ST. LOUIS – After 18 months of work, the St. Louis Reparations Commission has made several recommendations to make the city more equitable.
“We’re making strides, but there’s a long way to go. You’re talking about racism that has been embedded through policies and institutions way before I was alive. It’s not going to be dismantled overnight,” Alderman Rasheen Aldridge (Ward 14) said.
Some of the recommendations include a public apology for the systemic harm done to black people, the preservation of historically significant landmarks, and cash payments.
The amount of money is not specified, but to qualify, someone would have to trace their ancestry to slavery and prove that they have at some point lived in St. Louis.
The reparations report also details the history of Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood where more than 4,200 predominately black families were displaced as part of an “urban renewal project” in the 1950s. Part of that land is now owned by Saint Louis University. The report mentions Pruitt-Igoe; the public housing complex that became home to many families displaced by redevelopment projects like the one in Mill Creek.
Additionally, it recommends giving additional cash payments to people in those communities. The St. Louis NAACP President Adolphus Pruitt says that recommendation is too narrow.
“Why would you think their harm was more dramatic and impactful than mine simply because I lived in a different neighborhood?” he said.
Pruitt says the report’s foundation is excellent, but there are a lot of recommendations in the report with no dollar amount attached to them. Some of the additional recommendations include housing grants, scholarships, neighborhood revitalization, and a community health fund.
“If we’re going to try and do reparations and if its going to involve the dollars, we need to calculate what that is,” Pruitt said.
The city would ultimately have to develop legislation and determine those amounts.
“The question is, the city has a little bit of a surplus, but how do you do direct payments that can benefit ones that have been impacted by discrimination throughout St. Louis history and also figure out where that money comes from,” Aldridge added.
Aldridge says that discussion can take place now that they have this report.
