After 18 months of listening to testimonies from Black St. Louisans about past racial harms and hearing about the history of slavery and racial discrimination in St. Louis from experts, the St. Louis Reparations Commission concluded its last meeting Monday night with a draft of its final harm report.
The eight-member volunteer commission said the draft took many days and man-hours to complete, but the group still needs feedback from the community to ensure that the final report reflects what Black St. Louisans have been requesting as forms of repair.
The final draft includes an overview of the commission’s work and recommendations for recognition and redistribution. The issue areas that will be addressed are public health, neighborhood and built environment, state violence and legal reform, housing and land, education, economic justice and wealth creation, and criminal justice and policing. Potential city sources for restitution and a breakdown of eligibility requirements for repayment are also included in the draft report.
“I’m excited that you all will see the labor that we put into presenting what we hope is a powerful reflection of the story of St. Louis that really can be told by race,” commission Chair Kayla Reed said.
The Missouri Foundation for Health has contributed to the commission to help fund the printing and distribution of the final report, which will be available to the public and St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones on Oct. 7.
During the meeting, commission members noted that the final report will not provide complete redress for families and that the commission is only a local reparative initiative rather than a replacement for national reparations.
Each category for recommendations includes how the city can provide restitution and the types of policy changes needed to ensure injustices do not persist. The draft also states that to continue this work, a permanent city reparations committee should be established. Reed said economic experts would be needed on this committee to carry out true reparative justice payment calculations. The group is still working through an equation to determine cash payouts since they did not have a budget to hire economists to determine the scale of repayments.
More than 30 people attended the last meeting at City Hall. Residents who spoke at all of the commission meetings over the past year wanted to know who would be eligible for reparations and how they would be paid. The draft report states people who can provide proof of current or past residency can qualify for repayment, as well as people who can prove that they are descendants of enslaved people.
Some potential recommendations for recognition include the city issuing a formal public apology for the responsibility of inflicting racial harms on Black St. Louisans and adopting a formal history acknowledging those harms. It also suggests funding initiatives that preserve Black St. Louis history, creating cultural programs that highlight the Black community and opening a memorial or museum to honor the enslaved people.
As for redistribution, the draft recommends the city provide direct cash payments to descendants of enslaved Black people and Black residents who have been impacted by racial discrimination. It includes a recommendation for an additional payment of up to $25,000 to those who are former residents or direct descendants of residents of Mill Creek Valley, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project and McRee Town. The targeted cash payments would compensate families for the city’s involvement in forcing out thousands of Black residents from their communities to neighborhoods that were later destroyed.
Potential sources for funding reparations could include the RAM settlement fund, marijuana tax profit, unspent ARPA monies or the general city budget.
During the public comment period, residents thanked the commission for the drafted report, but still worried that reparations would not be attainable since the commission proposes to establish a permanent reparations committee.
“This commission has taken 18 months to get to this point … does it take this long for any other peoples that are in need to get their just due?” asked city worker and fitness coach King Ausar.
Ausar said he was discriminated against as an area high school student, has experienced police harassment and was deterred from renting homes in predominantly white neighborhoods because people in the area told him he was not welcome because of his race.
He wants to receive his reparations in the form of cash payments of $5,000 a month for the first five years and then renegotiate a new reparations contract.
Gwendolyn Cogshell went to the West End Center decades ago as a child to swim, do arts and crafts and finish school work. She said Black residents are not fully using the city-owned space because the center is leased out and is costly for Black residents to utilize.
“What they could do is bring everybody here for an after-school program … you can have tutoring, you can have everything, we can just make it a great hub,” Cogshell said. “That's what they do over the in the Central West End, they create these hubs where everybody can use it.”
She thought the draft report was expansive and touched on many ways to repay Black St. Louisans. She hopes the potential recommendation for housing repair grants makes it to the upcoming, 100-page or more final report and is adopted soon by the mayor because it could immediately help repair hundred-year-old, decaying homes in north St. Louis.
The commission is asking residents to email any feedback about the draft report to the commission by noon Thursday.
