As calls for reparations programs increase among activists and lawmakers in several states in the U.S., the Reparations Committee in Evanston, Illinois, has announced that 44 residents will soon receive $25,000 payments as part of Evanston’s local reparations program.
Fox News reports that the program was launched in 2019 and approved by the City Council in 2021 to provide direct cash assistance to black residents and their descendants who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969.
Evanston, the first city in the United States to pass a reparations plan, pledged to distribute $10 million over 10 years to Black residents to address past discrimination and slavery’s lingering effects. City official Cynthia Vargas told the Chicago Tribune that the money is mainly to help with housing costs. Tasheik Kerr, assistant to the city manager, stated that recipients should receive their funds within the next few weeks.
RELATED STORIES
At the moment, the reparations fund holds $276,588 that was largely collected through Evanston’s real estate transfer tax, according to a recent city report. Officials are looking at adding a tax on Delta-8 THC products to provide support to the program.
Any payment made depends on what is available in the fund, Alderman Krissie Harris noted. “It’s really important for people to understand we pay as we have the money, and it’s not that we’re withholding from paying everyone,” Harris said to The Daily Northwestern. “It’s just we have to accumulate the funds to make sure we can pay.”
The watchdog group, Judicial Watch, is, however, against the program, arguing in a suit that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“To date, Evanston has awarded over $6,350,000 to 254 individuals based on their race. The city must be stopped before it spends even more money on this clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional reparations program,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said last year when the group filed the lawsuit.
In 2021, when the program was approved, the Associated Press reported that for residents to qualify, they must “either have lived in or been a direct descendant of a Black person who lived in Evanston between 1919 to 1969 and who suffered discrimination in housing because of city ordinances, policies or practices.”
Over the years, cities, communities and organizations across the country have been looking at providing reparations to Black people. Religious denominations, including the Episcopal Church, and top colleges like Georgetown University in Washington, have also considered similar plans.
Calls for reparations programs particularly grew following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Then-President Joe Biden even threw his weight behind establishing a federal commission to study Black reparations.
