By Will Swaim
Sunday, May 21, 2023
California’s reparations commission has determined
that slavery, as opposed to disastrous policies advanced by the political
establishment for decades, is the real reason for present-day black poverty in
the state. In just a few weeks, the legislature that created the task force
will take up the commission’s proposal, which calls for payments to black
residents of upwards of $1.2 million.
As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in December,
reading the 500 pages from the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations
Proposals for African Americans is like listening to Béla Bartók’s bloody Bluebeard’s
Castle played on 100 kazoos.
Still, all anyone wants to talk about is the money, and
for good reason — the commission proposes to create a nearly trillion-dollar
fund from which qualifying African Americans may hope to receive million-dollar
payments. The total cost is conservatively estimated at three times
California’s annual budget.
Those sorts of eye-catching numbers have task-force
supporters increasingly worried — perhaps especially Governor Gavin Newsom,
whose signature created the commission that could imperil his White House
ambitions. Now they’re trying to downplay the monetary awards, even acting a
bit peeved that anyone would focus on something so mundane — so filthy — as
mere money.
“Dealing with that legacy is about much more than cash
payments,” Newsom said in a statement to Fox News. “The Reparations Task
Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our
bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an
important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our
original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our
country.”
Task-force members are equally coy.
“We want to make sure that this is presented out in a way
that does not reinforce the preoccupation with a dollar figure, which is the
least important piece of this,” said Cheryl Grills, a task-force member and
clinical psychologist in Los Angeles. “It’s really unfortunate. I’m actually
sad to see that our news media is not able to nuance better. It’s almost like,
‘What’s going to be sensational’ as opposed to what’s important.”
What’s important, Grills and others say, is providing the
public with an accurate record of slavery in California — slavery and its
innumerable effects — and then getting California to issue a formal apology for
what the task force calls the state’s “perpetration of gross human rights
violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their
descendants.”
“Our history has been so buried, so erased, so denied. I
think that is an essential element of our mission,” said Donald Tamaki, a
task-force member and lawyer from San Francisco.
On that matter, says task-force member and state
assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, the commission’s mission has been
accomplished. His evidence: He said he has met “a few who have read the report,
and it was eye-opening for them. For people who read the interim report, to
hear them say ‘I didn’t know’ was probably the most gratifying thing I could
hear.”
***
But on the more modest goal of documenting the history of
black Californians, the commission has utterly failed. It actually erases the
agency — the success — of black Californians throughout statehood. And the
report ignores the ways in which Californians of all races and ethnicities have
more often worked together to secure for all Californians unalienable human
rights, among these the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As I wrote in the Journal:
Begin with this: Slavery in what’s
now California was banned under Mexican authority in 1837. California joined
the union in 1850 as a free state. The panel briefly acknowledges this only to
dismiss it, lingering instead on the 1852 passage of the California Fugitive
Slave Act, under which 13 people were deported from the state. The commission
briefly mentions that the reviled law lapsed three years after being passed but
doesn’t mention the numerous cases of white California officials—sheriffs,
judges, attorneys and others—who discovered and liberated enslaved people.
The best known of these may be the story of Biddy Mason,
an account I described in that piece.
Mason was one of several slaves brought to California by
a Texas farmer in 1851. When Los Angeles County Sheriff David W. Alexander
learned of their presence in San Bernardino, he gathered a mixed-race posse and
rode 60 miles — up and over the windswept, nearly 4,000-foot Cajon Pass — to
free Mason and the others. He brought them to a downtown Los Angeles courtroom
where Judge Benjamin Hayes formally emancipated them. Remarkably, Mason went on
to become one of Los Angeles’s wealthiest landowners, a merchant, midwife, and
philanthropist.
Similarly, the commission touches on the case of Archy
Lee, a 19-year-old black man brought to Sacramento in 1857 by his Mississippi
master. Here’s how the commission reports Lee’s dramatic release from bondage:
But in one example, the case of
Archy Lee from 1857 to 1858, the proslavery California Supreme Court made every
effort to return him to enslavement. Lee’s enslaver, Charles Stovall, forced
him to go with him to California years after the state fugitive slave law had
expired. But California’s supreme court justices decided that since Stovall was
a young man who suffered from constant illness, and he did not know about
California’s laws, he should not be punished by losing his right to own Archy
Lee. It took several more lawsuits by free Black Californians, and a new
decision from a federal legal official, before Lee finally won permanent
freedom. . . . After free Black activists successfully rescued Archy Lee from
enslavement in 1858, angry proslavery legislators tried to make these
anti-Black laws even worse.
Black Californians were indeed critical to Lee’s ultimate
liberation. But much — in fact, almost everything — is missing from the
commission’s version of events.
The curious might start with these questions: If
California’s political establishment was so hostile to black Californians, how
did “Black activists” manage the trick of “several more lawsuits” and the
persuasion of “a federal legal official” to liberate Lee?
The answer: They did not act alone or without resources.
One of those “Black activists” was Mary Ellen Pleasant, a millionaire,
high-profile philanthropist, and abolitionist. When Lee escaped from Stovall,
Pleasant gave him shelter and then helped finance two state cases that came
before the state supreme court’s execrable decision to remand Lee to Stovall’s
custody. Lee’s attorney throughout the ordeal was Edwin Crocker, a white man,
and the chairman of California’s first Republican Party gathering, in 1856.
It was arguably the partnership of Crocker and Pleasant
that kept Lee free and in California through the first state-court case and
subsequent appeal. When the state supreme court asserted that Lee must be
returned to Stovall, it was Crocker who persuaded T. W. Freelon, a (white)
federal judge in San Francisco, to overturn the state high court’s stupid
ruling. And when Stovall nevertheless attempted to kidnap Lee aboard the Orizaba,
a ship anchored in San Francisco harbor, white policemen carried out a search
to rescue Lee. They found and freed him. Stovall returned to Mississippi sans
Lee. Perhaps shaken by his near miss or lured by gold fever, or both, Lee left
California for British Columbia that same year.
But to acknowledge all of this would mean trouble for a
government task force determined to find evidence of systemic violence against
black Californians. Despite the commission’s bias, there were such Californians
as Biddy Mason and Mary Ellen Pleasant — black, independent, and financially
successful women. There were also white attorneys willing to fight for black
freedom in a decade of national chaos in which the rights of black Americans
were in flux. More important, there were white California officials — judges,
police, and others — willing to enforce laws defending black Californians.
Systematically ignoring this evidence is Orwellian, an official government
endeavor designed to obscure history for momentary political gain. If
successful, it will rob all Californians, including black Californians, of
aspirational models of the hard work of freedom — and of hard work generally.
***
The commission’s childish and dangerous account of the
case of Archy Lee is a masterpiece of academic rigor compared with its complete
silence on the outsized role played by Californians in the Civil War itself.
Though California entered the Union a free state,
Southern apologists never surrendered their hope of one day capturing the
Golden State. These fantasists foresaw the creation of a vast slave empire,
fueled by California gold and run through Pacific Ocean ports, stretching not
just coast to coast but globally, too — south through Mexico, Central and South
America, all the way to frigid Tierra del Fuego, and westward across the
Pacific Ocean to grasp all of Asia.
When the Union blocked Southern ports in the summer of
1861, Richmond’s malignant California dream became an urgent military
necessity. Confederate troops massing ominously in West Texas suddenly crossed
that border, invading the New Mexico Territory and establishing a regional
capital in Mesilla with an outpost farther west in Tucson. From that fortress
town, the rebels began probing the desert path to California.
Set against Southern ambition, some 2,000 Californians
volunteered for training at Camp Downey, in what’s now Oakland. This newly
minted First California Volunteer Infantry, along with regular Army units, was
shipped to Los Angeles and from there stepped off on a 900-mile march across
Southern California’s hellish eastern deserts toward the Confederate Army.
Water and food were scarce along the route. Just as formidable were the Apache
Indians; fierce defenders of their historic lands, they were a constant threat
to the Californians.
Still, they marched. On April 15, 1862, at Picacho Pass,
50 miles northwest of Tucson, twelve California scouts ran into ten rebel
“pickets” — guards at the westernmost tip of the advancing Confederate Army.
Their engagement was brief and deadly. Irish-born Californian lieutenant James
Barrett led the attack, quickly capturing three Confederates and killing
another. But when he had secured one of the prisoners and swung back onto his
mount, Barrett was briefly in the range of a sharp-eyed rebel sniper. Shot
through the neck, Barrett bled out on the spot. Two other Californians,
Privates George Johnson and William Leonard, were shot and died nearby.
The retreating Confederate pickets carried news of the
advancing California Column back to their outpost in Tucson; from there, the
Confederates packed up and fled back to Texas.
The Battle of Picacho Pass ended the western advance of
the most malignant force in the first American century. It ended the
slaveholders’ dream of global empire. But that achievement left behind the
dreams of three young Californians. Johnson was just 21, Leonard perhaps 26;
their bodies were returned to California and buried at the San Francisco
Presidio. Barrett’s body, reportedly buried in a shallow grave, was never
found. In 1928, the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society and the Southern
Pacific Railroad erected a monument, near U.S. 10, to recall their sacrifice in
the “only battle of the Civil War fought in Arizona Territory.”
The California Column wasn’t unique. From a state
population of just 380,000, more than 17,000 Californians joined the Union
ranks — “the highest per-capita total for any state in the Union,” notes the
state’s Department
of Parks and Recreation. Fewer than 300 Californians left to join the
Confederacy.
Few Americans today recall the Californians’ commitment.
There is no mention of it in the state’s reparations report. Here as elsewhere,
the commission’s report often speaks loudest in its silences.
***
One of those silences is the commission’s refusal to
explain the voluntary, post–Civil War migration of millions of black Americans
to California, including to Weed, a flourishing lumber town.
But Weed was eventually destroyed, and with it the
prosperous black and other migrant families that built the town. It was
destroyed not by slavers or white racists or “systemic racism.” It was
destroyed by well-meaning but shortsighted liberal politicians — state and
federal officials who linked arms with environmental activists and began
squeezing the life out of the Northwest timber industry, including Weed.
Blindly privileging such remarkable species as the spotted owl over the more
common human person, California state and federal regulators locked down the
forests.
This overregulation of California’s lumber industry was
supposed to save the planet. Instead, it has done the opposite. It began with
the gradual, ceaseless piling up of federal, state, and local regulations. The
pile is now so large it is a kind of monument to human arrogance, a record of
the government’s doomed effort to cover every eventuality, from “forest health,
wildlife habitat, water and air quality, archeological sites, [and] land use
patterns” to “respect for community sentiments,” as researchers put it in
a 2005
study of the decline and fall of the California timber industry. Those
“growing regulations have only created costlier sales, not ‘cleaner’ ones,” the
researchers concluded. In the process, these programs undermined the wealth and
opportunities of working Californians, including the black Californians about
whom the commission says it is most concerned.
***
The reparations task force concluded that “American
government at all levels, including in California, has historically
criminalized African Americans for the purposes of social control and to
maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor.” Yet progressive government
itself is the enemy of disadvantaged Californians. Confronting these massive
failures would bring the state task force face-to-face with its own fellow
ideologues: government unions, environmental-justice warriors, and progressive
government officials. I’ll call back one last time to my prior piece:
Take the state’s execrable public
education system. California ranks dead last in the nation in literacy. Black
children are the most brutalized [by] these failures: Only 10% meet math
standards and about 30% achieve English competency. Yet as test scores fall,
high school graduations rise. Denied a real education, many of these children
will qualify only for low-level jobs and government assistance.
The commission calls this a
“school-to-prison pipeline” and blames slavery.
But the problems clearly start in the schools. In the
classroom, collective bargaining gives union leaders authority over teacher
hiring and firing; they use this authority to reward loyalists, punish
reformers, and move failing teachers into broken schools where overwhelmed poor
parents are unlikely to notice.
California’s greatest reparative act would be to
eliminate government unions. Liberating the people would lead to real prosperity,
not the government cheese of phony education — and the problems that follow.
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