Near the end of the Maryland General Assembly session earlier this year, Del. Aletheia McCaskill came face-to-face with Gov. Wes Moore for an uncomfortable conversation.
They had agreed to meet at the governor’s mansion to discuss her reparations bill hours before the legislature was about to pass it.
The bill was the culmination of years of work by McCaskill and others who wanted the state to more fully reckon with its racist past. It would create a commission to study options for reparations for the state’s role in the enslavement of Black people and denying their rights for generations after.
Privately, the governor had encouraged their work, McCaskill said. But then they heard whispers that Moore had something else in mind.
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As McCaskill sipped her hot chocolate, the governor shared with her a draft of an executive order, his plan for action on reparations that contained almost the exact language from her bill.
And it became clear to her then that Moore wanted his name on reparations.
Highlighter in hand, McCaskill reviewed the executive order. And she saw something else in the folder: A plan for Moore’s public rollout of the order. TV networks and media outlets were listed. “There was even already the script prepared. Even, ‘audience applaud now,’” McCaskill said.
“It was then that I sat back in the chair and looked at him, and I told him exactly this: I told him ‘I am disgusted with you and I am ashamed,’” McCaskill said.
McCaskill, a Baltimore County Democrat, went back to the House of Delegates where, hours later and after intense debate, the reparations bill passed by an overwhelming margin.
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Moore never went public with his executive order. Then weeks later, he vetoed the reparations bill, saying a study would slow down work to improve economic mobility for those systematically denied opportunity and promising to work with lawmakers on the issue when they return in January.
Asked recently about the proposed executive order, Moore, the nation’s sole Black governor, said that he tries to balance the importance of remembering history while also ensuring the state is “moving towards the work of repair.”
Moore said he didn’t go through with the executive order because “I wanted to try to work in partnership with the members of the General Assembly to produce something that I thought would really meet this moment.”
But multiple lawmakers said Moore and his team didn’t engage with them on the legislation, despite their entreaties, and despite knowing for months their plans to introduce it.
This year’s reparations study bill was the focus of intense work for more than a year. The Legislative Black Caucus — one of the nation’s largest and oldest — decided at the start of 2024 to make the reparations commission a priority for 2025.
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“The work did not start just during the session,” said Del. Joseline Peña-Melnyk, a Democrat representing Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties who chairs the House committee that reviewed the bill. “The work started during the whole year before.”
The Legislative Black Caucus created a subcommittee that examined past legislation, studied what other states had done and came to unanimous consensus on their plans. They had decided to scale back from creating a body that would award compensation to Marylanders descended from enslaved people to one that would make recommendations — lowering the price tag from untold millions to just $55,000 for staffing support.
Peña-Melnyk said she brought the revised bill to a top aide to the governor months before the lawmaking session started in January.
“Here is a bill for the governor, can you please give it to him and have him give me feedback?” Peña-Melnyk recalled saying. “What does he want to see? Does he want to change the title? Change the composition? I want to work with the governor.”
Then after the session began, Peña-Melnyk said she again met with the governor’s staff and texted them repeatedly. She even asked McCaskill to hold off introducing her bill until the deadline, to give the governor’s team an opportunity to suggest changes.
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“Everyone had an opportunity to give their input,” she said.
About midway through the January-to-April legislative session, Peña-Melnyk got wind that the governor “was having some hesitation.”
She again reached out for feedback. The feedback never came.
The governor’s team told her about the executive order, she said. She never saw a copy but did ask them questions — “What is in the executive order? Can you do both? Why are you doing the executive order?’”
The only answer she said she got was that the governor was weighing what to do.
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Lawmakers preferred to create the reparations commission through a law, which is more permanent than an executive order that could be undone by a future governor. The proposed reparations commission would be required to deliver recommendations in 2027, after the 2026 gubernatorial election.
Some lawmakers viewed a governor’s executive order as a backup plan, in the event that the legislation got stalled in Annapolis.
The whole episode has been disappointing and frustrating to Dayvon Love, director of public policy for the think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. The organization has pushed for reparations payments in the past but agreed to work with Black lawmakers on the study commission as the best course of action this year.
In mid-March, Love had a video call with two of Moore’s top staffers, who tried to sell him on the executive order, he said. He never saw the text, but was told it was titled “truth and reconciliation,” a term for the work of redressing harms that was popularized in post-apartheid South Africa.
Love said the executive order seemed to be similar to the legislation, but branded with a title that’s more palatable to white voters.
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“It was a political calculation more than a substantive one,” Love said.
Love delivered the same message to the governor in May, just before Moore vetoed the reparations commission bill. Love had gone to the State House to make a last-minute pitch to the governor not to veto the bill. He said the governor disagreed with his assessment.
“This is a dynamic I was not expecting,” Love said. “I was expecting this bill to be easy.”
A spokesperson for the governor said the issue is important to him.
“The Governor has long studied, and written, about the importance of truth and reconciliation,” Chief of Staff Fagan Harris said in a statement. The governor and his team considered an executive order in his first two years, but decided against it. This year, Harris said, Moore focused on balancing the state’s budget, growing the economy and responding to shifting priorities from the federal government.
Lawmakers and advocates have since turned their focus toward overriding the governor’s veto, ensuring a supermajority of lawmakers are still on board the next time the General Assembly convenes.
The bill passed both the state Senate and the House of Delegates by veto-proof margins, meaning if no one changes their mind, a veto override would be assured.
“We all voted for it, so we’re not going back on our vote,” said Sen. Arthur Ellis, a Charles County Democrat who worked to ensure the bill made it through the Senate.
Del. Gabe Acevero, a progressive Democrat from Montgomery County, said the commission won’t slow down important policy work, as the governor suggested.
“We are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time,” he said.
Acevero said he’ll vote to override the veto because the commission will put scholars to work “examining, not just on the history, but also what reparations should look like.”
“Maryland should work to understand how people were deprived of their freedom and how to make amends,” he said.
The Rev. Robert R.A. Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore, wrote a book about reparations and testified in Annapolis for the bill.
He said Maryland, with its roster of top Black political leaders, should have been the fourth state to create a reparations commission.
“It’s been hard enough to get to this point,” Turner said. “If we don’t get this right now, it will not be revisited.”
Clarification: This article was updated to attribute a governor's office statement to Chief of Staff Fagan Harris.
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