CFER and two member co-plaintiffs have taken City and County of San Francisco and San Francisco Human Rights Commission to court to stop the unconstitutional reparations fund plan. Represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), we filed the lawsuit with the Superior Court of the State of California in San Francisco, along with Mr. Richie Greenberg and Mr. Arthur Ritchie. Both co-plaintiffs are CFER members and San Francisco residents.

“Thanks to our strategic ally PLF, we are able to launch this timely legal challenge shortly after the reparations plan was enacted,” commented CFER President Frank Xu. "We are confident that the equal rights for all San Franciscans, including our courageous co-plaintiffs Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Ritchie as well as many unnamed CFER members in San Francisco, will be defended swiftly and resolutely!"

“I’ve been keenly paying attention to this issue of Reparations for several years now, watching as city hall officials (and now the mayor), have consistently ignored law and constitutional rights of us taxpayers. They have put rhetoric and ideology ahead of the city’s residents,” said Mr. Richie Greenberg. “I have reached out to the Board of Supervisors, the mayor, the city attorney and the reparations committee itself to demand they cease wasting taxpayers’ money on this unconstitutional plan, and the time has come to bring them to court.”

The San Francisco Reparations Plan was formulated in July 2023 by the Human Rights Commission. It was accepted by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in September 2023. The Board formally adopted the plan into an ordinance in December 2025. In order to qualify for the plan’s benefits in homeownership, employment, business, education and health, an individual must be:

a. An African American descendant of a chattel enslaved person or the descendant of a free black person prior to the end of the 19th century, or has identified as black/African American on public documents for at least 10 years;

b. 18 years or older;

c. And born in and/or migrated to San Francisco before 2006 and has proof of residency in San Francisco for at least 10 years.

Our lawsuit argues that San Francisco has violated the constitutional principle of equal protection in instituting such a sweeping reparation plan that essentially imposes “racial classifications on present-day residents who neither endured enslavement nor inflicted it.” By doing so, San Francisco has weaponized government action, public authority and taxpayer dollars to distribute benefits on the basis of race and ancestry. Specifically, the San Francisco Reparations Plan violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Proposition 209 and California Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection (Article I, Section 7).

We are asking the San Francisco government to stop the plan immediately, declare that racial preferences in the plan are unconstitutional, and pledge that it will not use any government resources or public funds to support discriminatory programs going forward.