparations task force that seeks $2 billion in local payouts.
Bridget Thorn, one of the county’s conservative commissioners, pushes back against what she calls the body’s ‘biased research.’
‘It’s only research looking at how we need to pay reparations, not if we need to pay reparations,’ she told Fox News.
The area’s Wellstar AMC South Hospital shuttered last year after losing $7 million each month, leaving locals in a ‘health desert,’ said Thorn.
Another $1.7 billion is needed to improve the overcrowded and violence-plagued Fulton County Jail, she added.
‘I don’t think we can put any more burden on our tax-paying citizens right now.’
Still, Georgia this week gave final passage to a $37.9 billion midyear budget loaded with $5.5 billion in new spending.
Reparations campaigners say it’s time for America to repay its black residents for the injustices of the historic Transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow segregation and inequalities that persist to this day.
Critics say that payouts to selected black people will inevitably stoke divisions between winners and losers, and raise questions about why American Indians and others don’t get their own handouts.
While reparations are popular among black Americans, the other groups who would foot the tax bill are less keen.
A survey last year of 6,000 registered California voters found that only 23 percent supported cash reparations, while 59 percent were opposed.
The reparations movement gathered steam amid the Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in May 2020.
Four years on, the schemes have largely failed to deliver meaningful results.
Supervisors in San Francisco formally apologized this week to African Americans and their descendants for the city’s role in perpetuating racism and discrimination.
Plans for $5 million lump-sum cash payments and guaranteed incomes of nearly $100,000 a year for black residents have not materialized.
Likewise, California’s black lawmakers this month unveiled a package of bills on reparations for black residents that makes no mention of the $1.2 million payouts they were promised earlier.