The City of Atlanta is taking steps towards offering reparations to its black residents, reviving a far-Left policy idea popular during the Biden administration.
The Atlanta City Council voted last week to appoint members to its reparations commission, a critical first step to enact its resolution to research the “City of Atlanta’s historical role in the legal discrimination of African American residents.” Once fault is determined, the commission will then “recommend potential remedies to address the resulting economic, educational, health and social disparities.”
The Atlanta Reparations Commission has yet to specify who would be eligible for reparations or what amount of compensation they would receive. California’s reparations committee determined in 2023 that “only descendants of either an enslaved African American in the United States, or a free African American living in the United States prior to 1900” would be considered eligible for compensation. That plan is projected to cost California more than $800 billion.
Reparations became a hot topic in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, and the idea gathered steam under President Joe Biden. But shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders terminating “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies programs, preferences and activities in the Federal Government.”
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That seems to have largely taken the wind out of reparations’ sails — until now.
In November 2023, Councilman Michael Bond initially proposed the Atlanta Reparations Task Force, which the entire city council then voted to create. Bond serves alongside civil rights attorney Eshé Collins and Liliana Bakhtiari, “who made history as Atlanta’s first nonbinary councilmember and Georgia’s first out queer Muslim elected to office.”
Council President Doug Shipman was previously the CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center. Under his leadership, “the Arts Center embraced and featured artists of all backgrounds enabling them with equal access, and the ability to prosper in the ever-growing Georgia arts industry.”
While the city council focuses on its reparations committee, crime continues to grow in various parts of the broader Atlanta metropolitan area, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported in 2024 that the greater Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta metro area accounted for more than half of all reported crimes in the entire state, including 440 murders, 1,605 rapes, 2,649 robberies, and 12,482 aggravated assaults, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
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