Alderman Robin Rue Simmons, who championed the bill
Credit: Tribune News Service/Chicago Tribune
The grand Dutch colonial houses in downtown Evanston give way to small clapboard homes with postage stamp gardens as you cross the city’s invisible border.
The clustering of the Chicago suburb’s black population into the triangle-shaped Fifth Ward — nestled between the old sewage canal to the east and railroad tracks to the west — is not by accident, but by design.
A discriminatory century-old housing practice, known as “redlining”, limited the areas black people could live, helping turn Evanston into one of the most segregated cities in the US.
Evanston’s city council on Monday took a huge step towards repairing the resulting damage suffered by black families by voting to award reparations, making it the first in the country to do so.
Those who can show they are descendants of an Evanstonian who lived here between 1919 and 1969, or directly experienced housing discrimination themselves in the decades since, will now be eligible for $25,000 (£18,000) to either go either towards home repairs or a mortgage.
The decision comes amid an increasingly urgent national conversation on how to tackle systematic racial inequity following the police killing of George Floyd and other black Americans last year.
“Right now, the whole world is looking at Evanston, Illinois. This is a moment like none other that we’ve ever seen, and it’s a good moment,” said Ron Daniels, president of the National African American Reparations Commission, after the vote.
The council’s aldermen hope Evanston will become a model for other cities and states grappling with whether to pursue their own reparations programs.
Growing up in the Fifth Ward, Robin Rue Simmons, who championed the bill, remembers the first time she realised the stark difference between the surrounding neighbourhoods.
Visiting a white friend’s home as a child she noticed “the streets were wider. The trees were taller. The homes were bigger and brighter. ‘My family worked just as hard, why didn’t we live like this?’” she asked herself.
Evanston’s first African American residents began arriving in the 1860s following the abolishment of slavery. By the late 1940s, the population had grown and white officials became anxious about the value of their homes.
The city began demolishing houses belonging to black residents that were outside of the Fifth Ward, forcing them to move to the redlined boundaries.
According to a recent report by local historian Morris “Dino” Robinson, homes in the area had smaller lot sizes, and often went without electricity and water.
Despite the city passing a fair housing law in 1968, estate agents continued to refuse to show black buyers properties outside the triangle, while banks generally refused to loan.
Today, about 16 per cent of its 75,000 residents are black and the majority live in the one-square-mile neighbourhood.
White people in Evanston make nearly double the income and their homes are worth twice as much as their black neighbours’, according to the most recent US Census. Of the 218 mortgages in Evanston issued by one major bank in 2018, 150 went to whites and 17 to blacks — numbers far out of line with a 65 per cent to 15 per cent split in the population as a whole.
“I’m just glad that now there is a recognition that harm was done,” said Sara Diggs, 69, outside the house her grandparents bought in the Fifth Ward in 1941. “Evanston is the first place in the United States to say ‘hey, we’re taking some ownership of this.’ “We’re part of history.”
The will to repair the harm caused by America’s so-called original sin has never been greater.
Last week, the Jesuit order of Catholic priests pledged $100 million to benefit the descendants of the enslaved people it once owned.
Barack Obama came out in February and publicly backed reparations as “justified” — something he said he was unable to do while serving as the country’s first black president.
President Joe Biden’s senior adviser Cedric Richmond has said he was “going to start acting now” by looking into national reparations plans.
Mr Biden, who has black voters to thank for his 2020 election win, has himself supported the idea of federal study into reparations, though has not expressed full backing for legislation.
The proposal for reparations has found overwhelming support in Evanston, which is known for its liberal politics.
The bill passed late Monday night 8-1. The aldermen voted to allow the funding for the reparations to be drawn largely from revenue from a 3 per cent tax the city collects on the sale of recreational cannabis.
The sole dissenting city official did not object to reparations in theory but said the current program fails to give residents enough of a say in how they will be distributed.
Cicely Fleming, who is black, said the focus on housing confirmed negative stereotypes that the poorest “can’t handle their money” and discriminates against people who may be due reparations but either do not own a home or do not plan to purchase one.
Other detractors told The Telegraph they do not see housing assistance as a credible form of reparations.
“True reparations repair you – you get a chance to say what it is that repairs you,” said Rose Cannon, a member of the group Evanston Rejects Racist Reparations.
“There aren’t even houses in Evanston which you can buy with a $25,000 downpayment, a lot of people are going to end up being very disappointed,” Ms Cannon, a 73-year-old resident of the city, told The Telegraph. “These are absolutely not the reparations we are entitled to.”
Outside Evanston, there is still plenty of scepticism about the need for reparations.
An Ipsos poll taken in June 2020, at the height of racial justice protests, found only one in five respondents agreed the US should pay damages to descendants of enslaved people.
Some opponents ask whether taxpayers can afford to pay out what could be billions, or even trillions, of dollars. Others question how eligibility for such programs would be determined, whether by race, ancestry or evidence of discrimination.
It is an issue that has long rankled the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, publicly opposed the idea of reparations in 2019, arguing “none of us currently living are responsible” and that electing the first African American president showed the country had moved on.
Conservative lawyers in Washington DC have already threatened to sue the city for the program, claiming it is “racially discriminatory”, “unfair” and “unconstitutional”.
But this has not dampened Evanston’s day.
In the Fifth Ward on Tuesday, many were quietly celebrating. “It may be a small drop in the ocean, but it’s what it symbolises,” said Ms Diggs.
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