Freedmen Nation / FRFT Announces Collaboration with CBAC to Support the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records

Freedmen Nation and the Freedmen Reparations Fund Trust are proud to recognize our collaboration with Concerned Black American Citizens, Inc. in support of the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records and its Reclaiming Our Legacy initiative.

In January 2026, CBAC and the Freedmen Reparations Fund Trust / Freedmen Nation entered into a Business to Business agreement establishing a formal foundation for cooperation around Freedmen genealogy documentation, family-history recovery, training, and status verification. This agreement supports the growth and development of Freedmen Nation while strengthening broader Freedmen family infrastructure through verified records, trained genealogy support, and community-based documentation services.

As part of this agreement, the Center selected Freedmen Nation as its Freedmen status verification provider, recognizing the importance of a trusted verification framework grounded in documented genealogy, historical evidence, and consistent standards. This role is central to the collaboration because the work is not only about tracing family history. It is also about helping families establish a verified Freedmen record that can be preserved, recognized, and used to support future institutional benefits.

A key component of this collaboration is Freedmen Nation’s support of the Center’s Reclaiming Our Legacy initiative through the Freedmen Genealogy Specialist training pathway and the Freedmen status verification process. CBAC will invite local prospects to Freedmen Genealogy Specialist screening sessions and provide information about the FGS 10-hour self-paced course. Once verified and trained, local participants may volunteer at the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records to assist families with tracing lineage, building family trees, establishing kinship connections, and preparing documentation for formal Freedmen status verification through Freedmen Nation.

Freedmen Nation and FRFT are honored to be trusted in this role. CBAC’s use of the Freedmen Nation status verification process and FGS training pathway helps validate the growing need for structured Freedmen family infrastructure, verified historical records, and trained community-based genealogy support. Families served through the Center may then be encouraged to participate in the Reclaiming Our Legacy: 500 Freedmen Family Census after completing verification through Freedmen Nation.

The Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records is located at:

901 Fayetteville Street, Suite 204A

Durham, NC 27701

(919) 880-1312

CBAC’s Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records comes with a major five-year goal: to identify and document 500 Freedmen families through the Reclaiming Our Legacy initiative. This is not just a genealogy project. It is part of a larger restoration process that connects family history, public records, legal identity, community memory, and institutional continuity.

Through this collaboration, Freedmen Nation and FRFT are positioned to support the Center’s work by helping provide a structured pathway for genealogy research, documentation review, training, and Freedmen status verification. Families participating in the 500-family documentation initiative who seek formal Freedmen status verification may be directed through Freedmen Nation’s verification process.

This also means participating families will now have a clearer pathway to access the institutional benefits connected to the Freedmen Reparations Fund Trust and the American Freedmen Legal Fund. Through verification, families may be connected to Trust-based resources, historical preservation initiatives, genealogy support, advocacy education, administrative notices, and AFLF-related support where appropriate and available.

This matters because Freedmen history cannot be protected by general memory alone. It must be documented, organized, verified, and preserved in a way that future generations can rely on. The records of our families are not simply names on paper. They are evidence of identity, kinship, community formation, labor, land, survival, and constitutional history.

For too long, Freedmen families have been forced to carry the burden of proving what history already knows. Records were separated. Families were renamed. Land was taken. Schools, churches, cemeteries, and public institutions were disrupted or denied proper preservation. The result has been generations of confusion, misclassification, and loss.

The Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records creates an opportunity to rebuild that foundation in a permanent home. By connecting CBAC’s community-based vision with the existing verification and institutional framework of Freedmen Nation and FRFT, this collaboration can help establish a stronger model for how Freedmen records should be recovered, protected, and used.

Freedmen Nation’s verification process is designed to protect the integrity of Freedmen status by relying on documented lineage, historical anchors, and family record review. This structure helps prevent fraud, confusion, and misclassification while giving families a clearer path to understand and preserve their place in the Freedmen historical record.

The Reclaiming Our Legacy initiative is also important because it recognizes that restoration is not only about the past. It is about rebuilding the systems needed for the future. Genealogy training, records recovery, documentation support, verified family history, Trust access, and legal-advocacy support can become tools for education, preservation, community planning, and long-term institutional repair.

FRFT and Freedmen Nation believe this collaboration reflects the type of infrastructure our people need: physical centers, verified records, trained researchers, protected family histories, access to Trust benefits, and institutions that understand Freedmen status as more than a cultural label. It is a historical, constitutional, and community-based identity that must be preserved with care.

We congratulate CBAC on the opening of the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records and look forward to supporting the work of restoring records, strengthening families, and helping Freedmen communities reclaim what was interrupted.

This is how legacy becomes infrastructure.

This is how memory becomes record.

This is how Freedmen families protect the future.

To learn more about Freedmen verification, visit https://www.freedmennation.org/start-verification-step-1.

To visit the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records:

901 Fayetteville Street, Suite 204A

Durham, NC 27701

To support CBAC’s Reclaiming Our Legacy initiative and the work connected to the Center for Freedmen Heritage & Records, donations may be made here:

https://givebutter.com/reclaiming-our-legacy-ucvrsf