Coloma, California — In a small town where the California Gold Rush began, black families are demanding compensation for land taken from their ancestors to create a state park, where fourth graders now visit to learn about the state’s history.
Their effort in Coloma, a town of 300 people about 36 miles (58 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento, is one of the latest examples of people urging the government to atone for a practice that hindered their prosperity long after slavery was abolished.
Debates over reparations for African Americans often return to the issue of land. It was originally the centerpiece of a promise the U.S. government made to former slaves in the mid-1800s, and later broke: up to 40 acres (16 hectares) of land as compensation for their time as slaves. To some, the reparations promise was fool’s gold, as evidenced by a bill that was first introduced in the 1980s and has since stalled in Congress, despite being named after the original promise and aimed at studying reparations.
The fight in Coloma is taking place in a state where the governor signed a first-in-the-nation law to study reparations, but advocates are urging the state to go further.
The California Gold Rush began in 1848 when white carpenter James W. Marshall discovered gold near Coloma, bringing hundreds of thousands of people from across the country and beyond to the state. Those who migrated included whites, Asians, free blacks, and enslaved blacks.
Decades later, the black and white families took the town’s land from the government and turned it into Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, which opened in 1942. Today, the park contains a museum, a church, and a cemetery where residents are buried. A 42-foot-tall Marshall Monument is on the grounds.
But the history of Black families who settled in Coloma has only recently begun to gain recognition. In 2020, California State Parks launched an initiative to reexamine the past and tell a “more thorough, comprehensive and complete history” of California, department spokeswoman Adeline Yee said in an email to The Associated Press. The department has created a webpage with information about Black family-owned properties in Coloma parks.
Elmer Ponza, a retiree who worked in a California brewery and eventually moved to Nevada, said he was a third-generation descendant of Nelson Bell, a black former slave from Virginia who became the owner of the Coloma property.
According to probate documents shared by the El Dorado County Historical Museum, after Bell died in 1869, a judge ruled that he had no heirs within the state, and his estate was sold at auction.
Ponza added that it was unclear what happened to Bell’s property in the years that followed, and that the land should be returned to his family.
“We rightly believe that our family has been denied the generational wealth that would have been available to us had we received our rightful inheritance of the lands that Nelson Bell owned,” he told the final meeting of the nation’s first national reparations task force.
Nancy Gooch, a black woman, was brought to Coloma from the South in 1849 when white men enslaved her and her husband. When California became a state, Gooch was soon freed and worked as a cook and laundry for miners. She later brought her son, Andrew Monroe, from Missouri to join the town. The Monroe-Gooch family became one of the most prosperous black landowners in California.
“We have to get the truth out there, because that’s what reconciliation is,” said Jonathan Burgess, a Sacramento resident who co-owns a barbecue catering business and claims the land in Coloma is his descendants’. “And when we get the truth out there, as I’ve always done in my speeches, we have to make it right.”
Burgess, who is a descendant of Rufus Morgan Burgess, a black writer who was brought to Coloma with his enslaved father, said in an interview at the park that correcting this would mean compensation for land that could not be returned, or the return of property where possible.
Jonathan Burgess also said his family is descended from Bell, but the Fonza and Burgess families are not related. The discrepancy highlights the difficulties that black residents could face if California passes a reparations bill 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 free black couple who came to Coloma in the late 1850s. Austin said after John and Phoebe Wilson died, their estate was sold through probate. She said the state should somehow repair the damage done to the family when the property was seized.
The reparations fight in California began as lawmakers considered reparations proposals in the state legislature. These included a bill to create the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to help black residents trace their family lineage. Another proposal would entitle all families whose lands were wrongfully seized by the government for racial reasons to have their property returned or compensated.
The bill, which is expected to be voted on this summer, reflects growing calls from Black families for reparations aimed at abuses of the practice known as compulsory expropriation, which requires governments to pay a fair price for property they make public. The issue gained statewide attention in 2022 when local officials in Los Angeles County returned a beachfront property to a Black couple, nearly a century after the government took it from their ancestors.
Earlier this month, California hit a milestone when Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom included $12 million in the 2024 state budget to pay for the reparations bill. But the budget doesn’t specify where the money would go, and the state estimates the bill could cost millions of dollars annually.
State Sen. Steven Bradford, a Los Angeles Democrat who authored the proposal, said the proposal would help compensate the state for lost land, adding that land ownership is important for building overall wealth.
“Reparations was never about a check,” Bradford said. “It was about the land.”
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AP photographer Godofredo A. Vasquez contributed to this report.
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Austin is a corps member of 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 report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @Sophia Dana
