The Assembly approved the bill 62–0, with a dozen of the chamber’s 17 Republican members not voting. After the final vote, members broke out in applause and walked over to congratulate Jones-Sawyer, who served on the Reparations Task Force and is in his final term in the Legislature.
“Even though our state entered the union as a free state, every branch of government has had a hand in perpetrating the oppression of Black folks,” Jones-Sawyer said. “This bill is an opportunity to confront those tough truths in a meaningful way.”
Before the vote, legislators recounted the role state lawmakers played in advancing chattel slavery during the state’s early days. In 1852, the state Assembly passed California’s fugitive slave law, which allowed enslavers to recapture formerly enslaved people they had brought to California before the state’s entrance into the union — and forcibly remove them to slaveholding states in the South.
A leading supporter of the fugitive slave bill in the state Senate, Sen. James Estill, owned fourteen slaves on his Solano County farm.
And in 1854, the state Legislature approved a non-binding resolution supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the explosive federal law allowing the expansion of slavery nationwide into U.S. territories.
“It is undeniable that our systems of government have been complicit in the oppression of African-Americans,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) said. “Our courts, our schools, even this Legislature. California’s history is tarnished by the subjugation of Black people.”