“Reparations have been and always will be more than an apology and a paycheck,” said Joey Mogul, a lawyer who wrote a draft of the reparations ordinance and represented several survivors. “We have to consider all the harm people have endured.”

An apology for a Florida massacre mattered, but the money didn’t go far.

More than 70 years after a racist mob massacred black residents in Rosewood, Fla., and burned the hamlet to the ground, Lizzie Jenkins’s mother received exactly $3,333.33 as recompense.

In 1994, Florida became the first state to pass a reparations law acknowledging a need to confront an eruption of racist violence that government officials failed to stop.

The law set aside $2 million for those who survived the 1923 massacre, which began with an allegation that a black man had assaulted a white woman. A white mob that included Ku Klux Klan members swarmed into the largely black hamlet of Rosewood and killed at least six black residents, and perhaps many more. Churches and houses were burned, and the residents scattered, never to return.

Ms. Jenkins, 80, a historian and author whose aunt and uncle were attacked and nearly lynched in Rosewood, said that some survivors used the relatively modest payments to re-roof a house or do some remodeling. Her family used it to pay the taxes on the property where her aunt had grown up.

“They didn’t get a whole lot of money,” she said of the victims, “but at least Florida acknowledged they had made a mistake.”

When the reparations law passed, its supporters hailed it as a moment to “right an atrocious wrong,” while opponents complained about being held responsible for the “sins of our forefathers.” But Ms. Jenkins said the impact of reparations turned out to be surprisingly small, never enough to erase the bloody history or restore what had been taken.