Who Gets Blocked First
The federal government on Tuesday asked a judge to halt the United States’ first reparations program, a city-run effort in Evanston, Illinois, that has already sent more than $7 million to Black residents and others harmed by the city’s housing policies. The U.S. Department of Justice joined an existing lawsuit and told the court the program was unconstitutional, calling it “racially discriminatory” because it distributed benefits on the basis of race.
The target is a program that was launched in Evanston in 2021 and set aside $20 million for Black residents and their direct descendants who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and suffered housing discrimination because of city ordinances, policies or practices. Residents of any race who experienced discrimination due to the city’s policies or practices after 1969 also qualified. The city has already distributed over $7 million in $25,000 increments, using revenue from a local tax on legal marijuana sales.
The money can be used for home repairs, down payments on property, and interest or late penalties on property in the city. That is the material side of the dispute: a local attempt to move resources toward people pushed down by earlier city policy, now facing the federal apparatus in court.
The City’s Money, the Federal Courtroom
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement: “There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer.”
The federal filing lands against a program that Robin Rue Simmons, who pioneered the program in Evanston and now leads the committee that presides over the funds, says was built in response to redlining and exclusion. Simmons called the lawsuit and the federal government’s support a “fear tactic” aimed at dissuading other governments from pursuing similar programs. She said redlining policies across the city between 1919 and 1969 harmed Black communities for generations, mirroring a prevalent practice nationwide wherein banks and property owners would not sell or rent to Black families in areas with more wealth. She said those policies often limited access to high-paying jobs, healthcare and education.
Simmons said, “Evanston has set a new precedent. It has shown that racial reparations are possible.”
The city’s Black residents make up approximately 14% of the city’s roughly 76,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census, with 11% identifying as more than one race. A majority of the city’s Black residents live in the city’s Fifth and Second Wards, which are historically low-income areas, according to a 2024 study on the reparations program.
What the Lawsuit Says
Michael Bekesha, one of the attorneys who initially sued the City of Evanston on behalf of six plaintiffs in May 2024, said applicants were not required to demonstrate that they were specifically harmed by the City of Evanston, leaving race as the only criteria. He said his clients would all be eligible for the program if they were Black.
Bekesha said Evanston’s program is different from those in the past, pointing to the program that compensated Japanese people after the U.S. government imprisoned over 100,000 people in internment camps during World War II, and to the people in Chicago who were paid after being tortured by the city’s police department between the 1970s and the early 1990s. Bekesha said, “Reparations programs aren’t new, but they’ve always been lawful, they’ve always been connected to specific harms, specific injuries suffered by specific individuals. And here in Evanston, there is no connection between the individuals receiving the money and any action taken by the city of Evanston at any point.”
The reparations issue has been a hot-button issue across the country since the abolition of slavery in 1865, and it became especially polarizing in recent years after momentum grew for similar programs in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody in 2020. At least five states, including California, New York and Maryland, and more than a dozen cities, including Boston, Detroit and Philadelphia, have created task forces or commissions to study slavery reparations, but none have gone as far as Evanston to actually distribute resources.
The Trump administration’s move to halt the program is in line with a broader conservative rejection of race-based reparations and is a shift from former President Joe Biden’s broad support of a congressional inquiry into ways to address the government’s long history of racial subjugation. It also differs from the position of the United Nations, which recently adopted a resolution urging countries to implement reparations for the trafficking of Africans into slavery around the world. The U.S. was one of three countries that rejected the measure, with the United Kingdom and all 27 European Union countries abstaining.