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The Washington, D.C. city council has approved funding to develop a reparations task force to address the effects of slavery.
According to the Washington Post, the D.C. Council approved $1.5 million of the city's $21 billion budget in 2025 to go towards the task force.
The allocation of funding comes after a bill was introduced by council member Kenyan McDuffie to create the task force aimed at developing reparations for Black residents “directly wronged and traumatized by the ills of slavery, Jim Crow, and structural and institutional racism,"
The legislation would also "require the commissioner of the Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking to create a a slavery-era database of slaveholding records, including life insurance policies on enslaved persons," NBC News reports.
In a statement, McDuffie said: “Having the funding included in the budget to establish the creation of the commission, to do all the research that’s going to be required to develop potential proposals, is absolutely critical to moving it forward.”
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