Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation to creating a new commission to study reparations and racial justice on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023. This commission will be tasked with examining the legacy of slavery, subsequent discrimination against people of African descent, and the impact these forces continue to have in the present day. Photo: Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.
Dec 19, 2023 —
Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed into law a measure to look at potential reparations for New Yorkers whose ancestors suffered under slavery in the state.
The new law establishes a task force to study the impact of slavery on present-day New Yorkers and look at the possibility of paying monetary reparations, as well as looking at changing housing policies and reforming a criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons Black and Brown people.
“By signing this bill today, I’m authorizing the creation of a commission, a committee,, to study what reparations might look like in New York,” Hochul said.
Hochul says New York often pats itself on the back for being the center of the abolitionist movement in the 1800s, with famous residents including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, along with a robust underground railroad.
But she says New York’s history has a darker side. Before slavery was abolished in the state in 1827, 20% of New York City’s population was enslaved Africans. Forty percent of colonial households owned slaves. A slave market existed on Wall Street for 100 years.
“Here in New York there was a slave market where people bought and sold other human beings with callous disregard,” Hochul said. “It happened right on Wall Street for more than a century.”
Even after the North won the Civil War, redlining in white neighborhoods and other forms of segregation kept Black and brown New Yorkers from getting ahead economically.
Speakers at the announcement included the first African American woman leader of the state Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton credited Hochul for her courage in creating the commission. The civil rights leader says it’s long overdue.
“Where you go and cut deals on Wall Street, our forefathers were put on blocks and sold like soap,” Sharpton said.
The governor admits that the idea of reparations for slavery, which ended in the U.S. over 150 years ago, is controversial, and she says she struggled with the notion. But she says descendants of slaves need more than just an apology. Hochul says the 2022 mass shooting in her hometown of Buffalo where a white gunman targeted and killed Black shoppers demonstrates there’s more to be done.
“I don’t want to pretend I didn’t have some concerns about this,” Hochul said. “ Anyone thinks that racism and hatred toward Blacks no longer exists, tell that to the families of the 10 victims in the grocery store in Tops at the massacre in Buffalo who once again will be staring at empty chairs over their Christmas dinner.”
In a statement, the Republican leader of the State Senate, Minority Leader Robert Ortt, called the commission “divisive” and “unworkable.”
“The reparations of slavery were paid with the blood and lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought to end slavery during the Civil War,” Ortt said.
The state of California has created a similar commission. That panel recommended that thousands of dollars be paid to each descendant of slavery to make up for disparities in health care, access to housing, and mass incarceration and policing policies that disproportionately impacted people of color.
New York’s commission will be required to issue its report one year after its first meeting, which should happen sometime next year.
