New Federal Reserve Data Shows Massachusetts Still Does Not Measure the Economic Condition of American Freedmen Families, USADOF Tells Legislature

BOSTON, MA — August 23, 2026 — United Sons & Daughters of Freedmen (USADOF) today submitted new evidence to the Massachusetts House Committee on Ways and Means showing that even the Commonwealth's most comprehensive wealth study to date does not answer a basic question central to pending legislation: what has happened to the economic condition of families descended from persons emancipated in the United States.

The submission follows the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's August 2026 release of Family Wealth in Massachusetts (Mass ECHOS), a statewide survey of 5,018 respondents released more than a decade after the bank's landmark 2015 finding that median net worth among U.S. Black households in Greater Boston was $8, compared with $247,500 for White households.

USADOF's analysis shows that the new 2026 figures — roughly $7,800 to $8,000 for various Black-population subgroups statewide — cannot be read as evidence of change in that 2015 finding. The two studies used different survey instruments, different geographic scope, and different population definitions, a limitation the Boston Fed's own report acknowledges in its methodology notes. In written correspondence with USADOF, Boston Fed researchers further confirmed that the survey's "US Black" category is built from race and U.S. birthplace, not from lineal descent — meaning it cannot distinguish a multigenerational American Freedmen family from a family with more recent immigration history.

The Boston Fed's own 2015 research established the principle USADOF is now asking Massachusetts to extend. The 2015 report explained that it is common to "lump the experiences of all blacks" together, but that doing so obscures meaningful differences between Black subpopulations — so researchers deliberately collected more granular data, separately analyzing U.S.-born Black, Caribbean Black, Cape Verdean, Puerto Rican, and Dominican households. That disaggregation is what allowed the $8 figure for U.S. Black households to be identified separately rather than subsumed within an aggregate Black wealth estimate. The result was dramatic — U.S. Black median wealth at $8, compared with $12,000 for Caribbean Black households and $247,500 for White households — and it drove a decade of institutional response.

The Boston Fed has continued to affirm that principle. Mass ECHOS lead researcher Beth Mattingly has said that broad economic indicators can "mask what's happening at the household level," and the 2026 report itself emphasizes that its unusually large sample allows analysis across demographic subgroups.

USADOF's position is that "US Black" — race and birthplace alone — is still too aggregated to answer a historical-accountability question: it cannot distinguish a family descended from persons emancipated in the United States from a family with a different, more recent history in this country. The principle of disaggregation is already established. The unresolved question is where disaggregation should stop.

Mass ECHOS continues that logic by separately reporting "US Black" and "Foreign-born Black" as distinct categories, but stops short of the distinction most relevant to the historical-accountability question USADOF raises. USADOF's submission identifies three consequences of that gap:

• Visibility. American Freedmen families disappear as a measurable population inside broader racial categories.
• Attribution. When wealth figures shift, policymakers cannot determine whether American Freedmen families experienced that shift, or whether the change reflects a different population entirely.
• Accountability. Institutions cannot determine whether capital, programs, and interventions justified by the history of slavery, emancipation, and racial exclusion in the United States have actually reached the descendants of that history.

A number like "$7,800" becomes a policy fact once it circulates — repeated in news coverage, hearings, grant applications, and legislative debate. But without the classification USADOF is asking the Commonwealth to build, that aggregate cannot tell policymakers whether the population most directly connected to the history being invoked improved, held steady, or fell further behind.

"This is not an allegation of bad faith by the researchers," said Nyhiem Way, President and Co-founder of USADOF. "It is a criticism of a classification system that continues to treat race and birthplace as sufficient where historical descent matters. The 2015 study showed why disaggregation matters: it revealed an $8 median wealth position for U.S. Black households that broader racial categories could not show. Eleven years later, Massachusetts still cannot tell us where American Freedmen families specifically sit in the wealth distribution, whether investments reached them, or whether their economic position improved, stagnated, or declined."

H.4351, An Act establishing a Massachusetts Agency of Freedmen Affairs, which defines American Freedmen as descendants of persons emancipated from slavery in the United States, received a favorable report from committee on December 18, 2025, and is currently referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means. USADOF's submission — an executive summary, a supplemental memorandum, and two supporting exhibits, including the complete correspondence with the Boston Fed research team — argues that the Commonwealth currently has no administrative mechanism to identify, measure, or track outcomes for American Freedmen families as a distinct population, even as it produces increasingly detailed data on race and wealth generally.

"When the historical injury being invoked is slavery, emancipation, redlining, and generations of exclusion in the United States, it is not enough to measure only race and assume that tells us what happened to the descendants of that history," said Antonia Edwards, Director of Community Engagement at USADOF.

USADOF has requested a twenty-minute briefing with House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz and relevant committee staff to walk through the evidence directly.