NEW YORK (AP) — New York City lawmakers on Thursday approved legislation to investigate the city’s significant role in slavery and consider reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.
The bill passed by the City Council still needs to be signed by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. Adams did not respond to a request for comment.
New York abolished slavery entirely in 1827. But businesses, including the forerunners of some modern banks, continued to profit financially from the slave trade—probably until 1866.
“The reparations movement is often misunderstood as just a call for reparations,” Assemblywoman Farah Louis, a Democrat who sponsored one of the bills, told the City Council, explaining that systemic forms of oppression continue to affect people through redlining, environmental racism and underfunded services in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
The bills would direct the city’s Commission on Racial Equity to propose solutions to the legacy of slavery, including reparations. It would also create a truth and reconciliation process to establish historical facts about slavery in the state.
One of the proposals also calls for the city to place a sign on Wall Street in Manhattan marking the site of New York’s first slave market.
The commission would work with an existing state commission that is also considering the possibility of slavery reparations. A report from the state commission is expected in early 2025. The city’s effort would not have to produce recommendations until 2027.
The city commission was created out of a 2021 racial justice initiative during the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. While it was initially expected to consider reparations, it instead led to the creation of the commission, which tracked cost-of-living data and added a commitment to remedy “past and ongoing harms” to the preamble to the city’s charter.
“Your call and the call of your ancestors for reparations have not gone unheard,” Linda Tigani, executive director of the Commission for Racial Equity, said at a news conference ahead of the council’s vote.
A financial impact analysis of the bills estimates the studies will cost $2.5 million.
New York is the latest city to study reparations. Tulsa, Okla., home to an infamous massacre of black residents in 1921, announced a similar commission last month.
Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first city to offer reparations to Black residents and their descendants, including paying out single $25,000 payments in 2023, PBS reported. Eligibility was based on harms suffered as a result of the city’s discriminatory housing policies or practices.
San Francisco approved reparations in February, but the mayor later scrapped the funds, saying reparations should instead be made by the federal government. California budgeted $12 million for a reparations program that, among other things, helped black residents research their ancestry, but it was defeated in the state Legislature earlier this month.
