Evanston, Illinois, has earned recognition for launching the nation’s first government-funded reparations program for Black Americans. Over the past two years, the program has distributed nearly $5 million to 193 Black residents of the town.
However, the program now faces a legal challenge. A conservative advocacy group has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to terminate the reparations initiative, arguing that it discriminates against non-Black residents of Evanston, a suburb of Illinois.
“This program redistributes tax dollars based on race. That’s just a brazen violation of the law,” the president of Judicial Watch, the organization behind the lawsuit, Tom Fitton, said in a statement.
In recent years, more than a dozen states and cities, including New York and Boston, have begun exploring the possibility of offering reparations to their Black residents. California lawmakers are currently considering legislation to establish a state agency that would oversee potential reparations programs.
The Judicial Watch lawsuit, filed on behalf of six non-Black residents of Evanston, contends that the program’s “race-based eligibility requirement” infringes upon the 14th Amendment.
The amendment, originally crafted to secure the rights of millions of formerly enslaved Black Americans following the Civil War, has been increasingly utilized by conservative lawyers and judges to dismantle programs they argue unfairly benefit Black Americans and other minorities.