Black leaders call for San Francisco to use tax funds to fund reparations

Leaders of San Francisco’s African American community are calling on the city’s Board of Supervisors to use the income from hotel and marijuana taxes to fund reparations, reports the SFExaminer.com. According to the NAACP San Francisco branch, the reparations would be used to make amends for the city’s historic injustices against its Black residents. “Here we are at the end of 2019 and in San Francisco Blacks are still suffering from the fallout of the human degradation of slavery and the treatment of their ancestors as tools and not human beings,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, the San Francisco NAACP’s president and pastor of the Third Baptist Church. With African Americans making up less than 5 percent of the city’s population, down from about 13 percent in the 1970s, the NAACP believes the reparations could help the city’s remaining African American population stay in the city and flourish. The NAACP is asking the city’s supervisors to use hotel and marijuana taxes to fund four specific initiatives for the African American community. The initiatives include creating wrap-around services for the city’s African American public school students, who the NAACP says face different challenges than their peers such as depression and other mental health issues as a result of violence in their communities. Wrap-around services would include tutoring and mentoring programs to ensure students can succeed in the academic world. The NAACP is also asking that the taxes be used to help former African American San Franciscans who were forced to move to neighboring communities due to gentrification and urban renewal. In addition, the taxes would fund a new housing lottery system that would give African Americans preference for housing in non-profit developments, public housing and affordable housing. And the NAACP is also asking that the taxes be used to create a “vibrant Black community” in the city’s Fillmore neighborhood, which the organization said has been devastated. The funds would be invested in both the private and public sector to help create thriving businesses in and around the Fillmore Heritage Center.