by nahlah Abdur-Rahman
May 7, 2025
The task force will suggest policy recommendations and community healing efforts for its Black residents.
The city of Decatur in Metro Atlanta has unanimously approved the creation of a reparations task force.
According to Fox 5, the Decatur City Commission adopted the resolution on May 5. The 11-member task force will release a report in three years, including policy recommendations to benefit the city’s Black residents.
The news comes a year after city leaders signed off on a contract with the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights to “uncover the legacy of racial harm” in Decatur. The alliance spearheaded the research work into reparations, holding community gatherings and listening sessions on how racial injustice has financially and systematically hurt these residents.
Their research detailed Decatur’s role in slavery and segregation, as well as redlining and property seizures against the Black community. Decatur also displayed multiple Confederate monuments, particularly one formerly at the DeKalb County Courthouse.
The city not only recognized its oppressive tactics toward its Black residents but also apologized for the actions that have stifled their progress.
“The City of Decatur formally acknowledges its past role in the systemic oppression of people of African descent through enslavement, human trafficking, convict-labor, discriminatory zoning and development, underinvestment in African American communities, school segregation, racially biased policing, the destruction of African American-owned property, businesses, and institutions and the displacement and erasure of the Beacon Hill community, people and culture,” the resolution reads.
The city aims to appoint the 11 members, with the help of the Beacon Hill Black Alliance, within the next 60 days. They will bring a variety of expertise to the task force, with members consisting of historians, legal experts, and youth advocates. For the next three years, the task force will compile records of Black land and property loss, noting economic displacement while also interviewing descendants of those impacted by these oppressive tactics.
City officials added, “The City extends a full and public apology to the Black residents of Decatur—past and present— and their descendants for its role in perpetuating discrimination, oppression, subjugation and the resulting harms, profiting from policies rooted in the system of white supremacy.”
The reparations task force will also propose city-sponsored memorialization projects, economic equity tools, and other investment strategies and communal initiatives to remedy its racist past. The move will follow other communities, even within Metro Atlanta, that have enacted reparation initiatives for Black residents. In Decatur’s neighboring Fulton County, its task force will resume holding meetings this year.
While the plan comes amid the national anti-DEI push sparked by the Trump administration, local leaders remain committed to the same justice efforts launched before Trump took office.
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