The Hennepin County Board of Commissioners is considering a proposal to create a Reparations Research Task Force to document historical racial harms and recommend ways to address injustices against Black and Indigenous residents. The commissioners have approved advancing the proposal to a full vote on Dec. 11.
Stemming from recommendations by the county’s Race Equity Advisory Council (REAC), the proposal is part of broader efforts to confront structural inequities in the region.
“Reparations isn’t a word that should be scary,” said Hennepin County District 4 Commissioner Angela Conley during the Dec. 2 board meeting. “Reparations is something that municipalities and jurisdictions across the country are starting to name explicitly and do the work that it takes to repair harm in our communities.”
Under REAC’s recommendations, the committee would gather data to study the county’s role in criminal justice disparities, education inequity, transportation policies that displaced Black and Indigenous residents, and labor discrimination.
“The conversation about reparations and reparative justice began for me when recreational cannabis was legalized at the state legislature,” said District 3 Commissioner Marion Greene.
REAC’s annual report, released last month, calls for partnerships with academic institutions and historians to detail policies that have perpetuated racial inequality in the county.
“For many, many years, people who look like me, regardless of socioeconomic status or zip code, have not had the same access that others do,” Conley said.
Minnesota began automatically expunging 57,000 marijuana-related cases after the state legalized cannabis under the Adult Use Cannabis Act in 2023. Greene said decriminalizing marijuana is part of repaying Black Minnesotans who were disproportionately affected by the criminal legal system.
“There are examples of jurisdictions around the country using cannabis revenue to support community programming, racial justice efforts, and reparations,” Greene said.
REAC also recommended that the county develop and publish a County Action Report, providing a framework with timelines and measurable goals for strengthening relationships with Indigenous communities.
“You can’t really have a conversation about reparative justice without including our Indigenous relatives,” Conley said. “This is Dakota land that we are on.”
District 7 Commissioner Kevin Anderson warned that federal shifts under the Trump administration, which redirected enforcement and oversight roles of agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, could threaten local reparations work.
“Individually, we live in a current political environment where this type of work is often targeted by the federal government,” Anderson said.
About one in seven people in Hennepin County is Black. Historical practices such as restrictive covenants limited Black homeownership. By the 1960s, one-third of the county’s Black residents were concentrated in Minneapolis’ North Side.
“What existed in Hennepin County that was disastrous and deserves a reparative framework?” Conley asked. “I’m really excited for the future of what is to come, but the scope and research are important.”
Other cities and states provide examples of reparations efforts. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, launched the Restorative Housing Program to compensate Black residents and their descendants harmed by discriminatory housing, zoning and lending practices. The program has faced legal challenges, including a 2024 lawsuit claiming race-based eligibility violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
California’s Reparations Task Force produced a report outlining ways to address injustices against Black Californians, including expanding access to education and career training, investing in communities, and addressing past property seizures. In 2025, lawmakers introduced bills based on the task force’s recommendations, though widespread direct cash payments were not included.
Locally, St. Paul’s Recovery Act and Community Reparations Commission, formed in January 2023, has not yet resulted in direct payments to Black residents. Advocates note that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down race-conscious admissions programs has created a legal climate that complicates the implementation of reparations.
Clint Combs welcomes reader responses at combs0284@gmail.com.
“Reparations isn’t a word that should be scary,”
Not any scarier than any other scenarios where the government is reaching into my pocket and stealing my money.
The government reaches into your pocket everyday and funds the killing machine that is the US military, as well as props up the millionaires and billionaires of this country; and yet, you are as silent as a mouse urinating in Texas cotton. You are quiet as a sleeping baby while every other group (Jews, Japanese, Indigenous, etc.) has received (or receives) reparations payments for Amerikkkan atrocities: but when it’s time to pay up to Foundational Black Americans, you draw a line in the sand, and expose your anti-Black hatred.
The hypocrisy of it all, while you ask that same group to sign up for its military death machine and sacrifice our children’s lives for this white supremacist empire of empires. I want to vomit.
Newsflash: we pay taxes too. Yes, contrary to popular opinion, the overwhelming majority of Black people work. And our tax dollars paid for reparations, as well as the building and maintaining of the white working and middle class, to this very day.
Cry all you want, but reparations will eventually be paid. And there’s no whining, hypocritical outrage, nor whataboutisms that will prevent it.
I’m not paying for something I had no part in, and not paying someone who was not even alive when this happened…I don’t see anyone giving anything to us Irish, the Irish were some of the first slaves here in America..
You can believe whatever anti-Black propaganda and nonsense you want; but what you’re not going to do is lie full stop on a Black news website. The Irish were not slaves; some were indentured servants, who worked under a contract and afterwards, could renew it, or set out on their own. Afrikans were considered property from birth to death. Quite a stark difference, don’t you think genius?
And the Irish knew completely about the condition of Afrikan people in the US (like all European immigrants) and still trekked themselves over here. In fact, the Irish were one of the most racist white groups towards Black people, highlighted by the Draft Riots of the 1860s; the Memphis Race Massacre of 1866; as well as the wretched behavior of many Irish-Amerikkan communities in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and a host of other cities during the 20th Century, exemplified by their role in the 1919 Chicago Race Massacre (Hamburg Athletic Club), the civil rights movement (Irish thugs attacked MLK and other marchers in Chicago’s Marquette Park and Gage Park in 1966); as well as the busing riots of the 1970s in Boston.
You have some unmitigated gall to talk about discrimination towards the Irish on a BLACK NEWS SITE while dismissing the virulent anti-Black history of the Irish in the U.S.
You definitely owe us, too.
And though you might not have owned slaves-Black folk didn’t annihilate Jews, nor detain Japanese, but we paid reparations for acts committed by those classified as WHITE-, you and the rest of White Amerikkka benefited from that legacy, as barriers were put in place to give you and yours a foundation in this nation, as there was no Black competition in jobs, businesses, housing and education.
And when Black people dared to have our own institutions, jealous and hateful white folk like you destroyed it (Tulsa, 1921; Elaine, Ark. etc.), and Black lives.
The nerve of you.
Black Amerikkka’s tax dollars funded the institutionally racist Homestead Act (a land give away to White families between 1863-1986), GI Bill, FHA loan program (98% of loans went to white people between 1946-1968), and the interstate highway system that allowed you to go to the central cities that you fled from to work, and back to your crappy, racist, suburban communities while wrecking Black neighborhoods and communities nationally, including I-35/94 right there in the Twin Cities metro. Their construction devastated the Black South Side and Rondo communities of Minneapolis and St Paul, respectively.
Now run tell dat!