History graduate students at UC Davis are investigating past discrimination against the Black community in Sacramento during the 1950s and beyond. With direction from Professor Gregory Downs, and in partnership with the city of Sacramento and the Greater Sacramento Urban League, they seek to answer the question: What could reparations look like?

Downs, a scholar of the 19th century American South, and his students are examining postwar redevelopment efforts— then called “slum clearance” — in Sacramento that forced a thriving Black community out of the city’s old West End, the neighborhood that now encompasses the Capitol Mall and Old Sacramento. They delved into the archives of a civil-rights lawyer, court cases, newspapers, and more, reporting their findings to Kelly Fong Rivas, senior advisor to Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg; and Troy Williams, chief impact officer at the Greater Sacramento Urban League.

The research project, surprisingly, grew out of a chance connection born of Downs’ commitment to engaging his undergraduate students. When he arrived at UC Davis in 2015, Downs quickly realized that the students in his introductory courses didn’t see the connection between the Civil War era he specializes in and their home region, so he rethought his teaching.

“Students were familiar with things like the Gold Rush, which I think is somewhat of an oversimplified founding myth, or the Oregon Trail,” he said. “With the help of colleagues who are great scholars of the West, I started to embed more information about how California was central to the Civil War, which led to a transformation of Black rights. A lot of those things really hit home with students.”

Including community voices

Community involvement has come through the crucial role of Troy Williams, who has a Ph.D. in human ecology and trained in community-based participatory research. He became part of the project in an unusual way: as an external reviewer for UC Davis grant funding.

“When I was reviewing proposals, I came across Dr. Greg Downs’ proposal and it just jumped off the pages,” said Williams. “I was amazed at what he and his graduate students had already accomplished. I thought, we have to figure out how to work with this gentleman, because he wasn’t asking for much money.”

Under Williams’ auspices, the Urban League offered to co-fund the proposal, which turned the project into a coalition with Rivas, Williams and Downs. “It’s extremely important for a rights organization to ensure that the voices that need to be at the table are present,” said Williams. Additional funding also offered a chance to expand the research to the underserved north Sacramento neighborhood of Del Paso Heights, where the Urban League is headquartered and where many displaced West Enders resettled, only to suffer further discrimination.

“A lot of those families still live in these communities,” said Williams. “If we can assist these folks and correct the damage of displacement and losing generational wealth, that would be a great thing to be part of, as well as being part of the larger reparations conversation in California.”

Both the initial grants and continued funding have been invaluable at these preliminary stages of the project, which is a mayoral initiative, not a formal mandate. “I’m the only staff member officially [on this initiative], and I was kind of shocked to get funding out of the city budget for racial equity,” said Rivas. “I’ve been trying to be frugal and scrappy and let the community decide what most of that funding should go toward. So the grant with Greg and being able to work with the student [researchers] has been amazing.”

Rivas, Williams and Downs said they hope the project will lead to a formal reparations initiative but agree that building relationships is worth the time. “We’ve learned to move at the speed of trust with community,” said Rivas.

Added Williams, “What’s so encouraging about the work is that they are really trying to get at systems-induced trauma. One thing that I love about working about historians, they really want to get the facts.”

Research nuts and bolts

Initially, graduate students used attorney Nathaniel Colley’s papers to investigate the impact of West End redevelopment, presenting their findings to Rivas, Williams and Downs regularly through meetings and formal reports.

Even with a big archival cache, tracing direct historical impacts wasn’t easy, said Taylor Black, a fifth-year graduate student who worked on the project’s first phase: “Surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of specific stories referenced in the sources, which is part of the struggle. It’s striking how many of the actual physical buildings where these businesses were no longer exist because they were physically destroyed. The sources are scant.”

Colley’s papers, for instance, reference 32 clients he was representing in lawsuits related to redevelopment, but don’t name the individuals — and seeking them in court records, stored on 1,000-page microfiches, led to another roadblock: court staff who didn’t have time to comb through hundreds of pages of files.

Such challenges are part of historical work, said Downs: “In an ideal world, you could really have a story that explodes across the map and into the present day. But some of those records can be challenging to trace, including things like figuring out where a business owner or property owner went” — especially if they had a relatively common name.

As the grant has been renewed and work has continued, the scope of research has grown. Students Chantal Walker, Omari Averette-Phillips and Sareena Crawford have looked at the neighborhood of Del Paso Heights, reflecting both the inclusion of community voices and the complex and contingent harms the Black community experienced.

In Williams’ community, this history is very much alive: “When I have spoken to some of my colleagues or community members about some of the findings, they’ll say, ‘Oh, my gosh, I know him. That’s my uncle,’” said Williams. “I spoke to our former senior director of partnerships and mentioned a name [from] the research, and he said, ‘Oh, I know him well. He was a member of my church.’”

The historical research is already having an impact. Walker’s research for instance, helped demonstrate institutional inequity in Del Paso Heights, long a banking desert. “The research that Chantal put into place absolutely assisted us,” said Williams. “Not only have we included it in our impact report, but we are speaking with congresspeople and potential investors for developing that area.”

Students also benefit, gaining experience in archival research and public history. “The Urban League, the mayor’s office and Dr. Downs are all super open and receptive to what we want to do as researchers,” said Crawford. “I feel incredibly grateful to be part of this project. I am a Black woman and I am from Utah, and even the concept of the mayor’s office considering reparations is huge.”  

Black, who specializes in race, religion and imperialism in the 19th-century America, agreed: “I’m required to become a specialist and write a dissertation that’s very specific, but I very much see myself as an intellectual-slash-teacher, teaching a much broader set of questions,” he said. “This [project] is in line with that. Public history matters a lot.”