A lineage claim, documented
Freedmen’s Bureau contracts. Bank ledgers with your family’s names in them. Census sheets, claim files, marriage registers. The paper trail of what was taken from Foundational Black Americans sits in federal archives right now, and most of it is free to search.
This project exists to do three things with that record: help you find your line in it, measure the harm it documents, and design repair that can actually survive a courtroom and a budget vote.
1870 federal census, Georgetown County, South Carolina. Freedman’s Savings Bank depositor register, Shreveport branch, 1871. Freedmen’s Bureau agreement of labor, North Carolina, 1866. All public domain, National Archives Record Groups 105 and 29.
The heritage
Any argument that opens with harm and never reaches contribution has already conceded the wrong frame. Foundational Black American labor built the agricultural economy of this country. Foundational Black Americans have fought in every American war.
And they originated jazz, blues, gospel, rock and roll, soul and hip hop, which is to say they originated most of what the rest of the world hears as American culture. The debt is not owed to a victim class. It is owed to the people who did the building.
Freedpeople and teachers before the Beaufort library, South Carolina. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
Escaped slavery to become one of the country’s greatest orators and writers. His autobiographies and speeches put the reality of bondage in front of a public that preferred not to look, and he advised President Lincoln during the fight over freedom and citizenship. He also ended his life as the last president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, watching it fail.
The agricultural scientist at Tuskegee Institute whose work on crop rotation and soil restoration rescued Southern farmland exhausted by cotton. He then developed hundreds of practical uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes, so those farmers had something else to sell.
Widely recognized as America’s first self made female millionaire. She built a national hair care and beauty company from nothing and, more to the point, created independent income for thousands of Black women at a time when every structural obstacle was still fully in place.
The inventor and draftsman who made electric light practical by improving the carbon filament so it would last. He drafted the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and worked alongside Thomas Edison. Two of the defining technologies of the modern world passed through his hands.
Invented the safety hood that let firefighters and soldiers breathe in smoke and gas, then patented the three position traffic signal. If you have ever waited at a yellow light, you have used his idea.
The names above are the ones history agreed to keep. The Freedmen’s Bureau files and the bank registers are full of the ones it did not, people who signed labor contracts, registered marriages, opened accounts and put children in schoolhouses within months of emancipation. Finding them is the work on the rest of this site.
A reparations claim is a documentation problem before it is a political one. We teach the record sets that establish descent from the American system of slavery.
Federal statutes, state task force findings, Federal Reserve wealth data, Census housing data. We cite the source and the year, and we mark what is contested.
Grievance is not a plan. We work on eligibility rules, delivery mechanisms, funding sources, and the legal exposure every one of them carries.
The paper trail
People are told their history is unknowable past 1870. That is not true. The federal government generated an enormous administrative record of emancipation, and it survives. Here is what is actually in it.
Depositor registers from 1865 to 1874, 55 volumes across 29 branches. Entries give birthplace, residence, age, complexion, employer, spouse, children, parents and siblings. Many depositors signed with an X. Some early volumes name the former owner and the plantation.
NARA microfilm M816. archives.gov
The first federal census to enumerate formerly enslaved people by name. Earlier censuses recorded them as tally marks on slave schedules. The color column, marked B or M, is doing enormous work on this page. This is why 1870 is the wall.
NARA microfilm M593. Free to search on FamilySearch.
The Bureau registered the agreements freedpeople signed with former owners. Each one names the workers, often a whole family, with ages, roles and monthly wages. It is the first written record of a Black American being paid for their own labor.
Freedmen’s Bureau, NARA Record Group 105.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands ran from March 1865 until 1872 and left labor contracts, marriage registers, ration rolls, school and hospital reports, land applications and complaint records.
NARA Record Group 105. Searchable free through the Smithsonian NMAAHC portal.
Created by the Act of March 3, 1871. It received 22,298 claims seeking over $60 million and paid about $4.6 million. The files hold sworn questionnaires and neighbor affidavits, some of the richest genealogical testimony in the archive.
NARA. Partially digitized, free.
Produced between 1935 and 1940, grading neighborhoods A through D. The digitized set covers 148 urban regions across 28 states. Twentieth century harm has a paper trail too, and it is in color.
Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.
We keep a working guide to these record sets, with the free portals first and the paid ones marked as paid.
Open the research guideThe ledger
None of these are estimates from us. Each one is a published figure from a federal agency or a signed statute, with the year it was measured.
$285,000
Median white family wealth
Against $44,900 for the median Black family. The typical white family held about six times the wealth of the typical Black family.
Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 dollars. Published 2023.
29.1 pts
Homeownership gap
Non-Hispanic white homeownership stood at 74.5 percent. Black homeownership stood at 45.4 percent.
US Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Q2 2026, released July 28, 2026.
82,219
People already paid redress
Japanese Americans incarcerated during the Second World War received $20,000 each plus a formal apology under a law signed by President Reagan.
Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Public Law 100-383, signed August 10, 1988.
37 yrs
H.R. 40 has waited
First introduced by Rep. John Conyers in January 1989. Reintroduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley on January 3, 2025 with 114 cosponsors. Still sitting in committee.
congress.gov, 119th Congress. Status current as of August 2026.
A note on honesty: between 2019 and 2022 median Black family wealth rose 61 percent while median white family wealth rose 31 percent. The ratio narrowed. The dollar gap still widened by roughly $50,000. Both things are true, and we will not print one without the other.
The framework
Most public argument stalls on the first question and never reaches the other four. That is why nothing moves. The work RJ Williams does, on stage and inside OUR NATION, runs all five.
See how the states answered themThe most cited standard comes from William Darity’s sworn testimony on H.R. 40 in June 2019: at least one ancestor enslaved in the United States, established by genealogical documentation, plus self identification as Black on a state or federal legal document for at least ten years. No phenotype. No ideology. No DNA test.
House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, June 19, 2019.
California’s task force chose six harm categories for calculation: health disparities, mass incarceration and over policing, housing discrimination, devaluation of Black owned businesses, unjust property takings by eminent domain, and labor discrimination. That list is a template, and it is contestable. Argue with it on the merits.
California Task Force final report, June 29, 2023. 1,080 pages, more than 115 recommendations.
Direct cash. Housing capital. Business capital. Tuition. Land. Each one has a different tax treatment, a different administrative burden, and a very different level of public support. Choosing the form is a strategic decision, not a moral one, and it should be made with the numbers in front of you.
Evanston, Illinois funds its program from a three percent municipal tax on cannabis retail, dedicating $10 million over ten years. Providence used federal recovery funds. Amherst used free cash and cannabis revenue. The funding mechanism determines whether a program survives a change of administration.
City of Evanston Resolution 126-R-19, November 2019.
This is the question the movement skips, and it is the one that decides everything. Evanston’s program is in active federal litigation. Any race conscious program has to be built against City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. and the reasoning in the 2023 Harvard admissions decision. A design that ignores this is not a plan, it is a press release.
Flinn v. City of Evanston, N.D. Ill. Motion to dismiss denied March 2026, litigation ongoing.
The programme
Documentation on its own is a hobby. Argument on its own is a podcast. The plan only becomes a plan when the curriculum, the membership and the think tank are running at the same time.
Learn
Six modules over twelve to eighteen months. Heritage recovery, financial mastery, land and food sovereignty, governance and character, digital skills, and community design.
See the curriculumOrganize
The membership that turns dispersed families into a coherent force. Four tiers with a genuinely free one, local chapters in the South, mutual aid, and a transparent land fund.
See the tiersDecide
The think tank. Seven standing working groups, quarterly summits, and briefing papers that carry a budget and a metric. Home of the podcast.
How it worksBehind all three sits a ten year roadmap to a legally structured, member governed community on land in the southern United States.
See the roadmapWhat comes after
The forward argument almost never gets made, and its absence is why this movement struggles to recruit anyone who is not already convinced. Nobody joins a project that can only describe a wound. Describe the country on the other side of a program that works.
Not a utopia. Four measurable things, each of which is tracked quarterly by an agency that publishes the numbers, so anyone can check whether the program is working or not.
Read RJ’s positionClose a 29.1 point homeownership gap. The largest single lever on household wealth in the country, and the Census reports on it every quarter.
Business capital compounds where a one time payment does not. Ownership of the firm outlasts ownership of the check.
The most publicly supported form of repair by a wide margin, and the one that pays out across a working life rather than a fiscal year.
Greenwood mattered because money circulated inside the district before it left. Repair that ignores day two evaporates by day thirty.
The think tank
A members only working group that meets weekly and records the session as a podcast. Not a lecture series. A room where people who are serious about this argue over eligibility rules, funding mechanisms and legal exposure, and leave with something written down.
Weekly live session. One question per week, prepared in advance, recorded and published to members.
Working groups. Lineage and documentation. Harm measurement. Program design. Legal strategy.
A shared record. Every source we use goes into a members archive with a citation and a date, so the group argues from the same facts.
Start free on Community, or open the full curriculum from $47 a month.
Placeholder, replace before launch: session photography
Where the debate actually stands
A think tank that only reads friendly polling is a fan club. If you want to move this, you have to know exactly what you are up against and why people say no.
One caveat we state every time: no top tier probability sample pollster has asked the reparations question since 2021. Anyone quoting a fresh number is quoting an opt in panel. Treat it accordingly.
Pew found 30 percent of US adults said descendants of enslaved people should be repaid in some way, and 68 percent said they should not. Black adults said yes at 77 percent. White adults said yes at 18 percent.
Pew Research Center, fielded October 4 to 17, 2021.
Among supporters, 82 percent rated educational scholarships extremely or very helpful, 75 percent business assistance, 73 percent home buying support, and 57 percent cash payments. Cash was the least popular option in every racial group surveyed. That is a design input, not a defeat.
Pew Research Center, 2021 topline.
Gallup found 62 percent said the federal government has a responsibility to address the effects of slavery, including 54 percent of white respondents. But among that same group, 65 percent said all Black Americans should benefit and only 32 percent said only descendants of enslaved people should. Lineage based eligibility is the least popular part of the proposal, including among people who agree with it in principle.
Gallup Center on Black Voices, fielded October 2021.
Asked why they opposed reparations, 38 percent of opponents said descendants do not deserve them. Another 25 percent said the impact cannot be valued and 18 percent said Black Americans are treated equally today. Only 6 percent said it is too expensive. Arguing about the price tag is arguing with the wrong objection.
UMass Amherst and WCVB poll, April 2021.
Placeholder, replace before launch: RJ on stage
Speaking
RJ Williams speaks to churches, campuses, civic organizations, conferences and municipal bodies on lineage documentation, the evidentiary case for reparations, and the policy designs that are actually on the table right now.
Keynote, workshop, panel or a full teaching session where the audience leaves knowing how to search their own family in the federal record. Every talk is built from primary sources and every slide carries a citation.
Start here
Become a member for OUR NATION. You will get the weekly source digest while membership is still closed, and first call when the room opens.
