★Reparations Station
Detroit
Report Delivered Oct 2025
Task Force Dissolved Dec 2025
Task Force Dissolved Dec 2025
In November 2021, more than 80% of Detroit voters approved a ballot initiative directing City Council to study reparations for Black Detroiters. Four years later, the 13-member Detroit Reparations Task Force delivered a 558-page report of recommendations — and then dissolved.
What happens next rests entirely with City Council and Mayor Mary Sheffield, who sponsored the resolution that started all of this as a Council member. The Black American Grassroots Council does not support this report as delivered. This page is the record, and the means to say so.
The report is advisory. Council has adopted nothing, and the body that wrote it no longer exists to answer for it. Nine members decide what happens next — and they hear from almost no one about this. Send the letter.
Every member below took office after the report was delivered. Denzel McCampbell chairs Budget, Finance & Audit — every funding mechanism in the report routes through his committee. James Tate presides.
Nothing in the report is binding. The task force was charged with proposing policy, not enacting it, and City Council has adopted none of it. The recommended Reparations Administrative Office does not exist. As of this writing there is no standing body in Detroit government carrying this work forward.
The eligibility criteria are where BAGC's objection begins. A 20-year continuous residency requirement measures presence in the city, not descent from the harm — and Detroit's Black population fell by roughly a third between 2000 and 2020. A rule written that way can exclude the descendants of the very displacement it claims to repair.