The Black Veterans Project (BVP) is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization deploying a restorative justice strategy that leverages research-backed narrative storytelling, public advocacy, and impact litigation to combat the legacy of racial discrimination in access to benefits experienced by Black veterans and their families. BVP envisions a future where the service of all veterans is honored and protected. We strive for a society that embodies equity, empowering those who have served, celebrating their contributions, and granting them full access to the benefits and resources they’ve earned.
Since our nation’s founding, Black Americans have served with valor across the U.S. military – demonstrating a continuous and often disproportionate commitment to our nation’s Armed Forces.
Despite a legacy of service and sacrifice, Black veterans have long protested unequal treatment in the administration of veteran benefits. In the face of widespread outcry, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has repeatedly rejected notions of racial bias across its benefits programs, contending an application of uniformity and fairness. Extensive evidence gathered over six years of research and litigation efforts led by the Black Veterans Project exposed historical and contemporary racial disparities in accessibility.
The consequence? Hundreds of billions in wealth-generating resources were unjustly denied to Black veterans and their families through the racially biased administration of housing, healthcare, education, pension, and disability benefits over decades.
The current racial wealth gap – whereby the families of white veterans hold, on average, 32 times the wealth Black veterans do – can be attributed to the actions of the very federal agency charged with honoring and serving all those who fight our nation’s wars.
The time has come to confront this history and its social and economic implications.
At the advent of the GI Bill following World War II, veterans’ housing and education benefits were a key driver of generational wealth accumulation for returning service members and their families. However, racist policies and practices resulted in diminutive numbers of Black veterans accessing the myriad of wealth-generating benefits that afforded millions of white veterans pathways to the middle class. A recent Brandeis University study estimates the amount owed to descendants of Black World War II veterans exceeds $100 billion.
BVP’s advocacy and research exposed long-standing racial disparities in the distribution of veterans' disability benefits, which have worsened financial losses. Stark racial disparities in PTSD grant rates in the post-9/11 era obstructed more than $20 billion in compensation to tens of thousands of Black veterans unjustly denied disability claims.
Our advocacy compelled Congress and the Biden administration to earmark a Government Accountability Office study, published in July 2023, which substantiates the existence of sustained racial disparities in disability compensation, adversely affecting economic outcomes. These findings help explain why Black service members are twice as likely to live in poverty, represent a full third of the nation’s homeless veterans population, and face a 44 percent greater likelihood of unemployment.
The maintenance of racial disparities in veterans’ benefits has hindered Black veterans and their families from full participation in programs intended to provide economic stability and social mobility. Key drivers of obstruction have been:
1. Discriminatory Practices: Disproportionate denials of wide-reaching VA benefits programs, including VA home loans, education benefits, and disability compensation – resulting in the loss of hundreds of billions in economic resources to qualified Black veterans and their families.
2. Data and Accountability Gaps: Despite numerous studies on racial disparities, the VA failed to address equity gaps in benefit allocation, exacerbating inequities over decades.
3. Policy Barriers: A lack of sustained advocacy by leading veterans' service organizations and civil rights groups hindered accountability in addressing racial disparities in veterans' benefit allocation. Efforts to enact reparative policies, such as the GI Bill Restoration Act, have stalled due to a lack of political will and underfunded grassroots organizing and mobilization.
4. Legal Advocacy Challenges: Until the work of BVP, there was no coordinated strategy for seeking redress for historical or ongoing discrimination in veterans' benefits.
Since 2020, BVP has collaborated with Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic to create a comprehensive record of the denial of veterans' benefits from World War II to the present day. Years of data gathering have enabled us to obtain previously unseen internal VA data and documents that substantiate the case for reparative justice.
In 2023, Yale Law School leveraged BVP FOIA findings to file a federal suit, Monk v. United States, seeking redress for harm caused by long-standing racial disparities in the VA's administration of veterans’ benefits programs. In the Spring of 2024, the Monk case became one of the first reparative justice cases to survive a motion to dismiss. The success of reparative strategies is contingent on continued affirmative litigation, narrative storytelling that galvanized public support, and advocacy that harnesses collective action and engagement across the Black veterans' community.
Years of grassroots organizing, public narrative building, collaborative research, and successful data collection, mainly through extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings, have laid the foundation for BVP to spearhead a national campaign for reparative justice for Black veterans. Through strategic planning with McKinsey & Company in the fall of 2024. BVP has developed strategic pillars to prioritize our activities and manage our scope of work and scale:
1. Research & Narrative Storytelling: BVP will spearhead research and story collection to amplify the generational impact of benefit denial, increase public understanding, and support the repair case. We will preserve the historical record, starting with narratives and participatory research from plaintiffs. This will culminate in the build-out of a digital archive.
Strategic Litigation: BVP will support litigation to advance the case for repair for Black veterans – working in collaboration with Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and Quinn Emanuel LLP.
2. Issue Advocacy & Community Building: BVP will build a national network of Black veterans and allies to drive advocacy campaigns that advance equity and combat racial discrimination in and out of the Armed Forces. Current attempts to roll back federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs will have adverse, long-term consequences. These will likely include the suppression of race-based data and efforts to subvert the historical memory of benefit obstruction, making BVP’s work both timely and imperative.
3. Strategic litigation – supported by BVP’s narrative storytelling, research, and data collection- will play a critical role in the fight to protect equal opportunity in uniform and equitable access to veterans' benefits for future generations. We intend to use multimedia learning tools to inform and activate the public. To ensure scholars, researchers, advocates, and policymakers can leverage our work in the future, we will maintain a publicly accessible digital archive that includes millions of documents gleaned through research, FOIA, and litigation efforts.
With storytelling and research at the center of our approach, we can expand our issue advocacy campaigns and deepen our impact through community building. Veterans who share their stories will join our membership corps, which can be activated to support our future advocacy campaigns to win the fight for repair and secure racial equity in and out of uniform.
The Black Veterans Project envisions a world that honors and protects the legacy of U.S. Black veterans and their families by actualizing reparations for generations of Black veterans and ensuring equitable access to veterans' benefits. Our project will conclude when we accomplish the following goals.
Implement our litigation and policy framework to achieve full restitution for Black veterans.
Archive the narratives of veteran plaintiffs participating in our coordinated legal actions and preserve a digital archive recounting the history of benefit obstruction for public memory.
Codify policies to ensure racial equity in veterans’ benefits for perpetuity.
Tam Metni Gizle
