Activists who identify as foundational Black Americans say Democrat-led reparations plans in New Jersey and New York are turning the history of U.S. slavery into a funding vehicle for far broader social programs. Leaders from the US Freedmen Project told Fox News Digital that government remedies should not go to recent immigrants or to Black Americans without lineage tied to American slavery.
Their warning lands as New Jersey lawmakers advance a statewide “repair” framework and as New York runs public hearings on reparative policy. The fight is not abstract. It turns on who qualifies, who pays, and whether race-based eligibility can survive constitutional review.
The group’s core claim is simple. True reparations, they argue, must be lineage-based and reserved for direct descendants of people enslaved in the United States. Anything wider, they say, conflates repair for slavery with general racial equity and immigration politics.
In New Jersey, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson and state Sen. Angela McKnight are spearheading the Truth, Reconciliation, and Repair Act. The measure aims to address wealth disparities tied to historical slavery and systemic discrimination. Research from the New Jersey Reparations Council informed the proposal, which seeks a framework for state-level reparative policies.
US Freedmen Project members reacted sharply. They contend the effort could reach residents who are not direct descendants of enslaved people. New Jersey lawmakers did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Spokesperson Annette Wilcox framed the dispute as a moral line, not a messaging tweak. She told interviewers that remedies should track actual harm.
"I also think it's not morally correct, you know? You don't give out remedies to people who haven't experienced the harm."
Wilcox said city equity offices often invoke slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and convict leasing, then widen the payout pool. In her account, the history of one group becomes the justification for benefits to “underserved communities,” people of color, immigrants, and other “marginalized groups.”
She tied that pattern to current outcomes for slavery’s descendants.
"That's why, frankly, I think we're in the situation today, where descendants of slavery in the United States are at the bottom of just about every socioeconomic parameter."
The US Freedmen Project describes itself as a grassroots organization of self-identified “Foundational Black Americans.” Members say their work is to educate the public on legal and historical distinctions between African Americans who descend from people enslaved in the United States and people who immigrated voluntarily in recent decades.
They have become regular voices at public hearings nationwide. Their position is that reparations must stay lineage-based and strictly reserved for direct descendants of enslaved people in the United States.
President Devine Prince told Fox News Digital that parts of the left are mixing three different ideas into one package.
"What we're finding out coming from the left wing of the political spectrum is that they are conflating reparations with racial justice and social justice. All three are similar, but they are far from the same."
Prince said the blend produces bad policy. In his telling, repair for the “badges and incidents of slavery” gets folded into everyday discrimination claims and into fights over immigration rules. He argued that broader social problems may deserve their own answers, but not under the banner of slavery reparations.
He also attacked the political incentive structure in blue states.
"What the Democratic Party loves to do is push them all together to create 'people of color' coalitions. These policies are largely being pushed in blue states, which is also where these issues are happening."
Prince said durable coalitions require specific treatment of specific harms. Treating every group as if it shares one plight, he argued, is how programs lose both clarity and public trust.
New York is moving on a parallel track. The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies held a public hearing at Hempstead High School on Long Island. Residents voiced concerns there, and Fox News Digital later followed up with participants.
Supporter Aubrey Muhammad delivered tense testimony and expanded on it afterward. He argued that immigration into poor Black neighborhoods has strained local resources in Hempstead since the 1990s.
"The Democrats, in a sick way, imported 25 million immigrants. And 70% of them came into poor Black neighborhoods."
Muhammad added that Hempstead “has been flooded with immigrants” and that the shift redirects resources “towards others.” Those figures are his claims. Public officials have not adopted them as formal findings in the material provided.
Census figures cited in the coverage do show a major change in the Village of Hempstead, a community of roughly 59,000. Black residents make up 43.2 percent. Hispanic or Latino residents make up 45.3 percent. In 1990, the Hispanic population was roughly 14 percent of the village. US Census Bureau data reflect significant change over the last three decades.
That local picture matters to the eligibility fight. If reparations are framed as repair for American slavery’s unique harms, activists say a race-wide or “marginalized communities” screen erases the lineage line they consider essential.
Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, made national news as the first city to distribute government-funded reparations to Black residents to remedy historic housing discrimination. That program now faces a high-profile class-action lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch and the Trump administration.
The suit alleges that Evanston’s race-based eligibility criteria violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Court docket details, filing dates, and a full primary-source description of Evanston’s enrollment rules are not included in the available package beyond that constitutional claim.
Prince pointed to Evanston as the legal fork in the road. In his view, race-based designs either collapse under challenge or get rewritten into universal benefits that no longer function as reparations at all.
"Reparations, in the context we're talking about, are only for those that were enslaved, emancipated, and then subject to the badges and incidents thereof. That is the American freedmen. Positioning it that way circumvents any legal challenge based on race."
He warned that converting a slavery remedy into a general social program empties the term. “That is not reparations,” he said.
The constitutional stake is straightforward. Race classifications draw strict scrutiny in equal-protection analysis. Lineage criteria tied to a defined historical injury are the path these activists believe can survive review. Officials in New Jersey and New York have not, in the reported record here, answered that design question in final statutory text.
Several operational facts remain unsettled in public view. Authorities have not released, in this record, the full eligibility language of New Jersey’s Truth, Reconciliation, and Repair Act or its precise legislative status. Investigators and lawmakers have not said how New York’s commission would police lineage, residency, or immigrant status if benefits are authorized.
No public results in the package define Evanston’s criteria beyond the race-based description under legal attack. Case numbers and court venues for that lawsuit are not provided here. New Jersey sponsors also left a comment request unanswered at the time Fox News Digital asked.
For voters, the practical questions are concrete. Who is covered? What proof of descent is required? Which harms are in scope? Will benefits be cash, housing credits, tax relief, or something else? And will the design be defended as lineage repair or as a wider equity program?
National reporting on the activists’ challenge captured the same fault line running through these blue-state projects: slavery history in the preamble, broader coalitions at the point of distribution.
Prince argued that Democrat-led governments prefer umbrella “people of color” coalitions because they are easier to market than narrow, lineage-specific repair. Wilcox said the pattern uses one community’s historical injuries to support remedies for a wider set of groups. Muhammad cast local immigration patterns as a competing claim on finite neighborhood resources.
None of those speakers claimed to set state policy. They are pressing commissions, legislators, and city programs to stop treating “reparations” as a synonym for every equity goal. New Jersey and New York sit inside a broader wave of state and municipal governments exploring reparative frameworks. Evanston shows what happens when a city moves first with race-based rules and then meets a Fourteenth Amendment lawsuit.
Lawmakers can scribe narrow statutes, publish clear eligibility tests, and defend them in court. They can also keep expansive language and invite the same equal-protection fight now aimed at Evanston. The activists say only one of those paths still deserves the name reparations.
When government spends public money in the name of slavery’s victims, the classification rules are the policy. If officials blur lineage into race-wide politics, voters should treat that as a choice about constitutional limits, not a footnote about tone.
