Evanston takes a small but historic step forward on America’s road to reparations
Evanston deserves big credit for becoming the first U.S. city to begin paying out reparations to Black citizens, and for doing so in a way that has the potential to become a template for other cities and towns.
The suburb’s lawmakers last week approved a $400,000 housing grant program aimed at Black Evanstonians. The payout is the first to be made from a larger, $10 million reparations fund created in 2019. The grant program is designed to address the harm Black Evanston residents suffered from the suburb’s discriminatory housing policies during the 20th century.
But rather than issue funds to descendants of American slavery — something reparations advocates have sought for the past 150 years — Evanston seeks to make amends to Black residents who suffered specifically under one of the town’s own racially discriminatory practices.
It’s a small step. History will show it to have been a critical one.
“It is not full repair alone in this one initiative, but we all know that the road to repair injustice in the Black community is going to be a generation of work,” Evanston Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, leader of the suburb’s reparation plan, told WTTW. “It’s going to be many programs and initiatives and more funding.”
Relief for past harms
Ever since President Andrew Johnson reneged on Special Field Orders No. 15 — the 1865 military order that promised to give newly freed Black people 40 acres and a mule — there have been attempts at granting reparations to the formerly enslaved or their descendants.
In the 1890s, Callie House, a Black woman who had been enslaved, created the National ExSlave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. House envisioned a cotton tax levied against Southern plantations, which were still functioning after the Civil War, that would raise the equivalent of $2 billion in reparations.
The federal government would hound House for years, accusing her of fraud, and the organization died.
But by targeting cotton plantation owners, House was looking to make those most responsible for slavery pay for what they’d done.
In some respects, it’s not dissimilar from Evanston’s current effort, in which the city is being held financially responsible for a host of racist housing policies that the suburb created or allowed, including steering Black homebuyers away from predominantly white areas and letting Northwestern University refuse housing to Black students after World War II.
The discriminatory housing practices not only were morally wrong, but they also negatively affected the financial fortunes of Black people, homeownership being a major pathway to greater wealth.
The descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or who suffered housing discrimination after 1969 would be eligible to receive $25,000 — to be used for home repairs or as a down payment on a house.
“We’re very excited to see the first national direct benefit from some of the harms we’ve had to experience from the past,” National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America Co-Chair Kamm Howard told CBS News. “The more local initiatives occur, the more impetus there is on the federal government to act.”
Not true reparations?
While the federal government continues to wrestle with the question of reparations as it relates to slavery, Evanston is sending a message that states and municipalities also have a responsibility to make amends — concrete and substantive — for the specific racist sins of their past.
Just imagine Chicago’s potential laundry list, with everything from restrictive covenants to police brutality to “urban renewal” — what Black people derisively called Negro Removal at the time — and to the intentional overcrowding of classrooms in African American neighborhoods so as to resist school integration in the 1960s. Thousands of Black Chicagoans today can ruefully recall attending school in portable classrooms — basically trailers in school parking lots — while desks went unused in white schools across the “color line.”
But Cicely Fleming, a Black woman who was the lone Evanston alderman to vote against the suburb’s reparations plan, raised an interesting point in her dissent, warning local governments against an overreliance on highly regulated forms of reparations, rather than simply making payments to those affected most, no strings attached.
“I think what we approved . . . was a housing program,” Fleming told the CBS News show “Red and Blue.” “When African Americans — probably many Americans — when they think reparations, we usually think of the Holocaust or Japanese internment.”
Some survivors of those outrages, and in some cases their descendants, received direct cash reparations, albeit in mostly token or symbolic amounts.
Evanston’s first step is not without its weaknesses. But it is undeniably historic.
In Georgia, Donald Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen has now been turned into bad law — an election law designed to make it harder for minorities and the young to vote.
This is, as President Joe Biden stated, the new Jim Crow, a blatant attempt by Republicans to suppress votes so they can hold on to power.
This bad law drives a stake into democracy in Georgia. It must be reversed. The Justice Department is considering going to court. Civil rights groups in Georgia have filed suit. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the For the People Act that would set national standards for fair elections.
Now, businesses and associations must weigh in. When apartheid South Africa suppressed the votes of Blacks, an international movement arose to make South Africa a pariah state. Athletic teams refused to travel to South Africa. Companies disinvested.
Celebrities refused to perform. Countries enforced sanctions. Eventually, apartheid fell in a peaceful transition to democracy.
Georgia’s misguided leadership must feel similar pressure. I have called on Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta. Companies like CNN, Delta, UPS and others with headquarters in Georgia must make their opposition clear. Celebrities should begin to postpone appearances in Georgia until the law is changed. The WNBA, which played a major role in standing with the Black Lives Matter mobilizations, should join with the NBA and the MLB players’ association to demand the law be reversed.
This mobilization is vital because this law is a direct affront to democracy. Let’s be clear about what is going down.
Trump’s big lie was refuted by official recounts, by Georgia’s secretary of state and election officials, and by Trump’s own attorney general. Despite Trump’s direct intimidation, the Republican secretary of state stated the truth: There was no evidence of fraud. The election — and later Senate runoff elections — featured a dramatic increase in turnout with the votes cast and counted fairly.
Led by the governor, state Republicans then claimed that election law changes were needed to “restore confidence,” a confidence allegedly weakened by Trump’s big lie.
They then passed a law designed to suppress the votes of those likely to vote against them.
Among other things, the law makes it a crime to give water or food to people in line to vote. It ensures that those lines will be long by slashing the availability of dropboxes, limiting early voting and imposing new ID requirements on mail-in voting. After Democrats won the runoff elections in two Senate seats, Republicans voted to reduce the time for the runoff from nine weeks to four with no clear provision for early voting, which African Americans use disproportionately.
This attack on the right to vote is direct and blatant. Propelled by a massive increase in African American and young voters, Democrats flipped Georgia in 2020, winning the presidential race and taking two Senate seats, including the election of the first African American to a Senate seat.
In response, Republicans chose not to broaden their appeal, alter their policies to attract votes from minorities and the young. Instead, they chose to pass a law to make it harder for their opponents to vote. In addition, they punished the secretary of state who stood up to Trump, stripping the power to run Georgia elections from his office and from local counties, transferring it to a state board that will be dominated by Republicans. Instead of celebrating the increase of participation in Georgia, Republicans are intent on suppressing it to keep control.
A former Confederate state, Georgia has a long and shameful history of repressing the Black vote. And now Georgia is just the tip of the Republican spear, with Republican legislators introducing some 253 laws in 43 states to make it harder to vote.
This new Jim Crow cannot stand if America’s democracy is to survive. The U.S. Senate should overcome the threatened Republican filibuster and pass the For the People Act that would provide national standards for fair elections. In Georgia, a massive mobilization is needed to overcome the new obstacles and show that the emerging majority will not allow itself to be suppressed. Major League Baseball and other businesses cannot stay neutral, for that would essentially support the law, voter suppression and the new Jim Crow.
Joining a demonstration against the law, the newly elected Sen. Rafael Warnock stated the simple truth: “Today is a very sad day for the State of Georgia. What we have witnessed today is a desperate attempt to lock out and squeeze the people out of their own democracy.” Now it is time to stand up and make it clear that this cannot stand.