Chicago suburb approves nation’s first reparations program for Black residents
The nation’s first government reparations program for African Americans was approved Monday night in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Advocates say the action represents a critical step in rectifying wrongs caused by slavery, segregation and housing discrimination and in pushing forward on similar compensation efforts across the country.
“Right now the whole world is looking at Evanston, Illinois,” said Ron Daniels, president of the National African American Reparations Commission, which wants redress at local and federal levels. “This is a moment like none other that we’ve ever seen, and it’s a good moment.”
The Evanston City Council approved the first phase of reparations to acknowledge the harm caused by discriminatory housing policies, practices and inaction going back more than a century. The 8-1 vote will make $400,000 available in $25,000 homeownership and improvement grants, as well as in mortgage assistance for Black residents who can show they are direct descendants of individuals who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969.
The housing money is part of a larger $10 million package approved for continued reparations initiatives, which will be funded by income from annual cannabis taxes over the next decade. Black people make up about 16% of Evanston’s population of 75,000.
More than 60 people spoke before the vote, many endorsing the resolution and calling for the city to take the historic step, others criticizing it and pleading for more time to reshape the plan. Housing assistance, detractors said, is not a credible form of reparations.
“It’s a first tangible step,” stressed Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmons, who represents the largely African American Fifth Ward and has been a prime force on the program. “It is alone not enough. It is not full repair alone in this one initiative. But we all know that the road to repair injustice in the black community will be a generation of work. . . . I’m excited to know more voices will come to the process.”
The issue of reparations has been raised nationally for decades, with supporters focusing not just on financial restitution for the descendants of enslaved Americans but on governments’ formal apologies for their role in that legacy.
In the wake of antiracism demonstrations that swept the country last summer — after the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. — California established a task force to propose a model for reparations. Chicago and several other cities are discussing reparations programs of their own.
Historian Jennifer Oast, an expert on institutional slavery at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, expects that the Evanston program in particular will have a “snowball effect” on proposed federal legislation.
That measure, H.R. 40, would create a national commission to study potential
THE $10 MILLION PACKAGE WILL BE FUNDED BY CANNABIS TAXES.
reparations. It was introduced in 2019 but largely languished until last year’s presidential race when two key candidates — Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Joe Biden — voiced support.
A House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the bill last month. The bill has 173 sponsors in the House, but Daniels projects that number “going toward 190,” which means it probably will pass. It faces a much bigger challenge in the Senate.
While White House press secretary Jen Psaki has not said whether President Biden would sign the legislation into law, she noted in late February that “he continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address systemic racism that persists today, and obviously having that study is part of that.”
Federal reparations are advocates’ ultimate goal because of the greater monetary resources that would become available. Yet local reparations are important because cities such as Evanston can “serve as a blueprint,” according to Daniels.
Figuring out how to build reparation programs that address redlining and segregation from the past century is much different than those designed to bring redress for the slave trade, Oast said — primarily because individuals from the Jim Crow and civil rights era are still alive and can directly benefit.