To the Editor:
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders of this nation wrote that all people are created equal, endowed with rights no government may legitimately deny. We celebrate that declaration today. We also inherit its unfinished business.
Many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. That is not a reason to dismiss the Declaration. It is a reason to act to complete our obligation to it. The founding promise was written to outrun the founders’ own practice — and for 250 years, Americans have been fighting, legislating, marching, and dying to close that gap. In 2026, we have the opportunity to close it further. New Jersey has a specific obligation to lead that effort.
We were the last Northern state to abolish slavery — not until 1866, a full year after the Civil War ended. By the 1830s, New Jersey held more than two-thirds of all enslaved Black people in the North. Our postwar suburbs were built on federally subsidized redlining — maps drawn in the 1930s that marked Black neighborhoods “hazardous” and drained them of capital for decades. And, in Princeton, there is at least one record of a covenant that forbade the sale of the home to non-whites. Truck route State Highway 29 cuts through Trenton, a town with majority Black and Brown residents, increasing pollution-related health risks pollution for its residents. The $643,000 racial wealth gap between New Jersey Black and white families and other racial disparities in education, health, incarceration, and virtually all measures of human success and thriving are the compounded result of several legislative decisions over the centuries. This will not heal on its own. It requires intentional, legislative action.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided redress to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, was enacted because an anniversary reopened a wound the nation could no longer leave unattended. We are at a similar threshold. This year, New Jersey is commemorating “the intertwined histories of freedom and the African American experience.” Those intertwined histories require intertwined accountability.
A1665/S2838, the New Jersey Reparations Task Force Bill, would create a state commission to study this history, document its living consequences, and recommend evidence-based repair. It is not a radical proposal. It is a responsible one — the kind of deliberate, public, legally grounded reckoning that a democratic state owes its citizens when it has participated in their harm. As members of religious communities and organizations working towards justice, we ask our community and our legislators: what better moment than the 250th anniversary to acting on the promise? We ask the public to demand accountability from your legislators —ask them to vote “Yes” on A1665/S2838.