Washington, DC — March 16th 2026, plaintiff Asa Gordon filed a landmark federal civil rights class action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, for Jim Crow era Reparations alleging that the State of Georgia systematically engineered, codified, and profited from a century‐long regime of racial subordination that inflicted both economic extraction and psychological harm on Black residents and their descendants. Asa declared: “To subsidize statutory Jim Crow, taxation was integrated in its collection, it was segregated in its distribution.”

The Class Action lawsuit seeks declaratory relief, injunctive relief, compensatory and punitive damages, and disgorgement of unjust enrichment accumulated by the State through Jim Crow–era policies that operated from approximately 1870 to 1965.

“Georgia did not simply discriminate,” said plaintiff Asa Gordon. “It built a legal and economic system that extracted wealth, suppressed opportunity, and used psychological domination as a tool of state profit. Those harms did not disappear — they were inherited.”

A State‐Engineered System of Extraction

The complaint details how Georgia’s Jim Crow statutes:

• Mandated racial segregation across transportation, housing, schools, hospitals, and public accommodations
• Criminalized racial boundary‐crossing to enforce fear and compliance
• Depressed Black wages and restricted access to public‐sector employment
• Confined Black families to under‐resourced districts through racial zoning
• Withheld public goods such as infrastructure, parks, and hospitals
• Leveraged discriminatory policing, fines, and forced labor to generate state revenue
• Depressed Black property values while inflating white property values
• Denied equal access to credit, homeownership, and intergenerational wealth

The lawsuit argues that these policies were not incidental or cultural — they were state‐designed economic instruments that converted racial subordination into predictable financial gain for the State and its preferred racial class.

Psychological Harms as Constitutional Injury

The filing includes a Ninth Amendment claim asserting that Georgia intentionally inflicted state‐engineered psychological harms, including:

• Public humiliation
• Legal reinforcement of racial inferiority
• Fear of arrest or violence for violating racial boundaries
• Exclusion from civic participation
• Intergenerational trauma rooted in state hostility

These harms, the complaint argues, fall within the Ninth Amendment’s protection of unenumerated fundamental rights, including dignity, autonomy, and psychological security.

Continuing Harms and Ongoing Enrichment

The lawsuit asserts that the State continues to benefit from wealth accumulated during the Jim Crow era, while Black families continue to bear the intergenerational consequences of:

• Depressed property values
• Lost land and displacement
• Barriers to wealth accumulation
• Public‐goods disparities
• Psychological harms transmitted across generations

“The State’s enrichment did not end in 1965,” Gordon said. “It continues today through the wealth, land, and public institutions built on the extraction of Black labor, taxes, and opportunity.”

Relief Sought The complaint seeks:

• Disgorgement of unjust enrichment
• Restitution for extracted economic value
• Compensatory damages for constitutional injury
• Punitive damages for deliberate, state‐engineered racial exploitation
• Declaratory and injunctive relief

About the Plaintiff, Asa Gordon Founder & Ex. Dir. Douglass Institute of Government (DIG) is a Washington, DC–based advocate pursuing accountability for state‐engineered racial harms and the intergenerational consequences of Jim Crow–era policies. He brings this action on behalf of himself and a putative class of similarly situated descendants of Black Georgians harmed by the State’s discriminatory regime.

Media Contact

Name: Asa Gordon

Founder, Exe.Dir. Douglass Institute of Government (DIG)

Email: [email protected] Phone: (202) 635-7926