More than 18 months after the economic crisis caused by lockdowns ended, there is still an enormous amount of unspent funding hanging around. The city of Providence, R.I., has hit on a seemingly new reason for spending the money: reparations for black and indigenous people.

Black Californians should get $350,000 to help shrink the racial wealth gap and right historical wrongs, a landmark California reparations task force has heard.

Max Fennell, a 35-year-old businessman and former professional triathlete, told the committee the money should be given to all black California residents. He argued that black-owned businesses should receive grants of about $250,000 and 15-20 acres of land to help further boost black wealth during the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals' public hearing.

Baraka Davis traveled from Texas to deliver her message to California’s Reparations Task Force Wednesday.

“Texas is watching each and every one of you,” she said.

Davis, 43, was one of several people who came to Oakland City Hall for the first of the committee’s two-day December meeting. Their presence reflected the historic stakes of the group’s state-sponsored effort to study and develop reparations for the generational harms of anti-Black racism.

In California, they see an opportunity for overdue redress, after centuries of disappointment.

Our neighbors to the west are about to embark on a giant political and socioeconomic experiment to put money behind the movement that launched the 2020 summer of protests.

California is one of a dozen states that now aim to address historic wrongs against African Americans through a massive transfer of wealth to Black communities.

Momentum for reparations drew strength from the gale-force winds created by the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. That outrage has led to progressive Democrats across America pushing reparations in cities, states and in Congress.

Evanston, Illinois, is a quiet place in the middle of an unusual experiment.

In this university town just north of Chicago, a sheen of affluence glints through the windows of solid brick buildings downtown, while rainbow flags and "Black Lives Matter" placards dot what seems like every other suburban lawn.

Its population of 78,000 is diverse - about two-thirds white, nearly a fifth black, with sizeable Asian and Hispanic communities - and its politics, predictably, liberal. During the 2020 election, Donald Trump got less than a tenth of the vote here.

Local governments and universities are taking reparations into their own hands. But can these efforts be successful or enough?

In Evanston, Illinois, where redlining excluded the city’s Black residents from homeownership, 16 Black families — randomly selected from 600 who applied — were given tax-free grants this year to be used toward a home.

California launched its reparations task force in 2021, to determine how the state can compensate Black Californians descended from those formerly enslaved.

California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present. It calls for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression.

California’s reparations task force released its first of two reports detailing the state’s history of slavery and racism and recommending ways the Legislature might begin a process of redress for Black Californians, including proposals to offer housing grants, free tuition and to raise the minimum wage.

The 500-page study describes decades of state and federal government actions that harmed Black Americans — from American slavery to the more recent redlining, mass incarceration, police actions and the widening wealth gap between Blacks and whites.

To repay African Americans in California for the “ongoing and compounding harms” of slavery, a state task force on June 1 recommended lawmakers create 10 new offices to oversee reparations.

The interim report (pdf) by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans—about 500 pages long—describes the harms slavery inflicted on African Americans and its “lingering effects on American society today.”

A report from California’s reparations “task force” published Wednesday cites critical race theorists Ibram Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Derrick Bell a total of 47 times, a review by The Daily Caller News Foundation found.