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Briana: Tonight, a special edition of NJ Spotlight News.

Two years in the making, a comprehensive study of slavery here in New Jersey that has often been overlooked.

The New Jersey Reparations Council presented its findings on this Juneteenth holiday.

>> Think about your ancestors being enslaved in New Jersey after the start of the Civil War.

That is a harrowing concept to me, and I know that is a lived experience of people here in this room.

Briana: Now, how to begin repairing the harms that slavery caused to so many and the discrimination and segregation that still exists in the state today.

>> So it was by policy design and practices that we got here, and it is by policy design and practices that we will get out of this.

Briana: NJ Spotlight News begins right now.

♪ Announcer: From NJ PBS Studios, this is "NJ Spotlight news" with Briana Vannozzi.

Briana: Good evening, and thanks for joining us on this Friday night.

I'm Briana Vannozzi.

Today marks the New Jersey State holiday commemorating Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce the freedom of enslaved people.

That was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

And despite what many history books have written into our collective memories, slavery was not just a sin of the South.

Some of its deepest roots were right here, in New Jersey, considered the slave state of the North.

In 1830, for example, the enslaved population here was over 2200 people, far beyond that of any of our neighbors in the Northeast.

And even after Juneteenth, it took New Jersey another roughly six months to ratify the state constitution and abolish and formally end slavery in the North.

In 2023, the state formed an organization to study that history and reparations as a legacy of slavery.

The New Jersey reparations Council brought together state and national experts and this week revealed findings and recommendations after two years of intensive work.

Tonight, we will dig deeper into the state's role in history and its ties to the current racial landscape, the damage that was done, and more importantly, how it can be repaired.

Here are some excerpts from Thursday night's presentation in Newark led by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

>> We wanted to begin, of course, with the beginning.

Why is it so important to tell the truth about New Jersey's history with slavery?

>> Thank you so much.

I can only think of my late grandmother's words right now in this moment, that would be, "New Jersey was up here playing in our faces."

[Laughter] For 150 years, New Jersey has been trying to decorate or make shinier shackles of slavery.

Mis-educating the public.

Mis-educating its people, trying to convince us that the violence was somehow softer, that the degradation and dehumanization was somehow lighter.

But we know gold shackles are still shackles, right?

And that really is the crux of the story here in New Jersey, and we will continue to confront this today.

-- confront these truths today.

As has been alluded to, New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish slavery.

And I put an asterisk on abolish slavery, because New Jersey, like many states, has an opportunity to excise the loophole of slavery for the -- but for the punishment of a crime still allow slave labor and involuntary servitude in the carceral system.

[Applause] So even though there was gradual abolition starting in 1804, New Jersey as a state was doubling down as other northern states were moving closer to abolition.

And this reality was not just -- it was transformed from, here is an abolition law to the cruel deception of an 1864 law of apprenticeship.

And so, that forced enslaved Black people to be forever apprentices to their slaveholders, which was effectively slavery again.

And New Jersey was not exceptional in this.

Many states carried that same practice.

But I think -- but think about that.

Think about your ancestors being enslaved in New Jersey after the start of the Civil War.

That is a harrowing concept to me, and I know that is a lived experience of people here in this room.

So they were deliberate choices as to how does history by historians and by state research reports, state publications as late as the 1970's New Jersey's history.

Our public education narrative committee looked into this and I just want to shout out my co-chair attorney Kenya Tyson and my committee members, attorney Jennifer Taylor, Professor Mark Pratasevich and Tim Eaton and authority on forward -- Dion Ford.

I appreciate you and the work we have done together.

We looked at this extensively.

We have people like Henry Cooley in 1896 who has a study of slavery in New Jersey.

I just want to quote what he says here directly.

"Slaves work, on the whole, well treated in New Jersey.

In most cases, they lived in close personal relations with master families and were regarded by him.

-- by him."

come on, now.

Also a compilation was marked as imported labor, not as the slavery that it was.

What is sickening beneath even the close relations to the master and the ill description of that is that the close proximity meant sexual violence, it meant deprivation of life and liberty.

It meant deprivation of additional rights.

It meant punishment, which was often punishment to death.

How many of you are from Bergen County in this room?

All right.

We've got a few hands.

A county that is now only 6% Black, but had the most enslaved Black people north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Right?

Areas of New Jersey having, you know, some areas having over 40% of its population being of enslaved people.

This is New Jersey's history.

[Applause] >> Walter, can you help us understand how specifically the institution of slavery has impacted Black wealth building over time and up to the present day?

>> Absolutely.

Thank you for the amazing question and the honor of serving with my panelists this evening.

This is a miracle.

A series of miracles for me.

My mother and father lived the reality that you described.

I had an older brother who was put on a farm at age five and beaten mercilessly for the better part of 30 years, until his parents managed to get them away from there.

So this strikes very deeply with me.

And the institution of slavery in New Jersey.

When I started my work in 1996 and 1997 trying to uncover these stories, people laughed in my face and said there is no Black history in New Jersey worth telling.

Slavery was always a positive good here, it helped make our communities better.

There are historians walking around the state now who said these things to me.

Who have published extraordinary books and are taken quite credibly.

>> I would love to know what those books are later.

[Laughter] >> I will pass the word.

So, the institution of slavery in New Jersey -- our committee on the history of slavery did a magnificent job in giving a gift not just to our state but to the nation and our world by moving us away from a set of assumptions about the plantation as the primary way to understand enslavement in this part of the world.

By going back to the 16 70's and 16 80's and 1720's, we see an entirely different portrait of what slavery was.

And at the core of it is the idea of they were not just for tobacco or cotton or sugar, but the labor of clearing roads, the labor of building homes, the labor of establishing what would come to be known as se ttler colonialism -- settler colonialism.

That was done on credit extended against African and African-American bodies.

Our ancestors were the currency used to underwrite the wealth that was then generated over the coming centuries.

So our economic justice report begins with what I found in my work was one of the enormous tragedies -- the way that we claimed to desegregate or integrate destroyed the basis of Black liberation that existed in the first half of the 20th century.

The example that I run across and constantly thereto -- it is the industrial school.

Among all the stories that people laughed at me and told me, what are you talking about, that is impossible, that could never exist, old Ironsides was the miracle of New Jersey that built a professional and technical Black middle-class 30 years before the federal civil rights laws.

The ability for the NAACP to train Baker to inspire Charles Hamilton Houston to put Thurgood Marshall on the path to end the Brown decision comes right through this state and runs right through Bordentown.

It is a real Wakanda that existed in this state.

And it closed because the state said, the education must be inferior there.

In fact, it was just the opposite.

In fact, wherever you saw Black educators working, the education they offered was better than the segregated white schools, because they had to be.

No example is better than the one I spend the most time talking about now, it is a place that the people who worked and lived there called the Black Brain Belt.

It was a set of communities from Middletown New Jersey down to Belmar where over 1000 families led by scientists, technicians, engineers lived between 1945 and 1995.

There are so many stories to tell about these families that built the technologies that we all use today.

The fact that you have a mobile phone or we are broadcasting this on Facebook would not have been possible without those scientists.

My single favorite example is Walter McAfee.

Graduates from Michigan with his degree in physics and engineering in 1945.

Over the next six years spends all of his time calculating the speed of the moon relative to the earth.

Why?

He is working at a signal station in Belmar.

And he wants to calculate whether he can bounce a radio signal off the moon and have it come back to earth at a predictable spot and it can then be decoded, translated, and understood.

His success convinced President Eisenhower to create an entirely new level of top-secret classification.

The work that he did for the Navy was called Project Diana, after the Greek goddess of the moon.

By bouncing that signal and receiving it directly, he created all of the satellite communications technologies that we use.

[Applause] Most especially as we watch the news today, the missile guidance technologies that we use.

No one declassified his work until 2006.

No one could know his name or the name of the project or what it meant for all of us.

Probably the thing that won the Cold War for us.

And that is just one story.

We are the bearers of the wealth and the strength and the character not just of this state, but of democracy in this world.

When we say there are reparations needed and preparations must be paid, it is for the good of humanity.

This is the work that we put forward in the report for economic justice, is we must let loose and stop crippling the people who make freedom real.

And so, that is the challenge we need to meet going forward tonight.

That is how slavery has crippled us, segregation has crippled us and lead to these boundaries where most of us can never dream of reaching the kinds of potential that the stories of Bordentown or the Black brain belt show us our real.

These Wakandas, they will tell you they are not real and never existed, you all sitting here are Wakanda.

[Applause] Let us take our time and realize our strength and move forward together tonight.

Thank you.

[Applause] Briana: What you are just there only scratches the surface of New Jersey's deep-rooted history in slavery.

Reparations will not be easy when you consider a poll released this week ahead of Juneteenth which found the residents are largely unaware the state allowed the enslavement of black people.

38% were unsure, while 18% did not know the history.

But nearly all said, they support teaching about slavery and racism in our public schools and acknowledged the negative consequences Black New Jerseyans face today as a result of the past.

The report lays out a blueprint for that repair.

Our next guest joins us to talk about it, the senior counsel for the New Jersey Institute of social justice.

Great to have you here in the studio.

I know you all had a late night so I appreciate it.

A lot of the repair work and reparations work talks about starting with the racial wealth disparity.

Why begin there?

>> Sure.

First of all, thank you so much for having me this afternoon.

Really I think part of the reason why we focus on the racial wealth gap is because the racial wealth gap here in New Jersey, which is one of the largest in the country, as a -- is a direct result of the history of slavery in New Jersey.

And we can trace in our report the history to the racial wealth gap.

New Jersey first started off as a colony.

It created a kind of racialized separation of property distribution in New Jersey where white settling families were given 150 acres of land and an additional 150 acres of land for each enslaved person that they brought with them.

That laid the ground for the racial wealth gap that we see today and the maternal mortality gap and infant mortality gap, the incarceration gap and all the racial inequities we see today in New Jersey.

We begin with that number because it helps focus people's attention on the manifestation of history in our present.

We are living in the world of slavery made.

-- that slavery made.

Briana: What is that gap today in 2025 numbers?

>> The gap between white households and black households in New Jersey -- The racial wealth gap is $643,000.

I will repeat that once again for your audience.

$643,000.

It is one of the largest, if not the largest racial wealth gaps, here in the United States.

Briana: A lot of what the report uncovers is that this was not just a culture or a way of thinking.

The government, the entire way that the government was set up was based on this.

And so it was not just the manual labor, but it was also so much intellectual labor and power that New Jersey was built on.

So how does the Institute and all the folks that you worked with even begin to separate the areas where this works needs to be done, can you sort of summarize it for us?

>> Sure.

It was by policy design and practices that we got here and it is by policy design and practices that we will get out of this.

So part of that is that week -- we call for a blueprint for repair in our report.

We call for comprehensive reparations.

We seek to strengthen our democracy and expand access to health care and eliminate environmental racism as well as dismantle the kind of racist policing and incarceration practices here in the state as well as close the racial wealth gap and finally to end segregation in our housing and school systems.

That is the work that is focused on our compressive reparations package which includes both payments and policies and practices.

Briana: What do those payments look like?

Who does the Institute and by a large through everyone you spoke within this report believe should get those reparations?

>> We take a comprehensive approach, that means in our direct payments policy proposals, we call for three kinds of direct payments.

First, we call for payments to the descendants of enslaved people in New Jersey for the uncompensated labor of their ancestors, that is one.

Two, we also call for payments to all Black people in New Jersey for pro slavery harms.

-- for post slavery harms.

You can think of this as kind of for damages, in a way, but also for the harms that were suffered, for pain and suffering in a way, and third, the last payment is for direct payments to individuals in Black households to close the racial wealth gap in New Jersey.

On the current trajectory that we are on, if we did not make those kinds of payments, the racial wealth gap in New Jersey would not close for another 220 years.

Briana: Wow, but how do you put a number on it, what is that number look like?

-- does that number look like?

>> We calculate the number based on the number that we talked about earlier, the $643,000 racial wealth cap and number of households in New Jersey.

If you look at the report, we do have calculations for that.

I would recommend your readers and your audience take a look at that number and take a look at how we come up with the total number.

It is a larger number.

But it is significant because of the 200 plus years of wealth accumulation based on the exploitation and extraction of Black families here in New Jersey.

Briana: That's interesting, because New Jersey at one point, many years ago -- many, many years ago did pay reparations, but not in the form that we are talking about right now.

What does that look like?

-- did that look like?

The state dedicated at that time 30% of its budget for it.

>> In 1804, New Jersey passed what is called the gradual abolition act.

But that is really a misnomer.

There was really no abolition.

Really what was involved from 1806 to 1811 was the state paying essentially reparations to enslavers.

And at times close to 30% of its budget went to paying enslavers for essentially freeing enslaved people, but that actually never actually materialized.

So the state realized that they were going to go broke from paying a significant amount of their budget to the enslavers and ended the program in 1811.

But what we get from that is that the state valued enslaved people's labor and the contribution in such a significant way that they were willing to pay enslavers for that value.

So what we take from that now in 2025 is that if the state can do that in 1806, why can't the state of New Jersey in 2025 invest in its Black communities and build a new New Jersey where Black families can flourish?

Briana: That tees me up to where we go from here, what's next?

When I think about an apology if you will, there is the apology and there is the taking accountability.

From everything laid out in this report, that accountability has not been taken.

Where do we go from here?

>> There are multiple ways we can go from here.

First, I think the state of New Jersey needs to acknowledge in a way that it has previously not in a way that it did in 2008 -- Briana: When the state made a formal apology.

>> Now it needs to update that apology, accepting responsibly -- responsibility for the harms that it initiated and oversaw.

And that it guided through.

And second, it needs to begin to think about how to invest in Black communities throughout the state.

That means direct payments, but also structural changes, meaning ending the harms that are contributed to ration inequalities in our current day and coming up with new practices and policies.

We have close to 100 policy recommendations, some that can be addressed in the short term and some that are obviously longer-term, because this is a process.

Comprehensive preparation is a process.

It took over 200 years for us to get here and that will take time to get here.

It will take commitment.

But we have the recommendations and urge your readers and legislators and people here in New Jersey to take up the reading in the report.

Briana: We talk about the monetary, but it comes down to the policy and structural change.

Sean Pierre, Thanks so much for coming in and sharing this work with us.

We really appreciate it.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

But make sure you tune into reporters' roundtable this weekend where we hear from gubernatorial candidates Mikey -- Mikie Cheryl and Jack Ciattarelli in their first joint appearance since the primary speaking at the NJ BIA forum.

Plus, David will have a panel of local journalists talking about all the week's big political headlines Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m. Then on Chat Box, David talks with U.S.

Senator Andy Kim about the efforts by Democrats to push back against the Trump Administration on federal budget cuts, immigration enforcement, international conflicts and more.

At a Saturday night at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday at 10:30 a.m. right here on NJPBS.

I'm Briana Vannozzi.

For the entire team at NJ Spotlight News, thanks for being with us for this special edition of NJ Spotlight News.

Have a great weekend.

We will see you right back here on Monday.

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