City lawmakers are poised to pass legislation this week greenlighting a study on the legacy of slavery in New York City, including possible payment of monetary and non-monetary reparations.
City Council is expected to vote on Thursday on the measure authorizing the study, with proponents forecasting passage after false starts earlier. Councilmember Farah Louis of Brooklyn also said her bill “was initially expected to pass months ago,” but stalled because of “considerable doubts” from her colleagues.
“Even within our own ranks, there were those – particularly among Black and brown legislators – who were reluctant to engage with this sensitive issue, fearing the potential consequences,” Louis said.
For some advocates, passage of the bill would be groundbreaking development in a decadeslong battle for racial justice.
“We’ve been talking about reparations ever since the original promise when slavery ended – It’s been people’s lifetime’s work to try and see this into fruition,” said Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, who heads the Racial Justice Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
With adoption, New York would join at least a dozen other cities that have approved local reparations efforts. A national reparations bill has languished in Congress since the 1980s. New York City’s iteration lists a range of “reparative measures” the city can take beyond financial restitution, including providing medical care, legal services, public apologies and memorials.
It also comes after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation last year authorizing a statewide reparations study commission.
If approved, the city bill, which is being sponsored by nearly half of the 51-member chamber, will head to the desk of Mayor Eric Adams, the city’s second Black mayor.
Adams has voiced his support for reparations in the past — including after Hochul signed the state reparations bill into law.
“We never really dealt with or reckoned with slavery, and there are some institutions that wealth is directly connected to slavery. It’s not like it’s a mystery,” he said at a press conference in December.
The new measure would enlist the NYC Commission on Racial Equity, also known as CORE, and the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, in studying the role the city’s governing bodies and agencies played “in perpetrating and perpetuating historical and ongoing impacts of slavery and its legacies.”
The entities would be required to periodically publish progress reports on the study, and hold several public meetings before producing a final report, including its recommendations, to the mayor, no later than July 1, 2027.
The Council is also expected to pass Councilmember Crystal Hudson of Brooklyn’s bill establishing a “truth, healing and reconciliation process” in the city related to its history with slavery.
The measure “will move New York City forward in a way that places the pursuit of truth and justice at our city’s core,” Hudson said.
But advocates expect more pushback to come.
“We’ve seen a lot of conservative efforts to squash this but that’s not going to deter folks from keeping their eye on the goal and the goal is to get reparations,” Owens-Chaplin said.
‘I’ll believe it when I see it’
David Thomas lives on a street on Staten Island named after the white family that once enslaved his own relatives.
For him, reparations are merely a dream, and not one that he expects to see happen in his lifetime.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Thomas said.
Thomas’ perspective is based on the years he and his sister have spent fighting for the city to properly recognize their great-great-great grandfather – the last enslaved person born on Staten Island – after the city turned their ancestor’s final resting place, the Cherry Lane cemetery, into a strip mall.
He also participated in the campaign of former Councilmember Debi Rose, the first Black person to hold any political office on Staten Island.
“I just don’t think slavery and the impact of slavery has been discussed enough for people to really get a grip on it. Black people know about it but white people don’t really want to talk about it not realizing that what happened back then has consequences for today,” Thomas said.
Although New York City lacked the plantations present in other parts of the country, largely the South, enslaved people participated in the labor that built this city, according to Leslie Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University who co-edited an exhibit by the New York Historical Society on the history of slavery in the city.
“For a place like New York – and other colonies where plantation labor isn’t in use – we are looking at enslaved people who are brought to build the colony, the first enslaved people arrived in New York City in 1626,” Harris said.
Enslaved people, who were first brought by Dutch settlers, participated in myriad ways to build the infrastructure of the city, ensuring Europeans’ survival in what was then known as New Amsterdam, Harris said. Slave auctions were also held on Wall Street.
“All of these economies are rooted in slavery, they are rooted in the idea that enslaved people are producing the wealth for Europeans and they are producing goods that people want,” Harris said. “And everyone who is here, at that time, before say the 1800s sees slavery as the way to wealth, that is how you extract wealth from the Americans: slave labor.”
For Thomas, the question on what exactly the city can do for him still racks his brain.
“How do you put a dollar amount on something so sinful, so degrading? How do you put a price on that?” he said.
Over the summer, the city installed a memorial garden to commemorate the Cherry Lane cemetery where Thomas’ ancestor is buried. It’s a marked step in the right direction, according to Assemblymember Michaelle Solages, who sponsored the state reparations bill passed last year, and was present to see the garden’s unveiling in August.
“It is through efforts like this that we ensure our past is never forgotten, and that we continue to honor those who came before us,” the Long Island representative said in a statement.
Then-Assemblymember Charles Barron originally introduced the state reparations bill in 2017. Solages took it on in 2022 after his departure from the Legislature. She sees reparations as “an avenue for remediation and remedy for our community.”
She spent months rewriting the legislation and building support for the bill, and said she still faced obstacles to getting it passed. She attributed the bill’s success in part to the difficult conversations she had to have with others in the state legislature.
“It’s not just about a check – it’s about making sure that we repair the harm that was done,” Solages said.