COLOMA, Calif. (AP) — In a small town where California’s gold rush began, black families are demanding the return of land that was taken from their ancestors to make way for a state park now frequented by fourth-graders learning about the state’s history.
Their efforts in Coloma, a town of about 300 people about 36 miles northeast of Sacramento, are one of the latest examples of African Americans urging the government to atone for practices that kept them from thriving long after slavery was abolished.
Debates over reparations for African Americans often return to the issue of land. Land was at the heart of a promise the U.S. government originally made—and later broke—to former black slaves in the mid-1800s: to give them up to 40 acres of land as restitution for their time as slaves. For some, the promise of reparations has been nothing more than a sham, as evidenced by a bill in Congress that has stalled since it was first introduced in the 1980s, even though it aims to study reparations and is named after the original promise.
Coloma’s fight comes in a state where the governor signed a first-in-the-nation bill to study reparations. But victims’ rights advocates are pushing for the state to go further.
In 1848, James W. Marshall, a white carpenter, discovered gold near Coloma, sparking the California Gold Rush, which saw hundreds of thousands of people come from across the country and outside the United States, or be brought there. These migrants included whites, Asians, free blacks, and slaves.
Decades later, the town’s land was confiscated by the government from black and white families before being transformed into the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historical Park, which opened in 1942. The park now houses a museum, churches and cemeteries where residents were buried. A nearly 42-foot-tall monument to Marshall stands on its grounds.
But the history of the Black families who settled in Coloma has only recently begun to be recognized. In 2020, California State Parks launched an initiative to reexamine its past and tell “a deeper, more inclusive and more complete story” of California, department spokeswoman Adeline Yee said in an email to The Associated Press. The department created a webpage with information about properties owned by Black families in Coloma Park.
Elmer Fonza, a retiree who worked in a brewery in California before moving to Nevada, said he is the third great-grandson of Nelson Bell, a former black slave from Virginia who became a landowner in Coloma.
After Bell died in 1869, a judge determined he had no heirs in the state and his estate was sold at auction, according to a probate document shared by the El Dorado County Historical Museum.
It’s unclear what happened to Bell’s property in the years since, Fonza said, adding that the land is expected to be returned to his family.
“We rightly believe that we have been deprived of the generational wealth that our family could have been entitled to had we received our rightful inheritance – the land that once belonged to Nelson Bell,” he said at the last meeting of a First Working Group on Reparations in a Nation-State.
Nancy Goocha black woman, was brought to Coloma from the South in 1849 by a white man who had enslaved her and her husband. Gooch was soon freed when California became a state and worked as a cook and housekeeper for the miners. She later brought her son, Andrew Monroe, from Missouri to join them in the town. The Monroe-Gooch family became one of the most successful black landowners in California.
“We have to get the truth out, because that’s what reconciliation is,” said Jonathan Burgess, a Sacramento resident who owns a barbecue catering business and also claims Coloma’s land belonged to his descendants. “And once we get the truth out, which I’ve done by speaking out all the time, we have to do it right.”
To address that, families should be compensated for land that cannot be returned or property returned where possible, Burgess said in an interview at the park. He said he is descended from Rufus Morgan Burgess, a black writer who was brought to Coloma with his father, who was himself a slave.
Jonathan Burgess has also said his family is descended from Bell, but the Fonza and Burgess families say they are not related. The discrepancy highlights the difficult work that could await Black residents if California ever passes a reparations law requiring families to document their lineage.
Cheryl Austin, a retiree living in Sacramento, said she is the heir of John A. Wilson and Phoebe Wilson, a married, free black couple who arrived in Coloma in the late 1850s. After John and Phoebe Wilson died, their property was sold through probate, Austin said. The state must somehow repair the damage done to families whose property was seized, she said.
The battle over land restitution in California comes as lawmakers consider reparations proposals in the state Legislature. That includes a bill to create the California Agency for American Freedmen’s Affairs, which would help black residents trace their family lineage. Another proposal would provide restitution or compensation to any family whose land was wrongfully seized by the government on racial grounds.
The legislation, expected to be voted on this summer, reflects a growing push by Black families for property restitution that targets the abuse of a practice known as expropriation, in which the government must pay people fairly for property it plans to make available to the public. The issue has drawn attention across the state as local officials in Los Angeles County returned a beachfront property in 2022 to a black couple, nearly a century after the government took it from their ancestors.
Earlier this month, California reached a milestone when Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom included $12 million in the state’s 2024 budget to spend on repair legislationBut the budget doesn’t specify what the money would be used for, and state estimates indicate the bills could cost millions of dollars a year.
State Sen. Steven Bradford, a Los Angeles-area Democrat who wrote proposalssaid they would help the state repair the confiscated land, adding that land ownership is essential to general wealth creation.
“Reparations was never about a check,” Bradford said. “It was about land.”
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Associated Press photographer Godofredo A. Vásquez contributed to this report.
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Austin is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to cover under-covered stories. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna
