The public hearing began with a welcome from Mayor Daniel Biss.
February 9, 2025
About 50 Evanston and Chicago community members chanted “Repair the damage” in unison at Norris University Center during the Illinois African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission Public Hearing Saturday morning.
ADCRC Chair Marvin Slaughter said the hearing’s purpose was to present the community’s voices within ADCRC’s research and to educate individuals about reparations efforts.
“The ADCRC is here to focus on developing and implementing measures to ensure equity, equality and purity for African American descendants of slavery here in the state of Illinois,” Slaughter said to community members.
The public hearing began with a welcome from Mayor Daniel Biss. It moved on to eight featured speakers who discussed topics such as housing segregation, the unjust legal system, separate and unequal education, racism and infrastructure for Black Americans.
“Having this information is important,” Evanston resident Candice Grant said. “I didn’t come from a family that had all the resources and connections to things. I have to come to events like this to get the information because it was not given to me.”
Housing Segregation
Founder and Executive Director of FirstRepair Robin Rue Simmons, an Evanston native and former 5th Ward councilmember, was the first to speak. She said that between Black and white families in Evanston, there is a 13-year life expectancy difference and a $52,009 household income gap – an increase from $46,000 in 2019. Simmons also said the Black population in Evanston has declined.
Simmons said exclusionary housing practices such as redlining and zoning laws have also contributed to housing disparities. She also shared that the commission reached milestones such as dispersing reparations by using $10 million from the recreational cannabis tax and adding $10 million from real estate transfer taxes. They have dispersed $5.3 million dollars to Evanston residents and still have up to $20 million to disperse.
“Recipients are in this room. It is not a game. It is not hearsay. It is real,” Simmons said. “We landed on housing as a form of repair because of the anti-Black legislative practices, also the culture, the history, the other institutions as well. Although we have a lot of work to do, much of it will expand beyond housing.”
Legal System
Cook County Bar Association President Nick Cummings also emphasized the severe consequences of redlining and the need for legislative action when discussing the history of the legal system in Illinois.
Cummings said the culmination of the “legacy of enslavement” and service laws continues to affect Black communities. He also said key issues of systematic inequalities are related to prison labor and disenfranchisement.
“The laws that seemed racially neutral on their face were enforced in a way that certainly made it seem that the targets (were) Black people,” Cummings said. “The law has not always been the friend of Black people in this state, but it is getting better.”
Education System
Executive Producer Afrika Porter said that by the time her son was 9 years old, he had attended eight different schools.
Porter emphasized that slavery, Jim Crow laws and discrimination have created disparities in Black Americans receiving quality education.
“For centuries, Black Americans have been denied access to quality education and fundamental rights that serve as the key to opportunity, progress, freedom, justice and equality,” Porter said.
Porter said everyone in the room is invested in the fight against racism through reparations.
Environment and Infrastructure
In the registered community speaker section, Dr. Demetrice Griffin, who represented the Chicago Westside branch of the NAACP, said Black Americans in the West Side are waiting for infrastructure funding to be dispersed and renovations to be complete.
This waiting creates health issues amongst seniors and children. Highways were developed to displace Black and Brown residents, she said.
After the four featured speakers, Griffin and other registered community speakers took the stage. Then, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Chicago), discussed the current importance of reparations discussions. He said now it is “urgent” due to President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate DEI and dismantle the Department of Education.
“I am not going to let (Trump) make ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ bad words,” Jackson said. “ I put my ‘D-E-I’ right in the middle of my speech. Use that word. Let’s not let it die.”
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