Recognizing racist past, Tampa will create reconciliation committee

TAMPA — More than three years after the Tampa City Council formally apologized for the city’s racist past, the body unanimously approved the formation of a committee tasked with examining and addressing persistent inequities in Florida’s third-largest city.

The 13-member Race Reconciliation Committee will make policy recommendations to “address our economic and racial divide,” according to the resolution passed Thursday, which now heads to Mayor Jane Castor for her signature.

The committee will probe five topics: affordable housing, development, youth empowerment, residents returning from prison and ignored history. The committee is expected to prepare a written report for the City Council prior to February 2025. It will then be dissolved.

The measure passed against a backdrop in which Gov. Ron DeSantis intensified his efforts to de-emphasize racism in the state’s public school system curriculum, arguing some Black people benefited from being enslaved. He also backed and signed legislation banning programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the state’s public universities.

Still, when the initiative passed Thursday afternoon, there was no audible celebration or sense of success in the halls of Old City Hall. Instead there was an audience of just a handful of residents who have been pushing for change, week after week, who sighed and shook their heads at what they characterized as half-hearted effort to examine hard truths.

“We’re still not being listened to,” Connie Burton told the Tampa Bay Times, standing in the chamber hallway. A lifelong East Tampa resident and chairperson of the Hillsborough County NAACP’s housing committee, she feels the long arm of racism holding her community down, in the gentrification of her neighborhood, in the imprisonment of teenagers, in hiring managers’ stereotypes, in unjust evictions.

She fears grassroots activists will be overlooked for committee appointments and expressed disappointment at a perceived disengagement of Mayor Castor, also a former police chief.

“It’s unfortunate for the city of Tampa that the mayor has decided not to participate in resolving long, historical wounds of oppression that continue to affect Black citizens,” Burton said.

In 2020, the pandemic and protests over police brutality underscored the nation’s persisting racial inequities. A growing number of cities across the U.S. began to form panels aimed at studying inequities, confronting the past and offering paths forward.

That September, the Tampa City Council unanimously passed Resolution 568, officially apologizing “for any and all past participation in sanctioning segregation and systemic discrimination of African Americans.”

The resolution declared “support for the creation of a reconciliation commission, with a mission of studying and developing proposals to redress the enduring negative effects of the institutions of slavery and the subsequent systemic discrimination.”

For about three years, little was done. Community concerns failed to materialize into tangible action by city officials.

Late last year, calls for the commission resurfaced. Burton and others poured into Old City Hall demanding action and donning T-shirts emblazoned with “Resolution 568.”

Then, last Sunday after church, City Council member Luis Viera drafted a proposal to finally form a committee.

“I’m not naive. This committee is not going to be anything of a cure-all in any way” he said Thursday. “But what it does is allow us to do better.”

He had proposed that Mayor Jane Castor make six appointees. She declined.

“That’s a missed opportunity,” Viera said at Thursday’s meeting.

“I’m disappointed as well,” added council member Alan Clendenin. “I wish the mayor’s office was participating in this wholeheartedly.”

Castor’s chief of staff, John Bennet, wrote to the council member that the administration would, instead, provide the committee with technical and logistical assistance, records show.

A spokesperson provided a statement from the administration Thursday that read in part: “We fully support the council’s leadership and initiative in forming the Racial Reconciliation Committee and will assist the council’s committee with its work.”

According to the resolution approved Thursday, each City Council member will appoint one person to the committee. The following organizations will also each have one appointee: The Hillsborough County NAACP, the Urban League of Hillsborough County, the Tampa Bay History Center, the Tampa Bay Coalition of Clergy, Abe Brown Ministries and Florida Rising.

Members will serve without compensation. Appointees will be proposed next month.

Thursday’s resolution recognizes that “the City of Tampa has made great progress on matters of racial and social justice, but still has many miles to go.”

A 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation found that Tampa police ticketed more people than the state’s four other largest cities combined, and that 8 out of 10 bicyclists ticketed were Black.

Then, in 2021, a Times investigation revealed a controversial Tampa Police Department program in which officers alerted landlords when their tenants were arrested and urged they be evicted. About 90% of tenants flagged to landlords were Black renters, the Times found.

Both reports prompted U.S. Department of Justice investigations.

The committee approved Thursday will serve “as a catalyst for greater citizen participation in the determination of racial harmony, racial equality and matters of justice and inclusion,” according to the resolution. All committee meetings will be open to the public.

“We’ve fought a long, uphill battle for this,” said Valerie Bullock, a lifelong city resident who left Thursday’s meeting angry. “The boys and girls of East Tampa are still dealing with the same issues I dealt with 50 years ago.”