Mamdani Leaves Door Open to Paying Reparations to Black New Yorkers

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

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What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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July 30, 2026

Jeffery C. Mays, The New York Times

**Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this week that New York City’s effort to determine potential reparations was “critically important.” Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times**

In a recent interview on The Root, Mr. Mamdani was asked whether he would support cash reparations if the city’s Commission on Racial Equity, which is currently studying the matter, recommended them. The mayor said he would have to wait for the commission’s report but acknowledged the city’s complicity in slavery.

“We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country,” Mr. Mamdani told the former New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in the interview. “Here in New York City, we were very complicit. And so, I look forward to whatever those findings are.”

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