Erin Cox
The Washington Post
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Friday vetoed a bill that would have required the state to define the economic harms to Black descendants of enslaved people and recommend remedies, dealing a blow to reparations supporters who counted on the only Black governor of a U.S. state to be an ally.
Moore said, given the state’s economic problems, he was focused on laws that helped the state recover from the severe impacts of the Trump administration’s federal spending cuts.
“I was very transparent with the leadership and members of the General Assembly that anything that fails to meet the urgency of this moment, I will not sign it and it must wait for another time,” Moore said in an interview, calling the reparations study “the most challenging” of his veto decisions.
Moore said he’s ready to engage in conversations about repairing the legacy of slavery now, and he doesn’t need to wait two years for the reparations commission to draft a study.
“A study group that is saying that they’re going to present reports to the governor in two years is fine. But the governor is ready to engage now,” he said.
Moore met with Black leaders as recently as Thursday to say he was wrestling with it.
Even before his veto of the bill, Moore’s unwillingness to embrace a reparations study fostered a mix of betrayal and resignation from some leading Black supporters, who saw the state’s first Black governor — a candidate who campaigned on tackling the racial wealth gap — as a natural champion in the century-long fight to redress slavery’s generational harms.
Despite his comments that he is not running for higher office, Moore is widely seen as a potential presidential contender — a pursuit that could be complicated by a record of supporting a policy of reparations, which according to polling is politically divisive nationwide.
“Everyone is upset about this,” Sen. C. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George’s), who led a rally outside Moore’s official residence in Annapolis last week urging the governor to sign the reparations bill, said about Moore’s lack of support.
“There will be a real backlash from the Black community — not just in Maryland, nationwide,” Muse said before the vetoes were issued, adding that the leaders of the General Assembly’s Black Legislative Caucus, of which he is a member, are broadly baffled by Moore’s reluctance.
“I’ve had two conversations with him about it,” Muse said. “We all walk away from it the same way: ‘What in the world?’”
Immediately after the veto, the Black Caucus issued a statement noting the study had a veto-proof majority and “the legislature will have the final say.”
“The State’s first Black governor chose to block this historic legislation that would have moved the state toward directly repairing the harm of enslavement,” the caucus said in a statement. “While unilateral executive actions and piecemeal legislation addressing disparities can contribute to progress, they cannot substitute meaningful, sustained, and comprehensive efforts.”
To advocates, Maryland tackling reparations represented both a concrete and symbolic victory.
The state is bounded by the Mason-Dixon Line and is the historical home to Black luminaries for equality, including Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall, as well as figures who worked to protect slavery. Roger B. Taney, a Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court opinion in 1857 ruling Black people were not citizens, was a Maryland resident prominently honored at the State House until 2017.