About Us
Our Organization
To ensure that the broken promises of Reconstruction are fulfilled for today’s American Freedmen.
Our Mission
The United Sons & Daughters of Freedmen is an Organization dedicated to the purpose of honoring the memory of its Freedmen ancestors; protecting, preserving and marking the places made historic by Freedmen blood and heroism; collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the institution of chattel slavery, the overthrowing of Congressional Reconstruction and events thereafter; recording the participation of Freedmen in their patient endurance of hardship and patriotic devotion during and after the Civil War; fulfilling the sacred duty of benevolence toward the surviving families of American slavery and subsequent atrocities; assisting descendants of emancipated slaves in securing a proper education; honoring the service of veterans from all wars as well as active duty military personnel and cherishing the ties of friendship among the members of the organization.
Our Background and Accomplishments in the fight for Remedial Justice
(USDF) was incorporated as a nonprofit in the State of Georgia in May 2020. The organization attained its 501(c) 3 status and received its determination letter from the IRS on August 20, 2020. USDF seats a 6-member board of directors who govern the organization based on its bylaws.
Styled by its peers as one of the premier educational organizations on reparations in the country, USDF’s research on the era of Reconstruction and Freedmen status has been pivotal in the fight for reparations. USDF research has been cited during the initial presentation stages of California’s Reparations Task Force and helped shape its vote for lineage-based reparations.
USDF has given three (3) testimonies to the One High Point Commission, for the City of High Point, North Carolina, to study reparations. Due to USDF’s fact filled testimonies, the One High Point Commission unanimously voted that reparations should be based on one’s Freedmen ancestry as opposed to an ambiguous race standard.
USDF worked directly with California reparations organization ‘Coalition for a Just & Equitable California’ (CJEC) to help define the term "American Freedmen," which was then used in California's legislation Senate Bill No. 189 (section 14) for disaggregated data collection, and also assisted reparationists in Boston Massachusetts to have the same language inserted in the proposed bill, H. 3921, and New York’s proposed BiIl A07828A. Due to USDF's research, education, and advocacy, this is the first time the term “Freedmen,” in relation to descendants of those persons enslaved in America (excluding the Indian Freedmen), a term that the Supreme Court recently ruled was a “race neutral… under inclusive proxy for race” has appeared in any form of legislation since the Reconstruction era.
USDF co-hosted a panel discussion on reparations via invite from BlackPact headed by Los Angeles activist Tara Perry, accompanied by an outdoors concert in Leimert Park, located in the city of Los Angeles, California. USDF educated hundreds of Angelinos on the importance of reparations for the American Freedmen. USDF was featured in the Associated Press and several national and local newspapers across the country, including The Hill, The Grio, NBC, ABC, etc., for its recommendation with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in a push to have American Freedmen as the recognized name for the 40+ million descendants of persons emancipated in this country for the purposes of correct disaggregation of population data for statistical record keeping.
USDF’s resurrection of the term and status Freedmen has led several States to consider establishing a modern-day version of a Freedmen’s Bureau. California has submitted legislation to establish such an agency and the city of Cambridge has started a American Freedmen Commission due to USDF's tireless work and connections in the New England area.
USDF has collaborated with William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. On, August 4, 2021, William Darity Jr. and “Ali Bey” (Director of History and Research for United Sons & Daughters of Freedmen), cowrote “Allegiance, Birthright, and Race in America,” a research paper that was part of a roundtable on “Contested Citizenship,” organized in collaboration with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. This research paper has been crucial to the forward-thinking and understanding of American Freedmen citizenship status as it relates to reparations.