Colleagues,

In the near future, I will introduce legislation to create a Pennsylvania Office of Freedmen Affairs. This legislation is intended to establish a formal mechanism within state government to address the enduring impacts of slavery and the unfinished work of Reconstruction on the descendants of enslaved people.

Advocates for this proposal, including legal scholars, argue that the federal government’s retreat from Reconstruction left key commitments unfulfilled. They contend that the original Freedmen’s Bureau Acts of 1865–67 created unextinguished statutory obligations that were never fully carried out, and that these unresolved obligations continue to have consequences for the descendants of formerly enslaved people. This legislation would create a state-level office to engage with those claims and provide an institutional framework for addressing their relevance and implications for Pennsylvania today.

Establishing an Office of Freedmen Affairs would give the Commonwealth a dedicated entity to engage affected communities, coordinate policy development across agencies, and advance meaningful responses to the long-term impacts of slavery and Reconstruction-era failures in a structured and sustained way.

I invite you to join me in cosponsoring this legislation.