The news that a conservative nonprofit legal group is challenging Evanston’s groundbreaking reparations program got me thinking about the many efforts to undo the wrongs of systemic racism through monetary compensation.
Americans have a long tradition of offering reparations for slavery, only to see them reclaimed.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862, which freed enslaved people in the nation’s capital and paid their former owners, who were loyal to the Union, up to $300 as compensation for each individual released. .
But the freed individuals were offered little except their freedom, which was no small matter. Lincoln’s signing of the bill is still celebrated with an annual holiday and parades in Washington, DC, on April 16.
The issue of reparations for slavery persists, especially among African Americans, with questions like: What happened to our “40 acres and a mule?”
That’s a phrase that arose from Union General William T. Sherman’s order to reserve cultivable land seized from the Confederates and give it to the former slaves. But Lincoln was assassinated before that was carried out, and Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson attempted to reverse the initiative.
Fast forward. As a descendant of freed American slaves, I have long felt that the chances of actual reparations happening were too remote for me and my family to care much. But in recent years, the reparations movement has turned its sights to local actions.
The Evanston City Council approved a program in 2021 that has already paid out more than $3 million and plans to distribute at least $11 million more. It aims to compensate black descendants of people who lived in the North Shore suburb between 1919 and 1969, when racial discrimination and neighborhood segregation were rampant.
Now, in a self-styled blow against what is often called “reverse discrimination,” Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative legal foundation, is accusing in a lawsuit its anti-discrimination program of discriminating against non-blacks by providing money only to African-American households. A lawsuit has been filed against the city, alleging the program is discriminatory. Against non-blacks.
Under the program, qualified recipients must have ancestors who identified as black and lived in Evanston for the stated half-century. Of course, those who are black and lived in Evanston as adults during that period are eligible. And Black adults who lived in Evanston after 1969 and can prove they were victims of housing discrimination are also eligible. Judicial Watch calls the program “nothing more than a ploy to redistribute taxpayer dollars to individuals based on race.”
The city government created the program, primarily with money from legalized marijuana, to help atone for what the city said was a system that prevented Black residents from building wealth through homeownership and separated Black families into a small enclave on the western edge of the city.
Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court, names as plaintiffs six people whose relatives once lived in Evanston during that 50-year period. None of the plaintiffs or their family members identify as black, the lawsuit said. Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the program awards applicants up to $25,000 based on their race, without having to prove that they or their family members have faced housing discrimination. It is a so-called class action lawsuit that, among other things, seeks $25,000 for non-black Evanstonians who are members of the class that Judicial Watch defines.
The city declined to comment on the lawsuit, but Kamm Howard, national co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, expressed confidence in an interview that the program will survive this legal challenge if it is not ruled a discrimination case , but as a human rights case, using international standards for crimes against humanity.
“We choose these remedies not because of discrimination, but because human rights have been violated,” said Howard, who has worked with Evanston. Therefore, he argued, the legality of reparations should be subject to international standards that prohibit apartheid, slavery and other crimes against humanity.
We will see. Howard has spoken at international conferences about a “new paradigm of reparations activism.” This could be an example of it. But international human rights standards have had limited impact in the United States.
Other local governments across the country are watching what’s happening in Evanston. But if we look at similar civil rights cases from the past – for example, affirmative action lawsuits – the more closely they can tailor the remedies, the greater the chance of success.
