Black attorneys slam San Francisco’s ‘outrageous, unconstitutional and unlawful’ reparations plan to hand longtime black residents $5m each -especially when California wasn’t even a slave state

Black attorneys have slammed San Francisco’s reparations committee for its proposal to give every longtime black resident a $5million payout in the summer.

Leo Terrell and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder called the proposal ‘outrageous, unconstitutional and unlawful’ and even racist in an interview on Fox News’ Hannity Monday night – and vowed to fight it.

They demanded to know who is going to fund the large payout — estimated to cost the city at least $50billion — noting that California was never a slave state.

But the woke city is already preparing to move forward with the proposal, with the reparations committee saying it will submit the plan to Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in June.

Under the proposal announced Monday, anyone who has identified as black on public records for at least 10 years and is at least 18 years old qualifies for the $5million payout.

They also must qualify for two of a number of requirements, including having been born in the city or migrated to it between 1940 and 1996 and then lived there for 13 years.

But the $5million payout is just the beginning of the draft’s proposals.

It would also involve a lump sum payment to ‘compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.’

The proposal also says qualifying low-income households should have their income supplemented to match the city’s median income – $97,000 in 2022 – for the next 250 years. 

And black residents who qualify for the program can get their debts forgiven, including their housing and student loans. 

A number of other proposals include investment in San Francisco’s black community, financial education, legal protections of people’s reparations, tax credits, and black-owned banks being brought in to manage people’s money.

The proposal says San Francisco must ‘issue a formal apology for past harms, and commit to making substantial ongoing, systemic and programmatic investments in Black communities to address historical harms.’

Terrell and Elder, though, say the plan is racist — using taxpayer money to provide black people with funds unavailable to residents of other races.

As Elder described it: ‘Reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners to people who were never slaves.’

Terrell, a Fox News contributor, is vowing to fight against the proposed measure.

‘It’s not ever going to get implemented,’ he told guest host Pete Hegseth. ‘I’ll be the first lawyer to fight against this.’

He continued: ‘This is outrageous. It’s unlawful. It’s unconstitutional. It’s racist. But it’s not surprising it came from California on the day of MLK’s birthday.

Leo Terrell, a Fox News contributor, vowed to fight the proposal he called ‘outrageous, unconstitutional and unlawful’

Both he and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder slammed the proposal as racist, saying Democrats are playing the ‘race card’

‘We’re talking about a racist program to benefit individuals who happen to be black — $5million,’ Terrell said, noting, ‘California was a free state.

‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ he asked. ‘Why should they get $5million? Because of skin color? It’s insulting.’

Elder, who ran for governor in 2021, also noted that California was never a slave state and San Francisco was never a slave city.

‘Furthermore, slavery was a Democratic institution. Why don’t Democrats pay?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘Jim Crow was a Democratic institution. Why don’t Democrats pay?’

He went on to claim that ‘very few Republicans owned slaves,’ and asked why Republicans should ‘pay a dime.

‘The whole thing is absolutely insulting.’

Both attorneys accused the Democrats in charge in the woke city of ‘playing the race card,’ with Terrell saying: ‘They need to keep blacks on the government payroll because, without the black population, there is no Democratic Party.

‘They have a race card issue and they’re never going to let that card go,’ he said.

‘This country has no systemic racism,’ he claimed. ‘That’s something in 1955. In 2023, we have no institutional racism.

‘But you can’t tell that to a Democrat.’ 

The proposal was compiled by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, chaired by Eric McDonnell

A red-line map cited in the proposal. The map was created for banks to rate the safety of loans given to residents of certain areas of the city. The purported riskiest – the red zones – were black neighborhoods

Advocates of the proposal say it is necessary to right the wrongs of previous generations, that are still affecting black communities today.

In a draft report issued last month, the San Francisco Reparations Advisory Committee said the proposal will ‘address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.

‘While neither San Francisco nor California adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systemic repression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes and judicial enforcement.’

The proposal also cites a number of city initiatives from decades past that studies show were racially motivated and had debilitating effects on the black population. 

Some were as simple as early legal restrictions against where black people could live in the city and the kinds of jobs they could hold.

Others were as far-reaching as city-wide zoning measures which left black communities marginalized effectively in ghettos, or else entirely razed to the ground and left vacant for years.

The proposal will be submitted to Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in June

People speak at a reparations task force meeting in San Francisco in April 2022

The proposal will be submitted to San Francisco leadership in June.

‘There are so many efforts that result in incredible reports that just end up gathering dust on a shelf,’ San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin told the SF Chronicle. 

‘We cannot let this be one of them,’ he added.

The proposal was compiled by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee [AARAC], which was commissioned by the Board of Supervisors. It was first presented to leadership in December.

‘Centuries of harm and destruction of black lives, black bodies and black communities should be met with centuries of repair,’ AARAC chair Eric McDonnell told the SF Chronicle. ‘If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.’ 

The city’s proposals come in the wake of California’s Reparations Task Force boss Kamilah Moore sharing her demands for payback.

She said any black Californians descended from slaves were owed $1million each.

Moore also said any black resident who’d suffered housing discrimination at the hands of California was owed $223,500.

She asserted that redlining – refusing loans such as mortgages to poorer people – had kept many black Californians in poverty between 1933 and 1977. 

Despite the huge cost of complying with the proposals, Moore insists they’d actually benefit the Californian economy by stimulating consumer spending.