Explore St. Louis’ Reparations Commission comprehensive approach to reparations and racial justice with the latest actionable insights from city leaders.
The St. Louis Reparations Commission, established by St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones in late 2022, has documented the injustice that’s plagued African Americans in the city for decades.
It took a year and a half of work and nearly 30 listening sessions to complete.
According to Will Ross, vice chair of the commission, the matter will have its challenges to resolve. “We knew that we had to address some really deep, deep core issues in the community around trust, around transparency, around racial healing, and restorative justice”.
“It’s clear, it’s evident it was intentional over decades. I want them to see that intentionality,” Ross stated.
“Too many times we blame the person for the predicament they’re in, and we want to say these are these external forces, these really powerful external forces that really constrain the health of Blacks in Saint Louis,” Ross said.
The new report is now with Mayor Tishaura Jones and is headed for the city’s Aldermanic Board. Its suggested policies are divided into two categories: Restitution-Oriented Recommendations and Policy-Oriented Recommendations.
The report makes many recommendations, chief among them that the city adopt a more formal, comprehensive history that explicitly acknowledges the aforementioned racial harms into its official record.
The report also advocates for direct cash payments to individuals capable of tracing their ancestry to enslaved people; to African American residents who have been disproportionately affected by systemic racism in St. Louis; and, targeted cash payments to those who were subject to specific, historically documented harms — such as harms done to former residents / direct descendants of residents of Mill Creek Valley.
Ross admitted it’s up to city officials to decide how to move forward equitably, but no matter what happens, it won’t be because they lack the proofs of documentation, or disinterest from the community. “They spoke and we heard them,” Ross said.
Mayor Tishaura Jones’s office is conducting a full analysis of the report to determine which of the commission’s recommendations could be implemented by the city, deputy director of communications Rasmus S. Jorgensen told PBS News via email.
“However, we are pleased that some ideas, such as providing assistance for homeownership, creating more affordable housing, revitalizing neighborhoods, establishing free public wifi, and investing in public health, are already underway or have been implemented by this administration,” Jorgensen wrote.
Jorgensen added that the proposed direct cash payments would “significantly harm the city’s ability to provide services and invest in lifting up neighborhoods harmed by racist policies.”
The cash payments have been challenged in court elsewhere, Jorgensen added, citing a reparations program in nearby Evanston, Illinois, which passed the first reparations law in the country and now faces a class-action lawsuit.
The report, which begins by acknowledging St. Louis as the ancestral home of many Native American nations, is organized using six key themes: (1) housing and neighborhood development, (2) education, (3) public health, (4) economic justice, (5) criminal legal system reform, and (6) cultural preservation.
Part of the commission’s work was directly with members of the community, including through open meetings. For Ross, the experiences of those who grew up in the Mill Creek Valley (a neighborhood bulldozed under racist urban renewal policies), remain ingrained in his memory, as they had been retold and attested to during those meetings.
“This was not historical. This was contemporary… they were displaced and they were standing there in those rooms telling their story. It was compelling. It was moving. It was riveting,” Ross said.Gabrielle Hays wrote the original version of this article.
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