Tucked inside Washington State’s newly approved $78 billion budget for 2025-2026 is a historic move: For the first time, the state will fund a study to explore reparations for the descendants of enslaved people. Signed into law by Gov. Bob Ferguson in May, the measure gives Washington the authority to examine how it might address the lasting impacts of slavery—marking a major shift in the state’s approach to racial justice.
According to The Seattle Times, the initial funding for the study is light, in comparison to the total of the budget, only costing Washington state $300,000 to become the third state in the country to officially study reparations in an effort to explore any possible and potential remedies.
Some, like Sheley Secrest, the director of the Washington state branch of the NAACP, anticipate that the actual cost is going to exceed the state’s anticipated price tag. Secrest estimates that the true cost of the state’s reparations commission is approximately $1.5 million.
As Davida Ingram, the executive director of the Seattle African American Reparations Committee, explained to the outlet, “You can see the warp and weft” of systemic discrimination in the State of Washington, and they also posed a rhetorical question which communicated the thrust of the argument for reparations, “This is a tapestry of an unjust society, so what does a just one look like?”
Indeed, although Washington did not become a state until after slavery was abolished in the United States, similar to Oregon, its laws were in practice, anti-Black.
The laws enacted by the state barred enslaved people who were once enslaved in what was formerly Washington Territory, within the borders of the State of Washington, from the state and created exclusionary laws that restricted the ability of Black people who were allowed to settle in Washington state to own land.
This, according to Rep. Chipalo Street (D-Seattle), one of the lawmakers who pushed for Washington state to face its past, makes it necessary to survey the damage that the laws enacted by the state have created for Black people.
“To enact a policy to repair that damage, we have to understand what that damage has done,” Rep. Street told the outlet.
He continued, describing how American Capitalism was fueled by the tremendous exploitation and inequity of the system of slavery, which created a system where “the benefits of our great national economy have not been equally felt.”
As economist Darrick Hamilton told The New York Times reporter Ezra Klein on an episode of Klein’s podcast in 2023, reparations are part of a just end to a massive injustice.
“I’m an advocate for reparations…Reparations is a retrospective, racially just program that does two things. It requires atonement. It requires truth and reconciliation. It requires the federal government to take public account and atone for the state-complicit malfeasance that have taken place in the past and led to the conditions that exist today,” Hamilton said.
Claude Burfect, a board member of the Seattle organization headed by Ingram, has a more personal anecdote, telling the outlet that his childhood in Louisiana was full of reminders of what chattel slavery made possible, none more stark than the Jim Crow laws that underscored the inequity and indignity of the system of slavery that preceded it.
According to Burfect, “Once the study is done, (it may) say, ‘This is what we were able to do for America, then this is what America may need to owe us.’
As Bridge Detroit reported in 2024, the growing call for reparations in America owes much to the work of Ray “Reparations Ray” Jenkins, whose dogged determination over decades persuaded former Congressman John Conyers Jr. to introduce legislation, HR 40, that called for a federal commission to study reparations on a national level, the blueprint which is now being followed at the state and even in some cases, the local level.
According to Trevor Smith, the co-founder and executive director of the Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty Collective, “There’s a lineage of this movement. The call for reparations has long been part of the Black radical tradition and the broader movement for Black lives. This idea that too much time has passed (since slavery), folks like Reparations Ray play an important role. There were folks calling for it, you were ignoring them. That is not the fault of the Black community.”
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