Freedmen News Watch · October 13, 2026, 1:20 PM CDT
Key Facts
- New California law requires companies to disclose past profits from slavery (via CalMatters)
New California law requires companies to disclose past profits from slavery.
Companies with more than $100 million in annual worldwide gross receipts will be required to search their records and submit sworn disclosures about slavery-related transactions.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law that requires large companies to disclose if they or their predecessors profited from chattel slavery. The Truth in Disclosure Act will require major companies operating in the state to disclose these historical and financial ties to enslavement-related transactions.
The bill was a top priority for the California Legislative Black Caucus this year. No other state requires corporations to account for their historical role in the slave economy, according to advocates.
Authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Culver City, the law applies to companies with annual worldwide gross receipts over $100 million.
Assembly Bill 2599 also requires relevant records and disclosures to be made publicly available through a searchable database to be established by the state’s Civil Rights Department. The sworn filings will be subject to the penalty of perjury.[1]
About the Freedmen News Watch
This series follows the news that bears on Black American freedmen and their descendants, the people freed from slavery in this country: citizenship and treaty-rights cases such as the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Freedmen, the Dawes Rolls and Freedmen’s Bureau records, heirs’ property and Black land loss, reparations and descendant-based programs, and the history and memory of emancipation. It covers the hard news and the good news alike. Every passage is quoted as reported and linked to its source, and nothing is generated. The photograph on each post is a public-domain file photo from Wikimedia Commons, credited, and shows a place or monument, not the people in the story.
How to Verify This Yourself
Read the original reporting directly at CalMatters — that page is the primary source for everything above.
References
Investigative methodology: this update was produced by scripts/topic_news_roundup.py from real CalMatters reporting — not a language model. The quoted text above is verbatim from the source, cited; no analysis or interpretation is added.
File photo: The exterior of the Cherokee National Supreme Court Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma (0c9bfdfd-54db-422b-85d7-786908473ff7) — National Trails Office (US National Park Service), 2016. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This image is illustrative and does not depict the people or events in this report.
Kemetic Minds Editorial Desk
Verified NewsroomPrimary-sourced investigative intelligence on civil rights, voting rights, federal policy, and consumer protection. Sourced from primary legal filings, government statistics, and direct field reporting.