Robert E. Williams said his great-grandmother was on one of the final slave ships to come to the United States, and that now is the time to help the descendants of those brought here in bondage.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of really bright people before us. We can\u2019t answer that we\u2019re going to fix it today, because they were fighting the fights that they had to fight. We\u2019re the only ethnic group in this country \u2014 as a class of people \u2014 that have laws written against us since slavery ended,\u201d Williams said.\u00a0 \u201cThis is a way to start \u2026 addressing those things.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Williams said Philadelphia is the only city in the U.S. with a law, established in 2004<\/a>, that forces insurance companies to come clean about any historical ties to slavery \u2014 including whether they sold policies on enslaved people or made money from slavery \u2014 and requires those companies to explain any financial reparations. A similar rule was later passed for banks<\/a> that manage the city\u2019s money.\n<\/p>\n Cara McClellan, of the Philadelphia Reparations Task Force, believes the city needs to move forward with the Office of Freedmen Affairs. She said it\u2019s more than a theoretical conversation.\n <\/p>\n \u201cIt has to be a very practical conversation about how to implement the remedies that are required for the harms that are being documented,\u201d McClellan said. \u201cWe can build on history. We can also build on what we know is being implemented in other states and at the local level.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Proponents of the office say Philadelphia could join the likes of California<\/a>, where Gov. Gavin Newsom approved an office in 2025. That came five years after forming a task force<\/a> in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s murder in Minneapolis to study the legacy of slavery in California and how the state could implement reparations policies. No money was attached to the California office for reparations.\n<\/p>\n Councilman Curtis Jones ended the hearing vowing, \u201cWe don\u2019t intend to just sit on this information. We intend to take this report [and] give it to the members of the Committee of the Whole to introduce legislation to create the freedmen\u2019s bill.\u201d\n<\/p>\n The Committee of the Whole includes all members of City Council and meets as a group to review major legislation. Right now, the city has no formal plans or dedicated funding for reparations.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert E. Williams said his great-grandmother was on one of the final slave ships to come to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,5648,71,70,55858,34251],"class_list":["post-117612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-city-council","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-reparations","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}