After years of trying, months of delays, Reparations Commission may start soon

To Del. Aletheia McCaskill (D-Baltimore County), “in some ways, this moment still doesn’t feel real.”

This moment is the pending launch of a Reparations Commission, years after it was first proposed and 17 months after it was passed by lawmakers, vetoed by the governor as unnecessary and then overridden by the General Assembly.

“I am excited to see the Commission is moving forward and we will be convening to begin the historic work of examining the historic and modern impacts of slavery and racial discrimination here in Maryland,” McCaskill, a leader of the fight for the commission, said in a statement Friday.

Her optimism comes as the majority of the 23 members of the commission have been selected. The all-volunteer commission will include members of the House and Senate, representatives of Black business and real estate groups, an attorney with expertise in civil rights law or constitutional law, a mental health expert and two employees from the state’s four historically Black colleges and universities with expertise in the history of slavery, among others.

McCaskill will serve on the panel, one of two members appointed by House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel). The Governor’s Office of Appointments released a list Wednesday naming five of the governor’s six appointees to the commission, including the Rev. Rev. Robert Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore, who traveled to Annapolis to testify in support of the measure last year. A spokesperson for the governor said Friday that the sixth appointee could be named in the next few weeks.

The commission will be charged with assessing the impact of specific federal, state and local policies from 1877 to 1965, the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, to see how public and private institutions may have benefited from policies that led to discrimination. The commission is also charged with recommending appropriate reparations, from a statement of apology to monetary compensation or social service assistance.

The State Archives office will help staff the commission.

Bills creating the commission were sponsored by McCaskill and Sen. C. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George’s) and were among the top priorities for the Legislative Black Caucus last year.

The Senate version passed but was surprisingly vetoed in May 2025 by Gov. Wes Moore (D), the state’s first and currently the nation’s only Black governor. He said in his veto message that it was time to move past studies of the issue and toward action. That veto was easily overridden in a special session in December, setting the stage for the commission’s creation.

“It’s not surprising it has taken this long. The Commission is one thing, but the work of the commission is the real thing,” said Carl O. Snowden, convener of the Caucus of African American Leaders. Snowden is not a member of the commission.

“I’m interested to see what recommendations are implemented,” he said Friday. “There’s some in African American community who believe that it should be limited only to people who can prove that they’re descendants of slaves, and others take a much broader view that if you’re Black, and you lived in America during a certain period of time, even though you were not a descendant of slaves, you were still subject to the same kind of racism. It’s going to be interesting to see how the commission comes down on that.”

Maryland become of the few states in the nation with a statewide body to study the inequality endured by African descendants when the General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the measure in April 2025.

While she’s excited to see the commission get going, McCaskill understands it will be a challenge.

“Every time I think of how far we have come, I can hardly contain my emotions,” her statement said. “However, the reality is, there is an extremely detailed amount of work to push through. But I have no doubt that we will prevail!”