The Declaration of Legal Status Restoration: Ending the Erasure of Freedmen

For over a century, the status of American Freedmen—those lawfully emancipated from U.S. chattel slavery—has been stripped, diluted, and ultimately buried under layers of race-based classifications that were never ours. The government exchanged our legal identity for social constructs like “Black,” severing generations from the protections, recognition, and reparative claims tied to the name Freedmen. That legal erasure ends now.

On Monday, May 12, 2025, the Freedmen Reparations Fund Trust formally issued its Declaration of Legal Status Restoration. This living legal instrument revives the original government-recognized designation of “Freedmen” as a legal status—not a racial term. It separates Freedmen from race boxes, foreign ancestry claims, and broad pan-African identities that were never written into U.S. law.

This declaration affirms three critical points:

1. Freedmen status is not optional—it is a legal designation tied to those emancipated from slavery under U.S. jurisdiction and their verified kin.

2. Freedmen are not a racial group—they are a class of injured persons under U.S. law, with distinct historical, legal, and financial claims.

3. Verification matters—only those verified through the Trust’s legal process are lawfully recognized under this restored status.

With this declaration, the Trust reclaims what was never legally repealed but systematically suppressed: a people, a status, and a rightful legal identity. The Declaration of Legal Status Restoration does what no court or Congress has yet had the political will to do—it acknowledges that the injury is not historical; it is continuous. And the erasure is not symbolic; it is administrative, economic, and constitutional.

This is not symbolic reform. It is structural correction.

It is not dependent on approval. It is grounded in Trust Law and private legal authority.

And it does not beg for inclusion. It secures rightful exclusion from categories that were never ours to begin with.

If you are a Freedman, verified by lawful evidence and protected under this Trust, the name “descendant” no longer applies.

You are not a category.

You are a people—a legally restored class.

Join the restoration. Stand under law, not label.

View the full Declaration at Download Here.