Her book should raise new questions for reparations commissions, state and local. John Stossel: The socialist wave in Latin America must be defeated She describes Chinese women caged and violated for decades in San Francisco brothels, and Southern whites bringing Black slaves to California during the Gold Rush. Pfaelzer also describes how Chinese laborers brought to California by 19th century railroad barons were enslaved in a variety of ways. She adds that many families were deliberately separated, a practice also inflicted on African-descended slaves in the old South. She relates that almost any California Indian could be captured and enslaved unless they could prove they were gainfully employed - and very few could. Seward, near the present-day Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Humboldt County, where adult males were slaughtered and their bodies burned, while women and children were sold off or indentured. Army depredations against indigenous tribes, especially in Northern California, where troops made weekly forays to Indian settlements throughout the 1850s, driving their residents at gunpoint to strongpoints like Ft. “Under four empires - Spain, Russia, Mexico and finally the United States,” she says, “(California) grew as a slave state.” The coming book, “California: A Slave State,” by Jean Pfaelzer, claims that while California never had many African-descended slaves, it has had many others, including an unknown number of human-trafficked women held as sex slaves today. No one has any idea how the cash-strapped city, down a reported 100,000-plus residents since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, could pay for all this.īut the proposed largesse for persons with enslaved ancestors may be misdirected, suggests an about-to-be-published, eye-opening book by a University of Delaware historian, who says that while California had no legal Black slaves after statehood, it condoned plenty of other slavery. Some task force members resist such huge cash payouts, preferring other forms of reparations in fields like education and employment, especially since the state faces a deficit of more than $20 billion as its budget-approval deadlines approach.Īlmost simultaneously, San Francisco supervisors unanimously expressed support for a draft plan by a city-appointed committee calling for $5 million cash payments to all local descendants of slaves, plus guaranteed annual stipends of $97,000 for 250 years. The state-appointed Reparations Task Force, yet to take a formal position on this, was urged by many Black activists to recommend giving $360,000 each to about 1.8 million Black Californians whose ancestors were enslaved, even though there was no legal African-derived slavery in California after statehood began in 1850. The amounts of money now bandied about as some Californians debate whether the state should pay reparations to descendants of slaves with African forbears dwarf anything this state or any of its localities has ever considered.
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