Dem Candidate in Swing House District Spent Years Calling for Reparations. Then She Ran for Congress.

Sue Altman (D., N.J.) is a longtime supporter of reparations, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she’s campaigned for Congress.

Altman, the presumptive Democratic nominee for New Jersey’s hotly contested Seventh Congressional District, enthusiastically supported reparations during her time as state director of the progressive New Jersey Working Families Party. But the Washington Free Beacon couldn’t find any instances of Altman discussing reparations since she launched her congressional campaign. The issue doesn’t appear anywhere on her campaign website, either.

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Altman in May 2023 launched her campaign for the highly anticipated race for New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District against Republican incumbent Tom Kean Jr. Before launching her run, Altman served as state director of the New Jersey Working Families Party where she advocated for reparations and a reparations committee.

“ALL white people in NJ and across the country have benefitted from slavery’s long long legacy. NJ must pass the Reparations Task Force Bill,” the party wrote in March 2021.

Altman herself also backed the policy at the time, calling for a statewide reparations task force.

“The legalization referendum is an admission that the war on drugs was a racist catastrophe. Now we have to UNDO it. Not simply ‘move forward’ like, ‘we’re cool.’ No! Equitable revenue distribution is a form of reparations—EXTREMELY valid,” Altman wrote in November 2020.

“Create a #reparations commission in NJ Why? Because NJ had slavery. By 1625 enslaved African people were here,” Altman wrote less than a year later.

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