Before the sun rose Saturday morning, Reggie Romain was on the road, traveling from Southern California with a group of demonstrators to Sacramento with a forceful request: “We got to get these bills,” he said, under the dome of the state Capitol.
Romain was referring to Senate Bills 1403 and 1331, which would create a new state agency to oversee reparations for Black Californians and a fund to help support those policies. The bills came out of two years of study by a first-in-the-nation state task force, which documented the harms committed against Black people in California and recommended ways to repair that damage.
But, as the measures were close to passing in the Legislature, they stalled in the California Assembly. That came after Gov. Gavin Newsom raised concerns about the bill creating the new agency and his administration proposed changes that would have scrapped it, The Sacramento Bee previously reported. Those suggestions were rejected by its author.
The final day to pass the bills this legislative session is Saturday and Romain wasn’t going to watch all the way from Riverside County, where he lives. He is a barber and canceled his appointments planned for the day, so he could make his feelings known.
“My ancestors talked to me,” Romain said. “I got to be here. I got to make this journey.”
Romain was one of the roughly two dozen protesters who came to Sacramento to tell lawmakers directly how they felt about the bills stalling. Their author, Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, said he had the votes for them to pass, but lawmakers, including those in the California Legislative Black Caucus, were not bringing them forward.
Its chair, Suisun City Democrat Lori Wilson told reporters Saturday afternoon the caucus would not be moving the bills forward before the deadline. And she disputed that Bradford, who is the group’s vice chair, had the votes.
“We will introduce the bill in the new year and work through the legislative process and get them across the finish line,” Wilson. “We’re committed to that.”
Those who came to the Capitol don’t want to wait that long.
“It would be unconscionable, I think, for any assemblymember to fail to put these bills to the floor let alone a member of the esteemed institution, like the California Legislative Black Caucus,” said Kamilah Moore, an attorney who served as the chair of the task force.
Moore left the Los Angeles area around 6 a.m. Saturday to get to Sacramento.
“We worked really hard over the course of two years and these last two bills in particular are sourced from some of the more stronger recommendations from the task force,” Moore said.
Bradford, also a member of the task force, wanted to bring up the bills on Wednesday. The Bee previously reported that the Newsom administration presented the senator with changes to the bill creating the novel California American Freedmen Affairs Agency. They would have not created the agency but instead set aside $6 million for the California State University system to lead a study of reparations and recommend a process for determining someone’s eligibility for them.
Wilson disputed The Bee’s reporting that the Newsom administration had proposed amendments and that the suggested changes would have turned it into a “study bill.”
There was not enough funding to create the new agency and keep it going, she said, so the goal was to use “existing infrastructure to be able to set up this type of agency, or this type of work.” The caucus has proposed changes to the bills, she said.
The two pending bills were not on a priority list unveiled by the Legislative Black Caucus In January.
After Wilson spoke, Bradford told reporters that his office received proposed amendments from governor’s office on Monday.
“We were moving these bills with the understanding that we had the votes to take it up on the Assembly floor,” he said.
He said the concern was over the cost of the bill but Bradford said there was enough money to move it forward. The state’s current budget included $12 million to help implement reparations-related policies.
“We’re at the finish line and I think we as a Black caucus owe it to the descendants of chattel slavery, we owe it to black Californians, to Black Americans, to move this legislation forward,” he said.
The shouts of demonstrators for the bills to move forward and chants for reparations “now” echoed in the Capitol rotunda, which was filled with lobbyists. They held up signs with the same message and yelled at lawmakers who were walking to and from the Assembly floor. Their cries could be heard at times inside the chamber.
At one point, Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, a Los Angeles Democrat, went to speak with them.
“I don’t understand why y’all can’t just bring the bills up,” said Chris Lodgson, a lead organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, a major supportive of state reparations efforts.
“The same reason I couldn’t sign them too,” Bryan said. “The building doesn’t move, you know what I’m saying? It’s hard to move s—.”
Darlene Crumedy has traveled from Fairfield to the Capitol day after day hoping the bills would be voted on. She said she would remain in the building Saturday until it was certain they would be dead.
“I’m not going anywhere until we’re for sure that we don’t have a chance today.”