Five years and $5 million after Evanston became the first municipality in the country to pass a reparations ordinance to counter the effects of historic discrimination against African-Americans, the city and its partners celebrated the ordinance’s five-year anniversary with a dinner and a town hall discussion on Dec. 5.
About 150 people gathered at Second Baptist Church at 1717 Benson Avenue, Evanston, to celebrate with leaders and recipients of Evanston’s reparations program and speakers from Maryland, California and Oklahoma, where residents are working on reparations efforts.
The reparations ordinance was passed in order to right the wrong of housing practices that discriminated against African-Americans in Evanston from 1919 to 1969, which included racial covenants and redlining that segregated Evanstonians, according to former Evanston City Council Member and current chair of the city’s Reparations Committee Robin Rue Simmons.
The reparations program is funded by the city’s 3% cannabis tax and by the city’s real estate transfer tax on properties sold for more than $1.5 million.
“It was clear that it was state action and corporate action in the city of Evanston that engaged in the redlining,” said Cook County Circuit Judge Lionel Jean-Baptiste, who moderated the panel. “Therefore it was correct for the state to remediate.”
The ordinance designated Black residents who lived in Evanston during that time as ancestors and made them and their descendants eligible to apply for reparations. So far, 212 people have been recipients of the program, having the option to receive a check of $25,000 from the city or assistance with a down payment on a home or to assist in upgrades and repairs to their home.
The harm done
Iva Carruthers, professor emeritus and former chairperson of the sociology department at Northeastern Illinois University, said her family arrived in the Evanston area sometime in 1919, fleeing a massacre in Arkansas. She said some of her family had also fled to Brazil, but “the harm, however, is transgenerational. It is deadly and it is real.”
Karli Butler, a fourth-generation Evanston resident from the historically Black Fifth Ward, said her great-grandfather, Sam Butler, settled in Evanston after coming from South Carolina during the Great Migration.
Butler said she and her grandfather, James Edward Butler, who had been drafted to serve in World War II in the Philippines, partnered to apply for the reparations program, but he ultimately died before the application process was complete, she said.
“I wanted my grandfather to get, someday, anything, and unfortunately, he didn’t get to see it. But I was fortunate to be able to go to the city and then have that $25,000 go to his heirs,” Butler said.
Forced from Palm Springs
In November, the city of Palm Springs announced a $5.9 million settlement to pay Black and Latino families that were pushed out of the city, according to the Associated Press. The attorney representing the plaintiffs, more than 300 former residents and hundreds of their descendants, Areva Martin, spoke at the Evanston panel.
Martin said thousands of Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South settled in Palm Springs at a time when the city was earning a reputation as being a “playground for the rich and famous.” She said many new Black arrivals would work service jobs needed by rich white Americans, including the likes of Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra.
Martin said the city would systematically destroy, burn and demolish homes owned by Black and Latino families in the 1960s. She said residents would fight the city for years, but “it wasn’t until the death of George Floyd in March of 2020 that the sense of urgency then gave way to the advocacy that led us to where we are today.”
Tulsa massacre
Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of a two-day race massacre that in 1921 obliterated a thriving Black neighborhood known as Black Wall Street, according to the Associated Press. In August, the city of Tulsa announced the creation of a commission that will give recommendations on how the city can pay reparations to descendants. Tulsa City Council Member Vanessa Hall-Harper spoke at the panel.
The process to create a commission took years and went through multiple twists and turns, according to the Associated Press.
“I’ll just say that in Tulsa, and I think in this country, but certainly in Tulsa, whenever there’s an attempt to do anything for and by Black people, there is an automatic pushback. There’s an automatic no, and there’s a fight,” Hall-Harper said.
“At the end of the day, the white institutions and the white power will never tell our history truthfully, and so we always have to be working to establish our own institutions for us, by us, so that we can control our futures, for our children, for us today and for our future,” she said.
In closing remarks, Robin Rue Simmons spoke about the city’s Road to Reparations in Evanston exhibit at the Evanston Public Library, which is on display from Dec. 3 to Jan. 31.
“I didn’t get to name it (the exhibit) yet; I’ve been really busy. But consider it My Faith, My Family and My Community. That’s what it’s named,” Rue Simmons said.
Rue Simmons, who launched the reparations ordinance in Evanston and is currently the chair of the city’s Reparations Committee, gave further thanks to the Evanstonians that made her proposal a reality. “We had an interfaith community. We had allies, folks that didn’t look like us, that didn’t live in our neighborhood, but cared enough about our values, to be uncomfortable and expose themselves and our city and do the hard work and be uncomfortable.”
“That’s what we did. And so I love my community, and I want you to know that it is my community, it is Evanston that did this.”
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