Can Mamdani Make Reparations a Reality in New York City?

Reparations for slavery and historic discrimination against African Americans once seemed like a pipe dream. But momentum for it has been building in the past five years in cities across America, including New York City, which has deep ties to slavery and has become an important testing ground of whether America is ready to make amends. 

A mayoral win on Tuesday by Democrat Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate and a reparations proponent, could propel the issue there, making New York one of the first cities in the U.S. to atone for its original sin of slavery. That victory could inspire the dozen-plus smaller cities seeking to rectify other historic racial injustices, creating a domino effect that expands the movement. 

But the authorities charged with examining whether such correctives could work in NYC are facing challenges that may foreshadow the problems that Mamdani, if elected, would face in pursuing reparations. Opposition from the Trump administration and its allies, as well as the price tag of Mamdani’s broader social justice agenda, could break the local movement’s momentum. 

Where Mamdani and his opponents stand on reparations

Mamdani was the only candidate who signed a pledge in May to champion reparations policies as mayor, and he has repeatedly defended that pledge publicly. Last week, he said that he would follow the recommendations of the city authorities tasked with studying this issue to decide whether that would entail a payout or a program.

“Reparations continue to be important because they’re a recognition of our city’s and our country’s history in terms of what not only we have denied Black New Yorkers, but also what we have taken from them time and again,” he told reporters and Capital B last week. “We establish these commissions for a purpose, and I think it’s important that we actually deliver on their findings.” 

New York City used enslaved African labor during its origination as a Dutch settlement in the early 1600s. When Britain took over the colony in 1664, “slavery grew harsher and more comprehensive,” writes Harvard University historian Tiya Miles. By the early 1700s, New York City had one of the largest slave populations of any city or settlement among the colonies, with nearly 40% of households using enslaved labor. 

Even after the state of New York fully enforced emancipation in 1827, Wall Street continued to play a central role in the country’s slave trade.

But it’s unclear how New York City could afford reparations for slavery. 

Neither of Mamdani’s opponents in the mayoral race — former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, the Republican Party nominee — have spoken about reparations on the campaign trail. But they have lampooned his claims that he will make the city more affordable via free buses, city-subsidized grocery stores and rent freezes.

A recent analysis from The New York Times found that those plans could cost New Yorkers at least $6 billion annually. But that excludes the cost of reparations, which alone could add billions to that tab. Duke University scholar William “Sandy” Darity estimates that New York would have to pay out $400 billion to close the racial wealth gap there, which he says is the best measure of an effective reparations program. By contrast, the city’s current total budget is $116 billion. 

“The left keeps trying to ride this tired hobby horse” of reparations, said Horace Cooper, chairman of the Black conservative network Project 21 earlier this year in a statement. “Hey lefties, get serious and join the effort to ‘Make America Great Again.’ In the process, blacks will prosper.”

But a 2024 poll conducted for the group New Yorkers for Reparations found that 48% of respondents supported “comprehensive New York state reparations,” including financial compensation, with 32% opposed. The same poll, found that 39% of voters would support candidates who favor reparations.

“I think he can make some steps forward on this,” said Philip Wesley White, 43, a high school teacher who lives in midtown Manhattan, speaking of Mamdani. “I think it should happen, based on what’s happened to us both during and after slavery, absolutely.”

But White also represents the kind of person that reparations advocates have often encountered — someone who supports reparations, but has doubts that it’s possible. Only 24% of Black New Yorkers — and 21% of the same poll’s respondents overall — said they believed reparations would actually happen.

The numbers represent a “hope gap,” says Trevor Smith, executive director of the BLIS Collective, which is helping lead reparations campaigns in New York and beyond. 

“A lot of Black folks don’t believe reparations are possible, and so I think we’re really focused on, not so much about which candidate supports reparations,” says Smith, “but rather making reparations seem possible.” 

How did New York get this close to reparations?

The U.S. reparations movement spans decades, spearheaded by groups such as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the National African-American Reparations Commission. But in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, more youth-organizing groups such as Get Free, the BLIS Collective, and the Justice League NYC, joined the movement. 

In September 2024, the movement yielded fruit in New York City, when the City Council authorized the city’s Commission on Racial Equity to study reparations. The council also established a “Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation process” to examine the city’s role in slavery. 

The city’s reparations legislation came from the cumulative work of these racial justice groups, which coalesced under the banner network New Yorkers for Reparations and includes legacy civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the National Action Network. 

The work in New York City and in the state has been largely funded by recently formed philanthropies such as the Decolonizing Wealth Project, which has doled out millions to help racial justice groups meet their reparations goals.

“Our mission is to make reparations a political priority for Gen Z and millennials, and we do that through creating narrative power, people power, and then, of course, political power,” said J.J. Briscoe, 24, a Get Free organizer based in New York City. 

Where have reparations been gaining ground?

The momentum for reparations in New York City comes amid several years of concrete wins by reparations advocates across the U.S. 

These efforts have largely taken place in states outside of the former Confederate South, in places where Black people weren’t enslaved. Their strategy has been to push for local reparations programs that are narrowly tailored to address not slavery, but specific harms in specific places. Most are targeted at 20th century racial injustices such as Jim Crow, redlining, urban renewal, and race riots. 

In the past year, there have been several breakthroughs.

In February, community developers broke ground in Portland, Oregon, on a roughly 2-acre plot that was once the commercial and cultural hub of a historic Black neighborhood. The land was gifted to Black community leaders by the city, which had seized and razed it in the 1970s under the guise of urban renewal. It is estimated that the property, owned by the Williams and Russell Community Development Corp., will be worth $120 million after development. 

In July, officials in Alameda County, California, started a fund to compensate surviving residents of an area formerly known as Russell City that was completely bulldozed off the map, displacing nearly 1,400 Black and Latino residents in the 1960s after it was declared “blighted.” The fund was seeded with $250,000 from the city of Hayward, California, and $650,000 from the county, which will be administered from a local foundation. 

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, after decades of failed attempts to win reparations for the 1912 Greenwood “Black Wall Street” massacre, Mayor Monroe Nichols — the city’s first Black mayor — announced a “Road to Repair” program in June. It mostly entails reclaiming land for survivors and their descendants. Under this plan, reparations will be fundraised via a private charitable trust — a process that has won buy-in from local Republicans. 

Where reparations stand in New York

Atlanta, Decatur, Georgia, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Missouri, Olympia, Washington, College Park, Maryland, and Asheville, North Carolina, are some of the other cities in various stages of reparations processes.

The big prize for reparations, though, would be New York City. It not only has the largest Black population of any U.S. city, but it also has the most diverse, given its large pockets of Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and African residents. 

However, its diasporic diversity also makes New York among the most challenging places to execute reparations — a large share of its Black population are immigrants who moved there long after slavery ended. The city will have to decide whether it will employ a narrowly tailored definition of reparations that redresses only those who can prove direct descendancy to enslaved victims, or if it will adopt a broader definition that captures Black residents with no direct connection to New York enslavement.

But that decision is likely miles away, because the work has been stalled largely due to the failure of Mayor Eric Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, to help move the city’s reparations plans forward. (Adams ended his bid for a second term in September, after a poor showing in the polls.) The city’s Commission on Racial Equity sued the mayor in August, saying he was refusing to comply with a mandate to release to the public a racial equity plan prepared by the commission.  

The commission is tasked with developing the reparations study in collaboration with the mayor’s office. But CORE Executive Director Linda Tigani said in her July testimony before the city’s Commission to Strengthen Local Democracy that their work has been “hampered” by this inaction.

“Apart from betraying the thousands of New Yorkers who voted to embed racial equity goals into government operations and dismissing the vision of a just New York expressed by our community partners, this failure represents a disdain for the rule of law inconsistent with a healthy democracy,” Tigani said. 

The Adams administration rebutted the allegations, with City Hall spokeswoman Liz Garcia saying the lawsuit “is incredibly misguided, short-sighted, and jeopardizes the wellbeing of the vulnerable communities it claims to protect.” 

How Trump’s executive orders will impact reparations

The biggest threat to New York’s reparations efforts may come from the Trump administration, which has been on a rampage to destroy programs that beckon discomfiting racial histories and eliminate race-based policies. His administration has inflicted punitive measures against cities, states, and universities for implementing racial equity initiatives, making this one of the worst political climates for reparations. 

Two jurisdictions in North Carolina recently fell into the Trump administration’s crosshairs for their reparations efforts. In September, the U.S. Justice Department warned Ashville and Buncombe County, North Carolina, that they could be investigated for carrying out their respective reparations programs, which address racial disparities in areas such as criminal justice, education, and housing. 

While Mayor Adams has been reluctant to buck Trump administration orders, Mamdani has made “Trump-proofing” the city a cornerstone of his campaign. 

The pledge Mamdani signed — created by the racial justice organization Get Free — calls for the next mayor to “champion policies that create real equality by rectifying historical discrimination and repairing ongoing inequalities.” It also calls on mayoral candidates to “use every tool at their disposal” to fight off MAGA attacks on civil rights. 

Polls have Mamdani up as much as 25 points over Cuomo, his closest contender, as of the week before the election. Mamdani is also maintaining a double-digit edge with Black voters over Cuomo. 

“No matter who’s the candidate, this is a moral objective from our standpoint,” said Smith, the BLIS Collective executive director. “Reparations needs to be something that is on the top of any mayor or governor’s agenda.” 

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