Commission to issue recommendations
Lisa Maria Nero, the town clerk for Greenburgh in Westchester County and a doctoral student in education at Long Island University, brought a lesson to Calvary Presbyterian Church in Newburgh on April 25.
For nearly a year, she has attended public hearings held by the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, whose nine members are examining the state’s history of slavery and its “lingering negative effects” on New York residents. The commission was created in December 2023 by legislation signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul. It is tasked with making recommendations to the Legislature on how to proceed.
“When we’re talking about systemic harms, I’m not sure people realize the extensive list,” said Nero. “Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Black codes, white domestic terrorism, racial massacres, racial property seizures, medical experimentation on Black Americans, sharecropping, convict leasing, Homestead Act exclusions, GI Bill exclusions and FHA [Federal Housing Administration] mortgage exclusions.”
In a series of meetings and hearings that began in July 2024, the commission has heard presentations from experts on the prevalence of slavery in New York before it was legally abolished in 1827, and the history of discrimination in education, housing, jobs, lending and other areas that came after emancipation. The most recent hearings have looked at gentrification and redlining, and the war on drugs.
Churches also discriminated. The Episcopal Diocese of New York acknowledged in a report from February that “countless Episcopal laity and clergy enslaved people and profited richly from the shipping and trade of Africans,” and that the church discriminated against Black congregations.
One of those congregations, St. Andrew’s in Beacon, was “unsupported by the diocese as urban renewal in the 1960s and ’70s demolished Black homes and businesses to build Route 9D,” according to the report.
While the diocese has created a $1.2 million reparations fund, the commission’s chair, Seanelle Hawkins, said its members are still “in the learning phase” regarding remedies. “Our work is to educate ourselves and work with a team of researchers, policy analysts and economists to understand what those recommendations are,” she said.
About two dozen people attended the hearing at Calvary Presbyterian, where they heard presentations by Shango Blake, an educator; Jackie Cody, who runs a Brooklyn nonprofit providing education and counseling services to teens and young adults; and Stephanie James Harris, director of the Africana Studies Program at Seton Hall University.
As a child in Jamaica, Queens, Blake said he experienced busing to a majority-white school where “all the Black children in the school were trapped in lower classes, while the students that weren’t Black were given the higher, more challenging classes” in math and science.
“Reparations acknowledges the harm, names who was harmed and directs resources and policies to repair that harm,” he said.
Slavery stood as the first harm. In a presentation to the commission in June 2025, Ned Benton, co-director of the Northeast Slavery Records Index, which covers nine states, listed some of its data for New York state: 8,835 records naming people who were enslaved; 43,111 naming enslavers, including 209 elected officials; 1,042 advertisements for fugitives and 559 records of sales.
In 2019, Historic Hudson Valley, based in Westchester County, produced a documentary, People Not Property, that acknowledged the earliest Black residents of the Hudson Valley and named their enslavers, including the owners of Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton and Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow.
Africans enslaved by Frederick Philipse (1626-1702), a Dutch merchant, built the manor, whose property covered about a quarter of modern-day Westchester. Philipse and his son would become major slave traders; the family is honored today by the name Philipstown.
“Slavery was the brutal foundation upon which the entire United States, north and south, was built,” according to the documentary.
In the 199 years since New York State banned slavery, Blacks have faced “formidable” obstacles, said Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University, in a presentation to the commission in April 2025.
Those barriers included bans on renting or buying housing in certain areas, getting loans for home purchases and being hired “in the vast majority” of New York City’s law and real-estate firms, insurance companies and corporations, even with a college degree, he said.
Even more “devastating,” said Naison: discrimination in construction jobs. “What this meant was that Black men with high school educations, in contrast to Irish and Italian men with comparable economic backgrounds, had no chance of getting high-paying construction jobs that would allow them to move out of public housing, or decaying urban neighborhoods, to purchase a home,” he said.
In response to its discrimination, the Episcopal diocese said its fund will be used to further excavate and document the church’s bigotry and provide financial support to programs in majority-Black neighborhoods and churches.
Some municipalities are also dedicating resources. In June 2025, the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, announced a plan to raise $105 million for housing, economic development and scholarship initiatives as reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre. The 1921 attack on a Black community by as many as 10,000 whites left hundreds dead and houses and churches burned and looted.
A reparations program in Evanston, Illinois, has provided up to $25,000 in housing assistance to the descendants of residents who experienced discrimination between 1919 and 1969 and has set aside money for small-business grants.
But Evanston is also a harbinger. Its program is facing a federal court challenge from a conservative group, Judicial Watch. A judge refused last month to dismiss the lawsuit, which claims the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
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