Large companies in California must search their records for slavery-era transactions and swear to the results under a law Governor Gavin Newsom signed on 30 September 2026.
The Truth in Disclosure Act, Assembly Bill 2599, makes California the first US state to require such corporate disclosures, and the findings will be published in a public database. It does not create any compensation scheme for descendants of enslaved people.
The law covers companies doing business in the state with more than US$100 million in annual worldwide gross receipts that existed, or had a predecessor that existed, on or before 31 December 1964. They must search their own records and those of related entities for evidence that they bought or sold enslaved people, used them as collateral for loans, financed their purchase or insured them.
Where records turn up, companies must disclose the names of enslaved people and slaveholders they find, along with evidence of transactions that generated profit from slavery. Executives must file affidavits under penalty of perjury confirming the search was done. The state’s Civil Rights Department is to build the searchable platform where the affidavits and records will appear.
Nothing happens until the Legislature funds it. For companies doing business in California on 1 January 2028, the first affidavits fall due on 15 January 2029, or later if the platform is not ready.
Assembly member Isaac Bryan, a Culver City Democrat who wrote the bill, has argued that private corporations across the United States grew rich on the free labour of enslaved people. He told CalMatters he expects financial-sector firms to be among those filing.
Newsom, speaking in an interview with civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson cited by Fox News Digital, described records of insurance policies written on enslaved people and of human beings pledged as collateral. “Accountability, as Bryan said, starts with the truth,” he said.
The state’s Reparations Task Force, set up under a law Newsom signed in 2020, issued more than 100 recommendations in 2023 covering possible compensation as well as housing, education, policing and health. Its report pointed to JPMorgan Chase, which apologised in 2005 after research found two predecessor banks in Louisiana had accepted about 13,000 enslaved people as loan collateral and took ownership of about 1,250 when borrowers defaulted. Newsom has so far declined to back direct cash payments.
The insurance industry pushed back. Several insurer groups told the state Senate Judiciary Committee the bill largely duplicates a 2000 law that already required insurers to research and report slavery-era policies to the California Department of Insurance.
Republicans also criticised the measure. Republican National Committee Press Secretary Natalie Baldassarre told Fox News Digital that California should focus on affordability instead. The Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation and Truth and the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations welcomed the law.
The state Senate passed AB 2599 on 27 August. Supporters say it is the 15th reparations-related bill passed since the task force reported.
