The fight for reparations for California's Black residents has been a battle. The Black church that has helped to spearhead the effort, like the rest of the state, is divided over what reparations can and should be.
SAN FRANCISCO — The Gospel reading at the Third Baptist Church on this cool early-summer Sunday is from Luke, who relates the story of a meeting between Jesus and a particularly avaricious tax collector.
are new programs to expand Black economic and educational opportunities, a formal apology for historical racism, and perhaps the boldest, cash payments of as much as $1.3 million to qualifying African Americans. From the first sin of slavery through last-century urban redevelopment programs harmful to Black prosperity to the disproportionate African American incarceration rate during the so-called war on drugs, Brown draws a direct line through Black history to the reparations package he has helped design, a debt he believes must now be paid despite the state’s fiscal condition.in his cluttered office, the walls decorated in a rich résumé of work in the civil rights movement.
It has not closed since, even though it moved several times before finding its current location high above the Fillmore neighborhood. Over the decades, the sanctuary has resounded with the voices of Paul Robeson and Mahalia Jackson andHe was born in Jackson, Miss., the great-great-grandson of enslaved people. He recalls as a 14-year-old in August 1955 hearing the news of Emmett Till’s lynching.
Brown assumed control of Third Baptist as his congregation was being pushed out by the ongoing Fillmore redevelopment. A congregation of 3,600 parishioners when he arrived at Third Baptist is one-sixth that size today. In recent years, Third Street parishioners have marched in favor of reparations, hosted a hearing of the state commission, and listened nearly every Sunday since the state movement began in earnest as Brown has delivered a maximalist message of what a historical remedy should be for Black Californians.
The divisions within Black Californians, though, over what form reparations should take remain wide, even in a city whereThe Fillmore neighborhood, off the commercial byways, is a mix of relatively new duplexes and enduring Victorians that survived the so-called redevelopment. The foot traffic is mostly White, the cafes and hilltop parks also reflecting the broader demographic change.
“We’re just trying to catch up to where everyone else is,” Harris said. “It’s so hard to hear sometimes that all this happened so long ago, all this discrimination. I mean, Jim Crow happened in my lifetime and it’s still happening.”Gregory Richardson arrived as a child in San Francisco from Mississippi with his mother and father, who was then serving in the U.S. military. He shares his small apartment today on the edge of the Fillmore with his ailing mom.
Fred Thomas, a jack-of-all-trades at Third Baptist, is 33 and does not know if he would qualify for a cash payment or any form of reparation, which depends on whether he is a direct descendant of an enslaved person or a free Black person living in the country before the end of the 19th century.
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