Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and City Councilman Rev. Ricky Burgess sit and listen to a 2019 presentation of the Homewood Comprehensive Community Plan. Burgess later sponsored, and Peduto signed, legislation creating the Commission on Racial Equity. (Photo by Heather Mull/PublicSource)
The future of the Commission on Racial Equity, billed as a “first step toward harmony,” is under consideration as Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration hones its approach to the city’s enduring disparities.
by Ladimir Garcia, PublicSource
In summer 2020, Pittsburgh City Council approved, and former Mayor Bill Peduto signed into existence, the Commission on Racial Equity. According to the city code, the commission was meant to provide support for “reducing institutional racism and increasing racial equity in the City of Pittsburgh.”
But the commission and its members never met.
Jam Hammond, one of the appointed commission members and director of the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, said the city needs to evaluate whether it is needed or not.
“Is the racial equity commission the right vehicle to promote racial equity in the City of Pittsburgh? If it is, then we should be more active,” Hammond told PublicSource. “If it isn’t, then we should maybe be a little bit more transparent with the public and say, this looked like it was going to work, but we have some other ideas.”
The Commission on Racial Equity arose out of a landmark evaluation of the city’s disparities.
According to a 2019 gender equity report by the University of Pittsburgh, 40% of Pittsburgh’s Black adult women lived in poverty, compared to 27% of Black men and 8% for White men.
The following year, councilmen Ricky Burgess and R. Daniel Lavelle introduced legislation creating the commission as one of two bills that also included a 10-point plan in which according to city code, the city “commits to eliminate race-based disparities.”
“I’m hoping maybe now in 2020 this is our time,” Burgess told TribLIVE.com then. “This is the time that we move forward as a city to begin to say that Black Pittsburgh matters. Four hundred years and we still have these inequities. Four hundred years and we see this pain. Now moving forward I will endeavor to take the first step toward harmony and take the first step toward reconciliation.”
PublicSource requested comment regarding the commission’s inactivity from Burgess and Lavelle, but they were not responsive.
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