—Barrington Williams, B1Daily

The $35 million reparations fund in Baltimore has become a bureaucratic farce, with city officials locked in power struggles over who controls the money while not a single dollar has reached the people it was meant to help. But the deeper issue is this: Unless those funds go directly to the descendants of Freedmen, Black Americans whose ancestors were emancipated from slavery, this entire effort is a fraud.

Why Lineage Matters

Reparations were never meant to be a vague racial equity program or another slush fund for nonprofits. The moral and legal case for reparations is rooted in specific historical crimes, namely, chattel slavery and the broken promises of Reconstruction. Freedmen, the newly emancipated Black Americans, were denied land, voting rights, and economic stability despite federal assurances like “40 acres and a mule.” Their descendants carry that inherited trauma and systemic disadvantage.

Yet Baltimore’s fund risks becoming yet another racial grant program, watered down to include anyone who identifies as Black, regardless of lineage.

This is unacceptable.

If reparations aren’t exclusive to those who can trace their ancestry to American slavery, then they’re just another welfare scheme, divorced from justice.

Bureaucracy Over Justice

As highlighted in recent reports, city officials are too busy fighting over control of the funds to actually distribute them. Meanwhile, legitimate descendants of Freedmen, people whose families endured Jim Crow, redlining, and ongoing discrimination, are left waiting.

The Fox News segment exposes how vague eligibility requirements and political infighting threaten to dilute reparations into meaningless “community programs” rather than direct payments. This is a betrayal. Reparations must be individualized, not funneled through nonprofits or city contractors who skim administrative fees.

The Only Solution: Direct Payments to Proven Descendants

If Baltimore is serious about reparations, it must:

1. Restrict eligibility to Freedmen descendants: verified through genealogical proof.

2. Cut the middlemen: no nonprofits, no “advisory committees,” just checks to individuals.

3. Demand transparency: every dollar must be accounted for, not lost in bureaucracy.

Until then, this $35 million fund is just political theater, a way for politicians to pretend they’re addressing historical crimes while avoiding real justice. True reparations must be specific, direct, and unapologetically for Freedmen’s lineage. Anything less is a sham.

—Barrington Williams, B1Daily