In San Francisco, local lawmakers are putting reparations into practice—a set of policy recommendations and legislative changes that have yet to be adopted at the state level. The effort began in July 2023, when the city’s Human Rights Commission, which oversees discrimination complaints and restorative justice initiatives, drafted the San Francisco Reparations Plan.

In December 2025, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted the plan as an ordinance, and Mayor Daniel Lurie signed it into law in January 2026. The measure includes a proposed $5 million one-time lump-sum payment to eligible black residents, along with more than 100 recommendations to support repair, restitution, and long-term community investment.

Among the sweeping proposals—many of which provide race-based benefits in homeownership, employment, business, education, and health—the city government will now be tasked with (pages 22-24):

• Funding tuition assistance for 2–4-year college institutions, trade schools, and other post-secondary school options.
• Investing in pathways for Black SFUSD (San Francisco Unified School District) graduates who return to San Francisco to work at SFUSD. The City will provide funding to eligible returning professionals to help cover housing, student loans, and related expenses.
• Establishing a satellite Historically Black College or University (HBCU) campus in downtown San Francisco.
• Eliminate student loan debt for blacks who attended SFUSD.
• Increasing funding for existing programs that support college readiness and completion.
• Providing housing stipends for black educators that are commensurate with market-rate housing needs.
• Using the Urban Ed Academy model, expand the program to include black women and build professional pipelines to attract and retain black women educators.
• Compensate black educators for the harm they experience teaching a “white supremacy curriculum.”

Notably, the plan’s education provisions include some jaw-dropping action bulletins, such as to “[e]stablish a Black youth hotline to report discrimination,” “[e]stablish an Afrocentric K-12 school,” “[i]ntroduce a mandatory core Black History and Culture curriculum into all SFUSD grade levels,” and “[i]ncorporate meditation, yoga, and other mindfulness principles into the classroom and afterschool programs.”

Compared with California’s state-level reparations prototype, which cunningly insists on identifying recipients by lineage rather than race, San Francisco’s model does not bother to hide its racial intent. When the city ordinance was codified, a San Francisco supervisor commented: “This would be the first time a city in California actually spent money towards achieving reparations for Black people.”

Certainly, many concerned San Franciscans warned their local representatives against abusing government power and taxpayer funds for blatant racial spoils. Advocate and commentator Richie Greenberg said:

I’ve been keenly paying attention to this issue of Reparations for several years now, watching as city hall officials (and now the mayor), have consistently ignored law and constitutional rights of us taxpayers. They have put rhetoric and ideology ahead of the city’s residents. I have reached out to the Board of Supervisors, the mayor, the city attorney and the reparations committee itself to demand they cease wasting taxpayers’ money on this unconstitutional plan, and the time has come to bring them to court.

Greenberg’s words fell on deaf ears, as San Francisco supervisors pushed the proposal through.

The mayor signed off on the plan rather quietly, without a press conference or media briefing. But defenders of equal rights, such as the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) and my organization, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), had been closely monitoring developments and working behind the scenes to build a case. On February 5, CFER and two member co-plaintiffs, Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Arthur Ritchie, represented by PLF, sued the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

Our lawsuit argues that San Francisco has violated the constitutional principle of equal protection in instituting the reparations fund. The plan essentially imposes “racial classifications on present-day residents who neither endured enslavement nor inflicted it.” By doing so, San Francisco has weaponized government action, public authority, and taxpayer dollars to distribute benefits on the basis of race and ancestry. Specifically, the San Francisco Reparations Plan violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Proposition 209, and the California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection (Article I, Section 7).

When reason and persuasion fall short of reigning in a government entity so determined to violate the law in the service of racial classifications, the court of law becomes our last resort. Alarmingly, this timely lawsuit was filed only weeks after CFER and two other member co-plaintiffs, under the legal counsel of the American Civil Rights Project, settled with San Francisco for the latter to defund four unconstitutional welfare programs on the basis of race and gender identity.

The battle to defend equality seems like a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole. And the stakes have just become higher, since the California Assembly is now poised to approve Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 7 (ACA 7), a 2025 bill aimed at repealing education-related provisions of Prop. 209. In May 2025, ACA 7 was paused and turned into a two-year bill by the California Assembly Appropriations Committee. It was subsequently unfrozen and approved on January 22, 2026, in an unconventional move, as most two-year bills die of inaction in the same committee.

If ACA 7 is approved on the November state ballot, the myriad of education-themed recommendations in the San Francisco reparations plan would gain significant legal leverage. Considering this, the problem of perpetual race-centric policymaking has become multifaceted, meriting swift and resolute action from the side of truth across all fronts: legal, legislative, grassroots, and more.

We believe supporters of individual equal rights are on the side of truth, and having acquired this knowledge, we stand firm in it.

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