From the Red Clay Up: Building Reparations in the Carolinas

This is the second in a series of reflections marking six years of Cypress Fund. In the first, I wrote about Mary McLeod Bethune, the South Carolina-born freedom builder whose legacy has shaped my life and leadership.

Now I want to speak to something we’ve been building toward with quiet consistency and growing clarity: reparations.

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At Cypress Fund, we believe reparations are not only a moral imperative. They are a political and practical strategy for healing, repair, and reimagining the future of the Carolinas. For us, reparations start with land, its theft, its meaning, its memory, and expands toward the kind of resourced, rooted infrastructure Southern Black communities have always deserved.

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The Carolinas As a Birthplace and Battleground

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To talk about reparations here, in the Carolinas, is to name the histories that still shape our present:

• The forced removal of Indigenous nations and the ongoing erasure of their sovereignty.
• The violence of slavery, sharecropping, and convict leasing that built the economies of this region.
• The multigenerational dispossession of Black landowners through heirs’ property law, zoning, racialized lending, and systemic neglect.
• The manufactured scarcity that has kept rural Black towns, coastal Black fishing communities, and urban Southern neighborhoods underfunded and under attack.

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But it is also to name something else: our lineage of resistance.

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Over the past six years, Cypress Fund has proudly resourced many bodies of land work across the Carolinas — work that tells a different story. We’ve funded BIPOC farmers reclaiming generational plots. We’ve supported tenant unions resisting displacement and shaping new housing cooperatives. We’ve backed cultural heritage stewards preserving sacred land, environmental justice organizers in frontline communities, and local leaders creating land trusts, healing spaces, and community-governed land use plans.

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This work has not been one-off. It’s been strategic, layered, and intentionally cumulative,  building toward a vision of the Carolinas in which Black, Indigenous, and working-class communities don’t just survive the South. We shape it.

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Reparations Is a Frame and a Path Forward

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There’s a temptation to reduce reparations to one-time payments or abstract ideals. But we are called to something deeper.

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At Cypress, we understand reparations as a Southern practice of redress, return, and rebuilding that must be:

• Material — funding community-controlled infrastructure, general operating support, and land-based work without restriction or delay.
• Political — naming the harm clearly and funding the organizing, policy, and legal strategies to undo it.
• Cultural — resourcing memory work, intergenerational leadership, and spiritual reclamation.
• Local — designing with and accountable to the people whose lives and lineages have borne the brunt of racial capitalism in this region.

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In the Carolinas, this means we center Black and Indigenous-led movements already doing this work and ensure they are resourced not just in moments of visibility, but over the long term.

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What We’ve Already Built

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Over six years, Cypress has helped move this vision from theory to practice across the Carolinas:

• Land-based organizing: We’ve funded groups working at the intersections of tenant rights, land ownership, and governance: including cooperatives, land trusts, and community design projects.
• Cultural and ancestral stewardship: We've resourced Black burial ground preservation, community land histories, and storytelling work that restores relationships between people and place.
• Disaster and climate resilience: We’ve supported grantees rebuilding after storms and climate displacement, ensuring that land repair is also future-facing.
• Legal and narrative strategy: We’ve helped fund heirs’ property legal support, redistricting advocacy, and local campaigns to reclaim or defend public land and housing from predatory development.

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We have learned alongside these partners, understanding that land justice is not a single issue;  it is a convergence point for nearly every facet of liberation: food, housing, memory, health, autonomy, and governance.

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And more than anything, this work has made one thing abundantly clear: reparations is not just possible in the Carolinas; it’s already happening. We just need to fund it at scale and in alignment with the people leading it.

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A Philanthropic Call to Action

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We know that philanthropy alone cannot deliver reparations. True reparations require public acknowledgment, federal action, and structural redistribution.

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But philanthropy can and must be a participant in the work of repair. And particularly in the South, where movement leaders are doing miracles with minimal resources, philanthropy must be bold, aligned, and long-term in its approach.

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Cypress is here to model what’s possible. We don’t wait for permission to act in alignment with our values. We trust that BIPOC Southern communities already know what’s needed and we follow their lead.

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If you are a donor or funder, we invite you to join us in shifting from charity to commitment. Fund land work as reparations. Fund healing as infrastructure. Fund legacy as a strategy. As a step in this direction, we encourage you to read Rooted by Brea Baker to grow your analysis of the legacy of Black-led reparations across land, economics, and governance in the Carolinas. When testimonies and family histories in this book stick with you, share your curiosities and learnings with us at info@cypressfund.org. We’re excited to journey with you through your political development.

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A Look Ahead: Building for the Long Haul

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As we move toward 2030, Cypress is deepening our reparations-aligned strategy, which includes:

• Launching and sustaining the Maroonage Fellowship, which supports young Southern Black leaders, especially those from rural South Carolina,  whose vision is grounded in land, power, and memory.
• Seeding and supporting shared ownership models, including physical space and community-owned land, in partnership with organizers and movement partners.
• Creating a reparations-aligned portfolio that explicitly tracks how resources are moving toward land return, economic sovereignty, and governance capacity.
• Developing a donor education initiative focused on reparations, place-based funding, and Southern resilience to bring others along in this work.

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Reparations is not a trend. It’s a responsibility. And in the Carolinas, it is our opportunity to build a future that honors the past, meets the present, and invests in the brilliance of what’s next.

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What We Know For Sure

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Cypress Fund has never claimed to be the answer,  but we are committed to being part of the response. Six years of land justice funding across the Carolinas has taught us that repair is not only necessary, it’s already in motion.

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We fund reparations not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.

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We invest in land work because the Carolinas are our home.

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And we build infrastructure because our people deserve to inherit more than survival; they deserve sovereignty.

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