New York’s Reparations Hearings Are Doing the Work the Federal Government Refuses to Do.

The New York State Commission on Reparation Remedies was established by Governor Hochul in December 2023 (Bill 1163A), co-sponsored by Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages and Senator James Sanders Jr. The nine-member volunteer commission has held 19 public hearings across the state and will submit a formal report with recommendations to the governor and legislature

Dr. Ron Daniels (President, Institute of the Black World 21st Century) opened by invoking Medgar Evers on Memorial Day — a WWII veteran who fought for this country and was shotgunned down in his driveway in Mississippi — and the hundreds of thousands of Black GIs who were denied GI Bill benefits due to racial discrimination while defending a nation that refused to defend them

Lynette Battle, a Foundational Black American whose grandparents were sharecroppers and great-grandparents were enslaved, delivered one of the most powerful testimonies of the hearing: “It is difficult to watch this country suddenly find money and political will for funds connected to January 6 hooliganism and insurrectionists while still hesitating to fully acknowledge and repair the lasting harm caused by slavery, segregation, and systematic discrimination against Black Americans. That contradiction is painful and deeply offensive.”

Long Island’s hidden history of slavery was front and center — enslaved Africans were present throughout Long Island as early as the 1600s, there was a live slave market at the foot of Wall Street in 1711, and New York State did not fully abolish slavery until 1827. Post-WWII redlining, racial covenants, and discriminatory lending in Nassau County deliberately blocked Black families from homeownership and generational wealth — a direct line to the inequities Long Island communities face today

The hearing surfaced a key constitutional debate that will shape the bill’s future: Foundational Black American advocates like the US Freeman Project argued that race-based language in the bill is constitutionally vulnerable under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment — pointing to the dismantling of race-based affirmative action, the Fearless Fund, and Black farmer programs as proof. Their alternative: a lineage-based, status-based approach tied to direct descendants of U.S. slavery, which they argue is constitutionally defensible