Reparations activists push for lineage-based eligibility, oppose broader social justice programs

A grassroots organization called the U.S. Freedmen Project has begun pushing back against what its members see as a fundamental misuse of reparations language in state legislatures across the country. The group's central argument is straightforward: remedies for slavery should go only to direct descendants of enslaved Americans, not to immigrants, other people of color, or marginalized groups more broadly.

Annette Wilcox, a spokesperson for the organization, laid out the complaint plainly. When cities and states invoke the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and convict leasing to justify new programs, she said, they then turn around and distribute resources to a much wider population. "You're using one group of people's history to then give remedies to a wider group," Wilcox told Fox News Digital. The group, composed of self-identified "Foundational Black Americans," has positioned itself as a corrective to what it sees as political opportunism—the packaging of distinct historical harms under a single umbrella of social justice.

The tension came into sharp focus in New Jersey, where Democratic lawmakers introduced the Truth, Reconciliation, and Repair Act, spearheaded by Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson and state Senator Angela McKnight. The bill, informed by research from the New Jersey Reparations Council, aims to establish a framework for state-level reparative policies addressing wealth disparities from slavery and systemic discrimination. But the proposed scope—which could include residents who are not direct descendants of enslaved people—drew immediate criticism from the U.S. Freedmen Project. Devine Prince, the organization's president, argued that lawmakers and certain advocates are conflating reparations with racial justice and social justice, three categories he insisted are distinct.

Similar concerns surfaced in New York during a public hearing for the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies at Hempstead High School on Long Island. Aubrey Muhammad, a supporter of lineage-based reparations, delivered pointed testimony about demographic change. He argued that immigration policy had brought roughly 25 million immigrants into the country, with 70 percent settling in poor Black neighborhoods. In Hempstead specifically, the Hispanic or Latino population grew from roughly 14 percent in 1990 to 45.3 percent today, while the Black population now comprises 43.2 percent of the village's roughly 59,000 residents. Muhammad framed this as a diversion of resources away from historic Black communities.

The U.S. Freedmen Project has become a vocal presence at public hearings across the country, consistently arguing that true reparations must be lineage-based—strictly reserved for direct descendants of enslaved people in the United States. Prince contended that this specificity is not merely a matter of principle but of legal survival. Broader race-based programs, he suggested, are vulnerable to constitutional challenge. He pointed to Evanston, Illinois, which became the first city to distribute government-funded reparations to Black residents to remedy historic housing discrimination, only to face a high-profile class-action lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, alleging the program's race-based eligibility criteria violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Prince's argument was that reparations programs face a binary choice: either they remain narrowly tailored to lineage and survive legal scrutiny, or they broaden into universal programs and cease to be reparations at all. "It either becomes something that is unconstitutional and will be challenged and shut down—like Evanston is on its way to being done—or you convert it into a universal program," he said. "That is not reparations." He acknowledged that broader social and racial justice initiatives are admirable but insisted they should not claim the legal and historical definition of reparations, which he defined as remedies for those who were enslaved, emancipated, and then subject to the badges and incidents of slavery.

Wilcox framed the stakes in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. "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," she said. The implication was clear: resources meant to address that specific historical injury are being diluted when distributed to other populations. Prince added a political dimension, arguing that Democratic-controlled blue states are using reparations language to build broad coalitions without addressing the distinct needs of specific constituencies. "There is a responsibility for any political entity to address its constituents directly and, more importantly, specifically—because that's how true coalitions are built, not by cobbling people together and pretending they all have the same plight and political priorities," he said.

The New Jersey lawmakers behind the Truth, Reconciliation, and Repair Act did not respond to requests for comment. As more states and municipalities explore reparative frameworks, the debate over who qualifies and what remedies should look like appears likely to intensify—both in legislatures and, increasingly, in courtrooms.