Only in California: San Francisco creates reparations fund aimed at addressing past slavery
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie quietly signed a new law that establishes a reparations fund for Black residents, which could amount to $5 million each, if recommendations from a 2023 report are taken seriously
by Summer Lane | January 2, 2026
Black Americans in California may receive a massive check from the state, thanks to a new reparations fund established by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who approved the creation of such a fund heading into the new year.
According to Newsweek, the mayor’s decision to sign the local bill into law simply establishes a reparations fund, which could be aimed at dishing out up to $5 million payments to Black San Franciscan residents in the name of “reparations.”
The reparations fund is based on a 2023 reparations plan submitted by the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee. The nearly 400-page report essentially argues that the past sins of slavery still apply to the Black community today, and therefore, financial restitution is necessary.
For reference, California was never a slave state.
“While neither San Francisco, nor California, ever formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement,” the report argued.
It also argued that a “one-time, lump sum payment of $5 million” to eligible Black San Franciscans would “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 reparations fund, while established by the mayor, is not actually funded at this time, Newsweek reported.
“I was elected to drive San Francisco’s recovery, and that’s what I’m focused on every day. We are not allocating money to this fund—with a historic $1 billion budget deficit, we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner,” Mayor Lurie told the outlet.
The fund, at the moment, serves to make more of a political statement than anything else. It has drawn considerable criticism, especially from Elon Musk, the visionary CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and the social media platform X – once headquartered in San Francisco.
“California didn’t even have slaves!” Musk posited on his social media platform.
He continued, “Why is it right for someone who escaped tyranny in other countries and happens to live in SF to pay ‘reparations’ for something they had nothing to do with? This is deeply morally wrong.”
Photo: Adobe Stock
