A state council tasked with exploring the history and impact of slavery in New Jersey last night held its second ever public meeting with a focus on segregation, taking input from residents who shared family stories about that experience.

Here in what was once known as the slave state of the North, as Melissa Rose Cooper reports, their accounts are helping the Reparations Council compile a report of recommendations and humanize the way slavery affects Black lives.

Today.

The question that we often confront around the work here is why convene the New Jersey Reparations Council?

And the answer is that although slavery shaped every aspect of New Jersey to many people in our state believe that it never happened here and that racial inequality is not a New Jersey issue.

But as you'll hear tonight, New Jersey's original sin of slavery and its lasting stain tell a very different story.

Ryan Haygood of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice kicking off the second public meeting of the New Jersey Reparations Council for two years, members will study the history of slavery and its effects on the state's current racial landscape in an effort to improve various disparities within the Black community.

The Council will not only propose bold strategic policies to repair the enduring harm to Black people from slavery, but it will also answer this foundational question and that is what kind of reparative system does New Jersey need to build to invest in for Black people here to finally be free, to thrive.

Free.

So when.

Housing inequity is one of the main issues the council says is proof of slavery's long lasting impact.

We have exclusionary zoning laws, which really worked through the police powers that each municipality has and through home rule, and New Jersey being a home state to ensure that the kinds of housing that would be affordable to Blacks would not be built in those areas.

And that discrimination, garden variety, private discrimination and not allowing Blacks to live in certain neighborhoods, not allowing Blacks to borrow, not allowing Blacks to take advantage of federal programs that made homeownership possible would be much more effective.

New Jersey currently, according to the the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, is the sixth most segregated school state in the country, and that has very serious consequences.

Even though New Jersey is known as being a state with very high educational levels that isn't experienced equally by all of its students.

And some of that harm comes as a result of the funding formulas that are true throughout the United States, but also in New Jersey, which link the amount of funding that schools get to property values in the school district.

Maisha Simmons of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also says where a person lives is linked to increasing gaps in health care.

As a funder of the council, the foundation is clear in our stance that the time has come for New Jersey to create a shared understanding of the harms caused to black New Jerseyans over the past four centuries and embarked on a process to remedy those injustices.

The Reparations Council plans to hold several additional public sessions before publishing its final report on Juneteenth 2025.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Melissa Rose Cooper.