16-05-2025
Wes Moore, the nation's lone Black governor, vetoes bill to study reparations
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Friday vetoed a reparations bill that would have required the state to define the economic harms to Black descendants of enslaved people and recommend remedies, dealing a blow to reparations supporters who counted on the only Black governor of a U.S. state to be an ally.
The veto of a reparations study was the highest profile of two dozen vetoes Moore issued late Friday, the most the governor and rising Democratic star has fought back against the Democratic-controlled legislature during his two and a half years in office.
'I was very transparent with the leadership and members of the General Assembly that anything that fails to meet the urgency of this moment, I will not sign it and it must wait for another time,' Moore said in an interview, calling the reparations study 'the most challenging' of his veto decisions.
'A study group that is saying that they're going to present reports to the governor in two years is fine. But the governor is ready to engage now,' he said.
Moore met with Black leaders as recently as Thursday to say he was wrestling with it.
Even before his veto of the bill, Moore's unwillingness to embrace a reparations study fostered a mix of betrayal and resignation from some leading Black supporters, who saw the state's first Black governor — a candidate who campaigned on tackling the racial wealth gap — as a natural champion in the century-long fight to redress slavery's generational harms.
Despite his comments that he is not running for higher office, Moore is widely seen as a potential presidential contender — a pursuit that could be complicated by a record of supporting a policy of reparations, which according to polling is politically divisive nationwide.
'Everyone is upset about this,' Sen. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George's), who led a rally outside Moore's official residence in Annapolis last week urging the governor to sign the reparations bill, said about Moore's lack of support.
'There will be a real backlash from the Black community, not just in Maryland, nationwide,' Muse said before the vetoes were issued, adding that the leaders of the General Assembly's Black Legislative Caucus, of which he is a member, are broadly baffled by Moore's reluctance.
'I've had two conversations with him about it,' Muse said. 'We all walk away from it the same way: What in the world?'
To advocates, Maryland tackling reparations represented both a concrete and symbolic victory.
The state is bounded by the Mason-Dixon Line and is the historical home to Black luminaries for equality, such as Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall, as well as figures who worked to protect slavery. Roger B. Taney, a Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court opinion in 1857 ruling Black people were not citizens, was a Maryland resident prominently honored at the State House until 2017.
Proponents of reparations say Black Americans continue to suffer the lingering effects of slavery and discrimination. Opponents argue that the harms caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws are in the distant past, saying it's not fair to make citizens who were not involved in racist government policies pay for the misdeeds of others.
Federal efforts to enact reparations have stalled for years, but three states and several cities have taken action to study or implement reparations, including: California, New York, Illinois and the District.
'For him not to do this would really be a slap in the face to the momentum of the movement,' Nkechi Taifa with the Reparation Education Project, a national organization, said of Moore before the veto was issued.
'He must not be cowered by the current politics of the issue,' she said. 'Why not establish just a task force? It's just a study and a commission to recommend amends. What is wrong with that?'
Within Maryland, some advocates for repairing the lingering harms of discrimination have echoed Moore's reasoning and said that further study just slows down action.
Maryland has already created several government-backed studies, among them a commission on lynching and the Underground Railroad. Others argue no action has focused exclusively on reparations, and studies are key tools to lay the necessary foundation to pass reparations — documenting the harms and establishing consensus on a fix.
Maryland's legislation would have allowed a commission to recommend any remedy — a structure that one expert warned might lead to a lack of progress.
Muse, the state senator who sponsored the legislation, noted the legislation passed with veto-proof majorities and Black leaders have been discussing whether to override Moore if a veto were issued.
'If he doesn't sign it, we're coming back to do it again,' Muse said in an interview Thursday. 'We have the votes.'
Moore campaigned on tackling systemic racism and the lingering impacts of discrimination, including racist home-lending practices and disparities in health and education.
In office, he has funneled millions to Maryland's historically Black colleges and universities, which a court determined had been underfunded for decades, and often points out in speeches that 'we don't have an eight-to-one racial wealth gap because one group is working eight times harder.'
In the interview, Moore passionately defended his record of advocating for Black families and equality, and he said he rejects any suggestion that he vetoed the reparations study because it would be a political liability to a presidential bid — which he has said he is not launching.
'I never find it to be a political liability to be able to address the racial wealth gap,' he said.
He pointed to his focus on steering more state contacts to Black-owned businesses, issuing a mass pardon on marijuana convictions that disproportionately impacts Black residents and putting cash into a child care subsidy that also helps lower-income Black residents more than any other group.
'I am fully committed to being able to make sure we are creating a culture repair in the state of Maryland,' he said.
Moore said the vetoes issued Friday broadly fell into three buckets: legislation that distracted state agencies from their core missions, proposals with costs that cannot be endured at a time of historic budget problems and regional economic uncertainty, and laws mandating reports and research on policy solutions that either Democrats already widely agree upon or would be inefficient to study rather than act.
'In normal times, these would be easier bills for me to say, 'well, you know, I'll just go ahead and sign them.' But these are just not normal times,' Moore said, pointing to multibillion budget deficits, and a stagnant economy state economy further bruised by the Trump administration's cuts to the federal workforce, which he called 'an all-out attack.'
Moore also vetoed a study that would design a tax on carbon polluters to pay for the cost of climate change programs, already law in New York. Moore said a model to do this at the state level already exists elsewhere, and the policy solution makes more sense at the federal level.
'We're no longer in position to fund and staff studies for which a significant amount of work has already been done in other states, or often by academic institutions, and particularly when they can do things, you know, faster and cheaper,' he said.
Baltimore political organizer Dayvon Love, director of the advocacy group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, said he personally made a final pitch on Thursday to Moore, arguing that Maryland has never done a reparations study before.
'People have studied the problems, studied the inequity, but there hasn't been a rigorous and precise strategy in how you operationalize a reparations effort,' Love said in an interview.
Love pointed to the sharp racial division in public opinion on reparations, and said it was hard to view Moore's choice without taking that into consideration — especially in a state like Maryland, where 30 percent of the population is Black and the state has an unprecedented concentration of Black people in power in state government.
While 77 percent of Black Americans support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, only 18 percent of White Americans do, according to 2022 Pew Research poll.
'Reparations is a very controversial policy in the White mainstream," Love said. 'I think, if he were to veto, it would demonstrate a level of capitulation, and constitute a political calculation in an attempt to not alienate that White mainstream.'
William A. Darity, an economist and social scientist at Duke University who has written extensively on reparations, said Maryland's proposed study had an admirable and necessary truth-telling mission, but any state-level effort was insufficient.
He noted that is partly because states lack the resources to pay for the full economic harms of slavery, and also partly because descendants may no longer live where the harms took place — families of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre may no longer live in Oklahoma, for example.
He said he and his colleagues have argued for years that, at minimum, a reparations plan should eliminate the racial wealth gap, which he estimated would cost roughly $400 billion in a state with an annual budget of only about $65 billion.
'The problem here is the sheer inability of a state government to execute a comprehensive program of reparations for black descendants of U.S. slavery,' he said in an email, adding that he does not believe people eligible for reparations 'should settle for less than is due.
'We should not take a fragment of a loaf or even half of a loaf in the form of something labeled 'reparations' when it falls short of what is due,' he said. 'And, intrinsically, state and municipal efforts will fall short of what is due.'
Katie Shepherd and Emmanuel Felton contributed to this report.
