OUTSTANDING BALANCE: Evanstons residents take action.
Photo courtesy of businessinsider.com
On January 11, 2024, roughly 200 people filled the Evanston Township High School auditorium to watch a computer decide who would be paid first. 454 direct descendants of Black residents who lived in Evanston, Illinois, between 1919 and 1969 had each been given an identification number, and all 454 now appeared on a screen at the front of the room. Each number determined a family’s place in line for $25,000 in reparations. All 454 families would eventually be paid, though some in months, while others could wait years.
Two and a half years after that night, it is estimated that only 171 families will be paid by the end of 2026, a figure that reflects less than half of the total count. Now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Donald Trump has joined a lawsuit to end the program altogether.
Between 1919 and 1969, boxed in by the city’s zoning laws and shut out by redlining—the practice of banks and federal agencies refusing mortgages in Black neighborhoods—Black Evanstonians could buy homes in only a few parts of the city. The harm was not an accident, but a policy. 2021, Evanston became the first U.S. city to pay for it, pledging $20 million: half from a 3% tax on recreational cannabis, half from a tax on real estate sales.
While this one-time payment is a promising step, it pales in comparison to the full amount owed to families impacted by decades of racial injustice. As the program’s founder, former Evanston Fifth Ward Alderman Robin Rue Simmons, said in 2021, “[the compensation plan] is alone not enough.”
For instance, redlining did not only take a single lump sum from Black families; it stopped their wealth from growing altogether. A home is how most American families build wealth. It gains value, it can be borrowed against, and it can be passed down. History Department Chair Steven Schuh describes how a mortgage allows for ownership and wealth accumulation: “You’re given 30 years at a prevailing interest rate…at the end of which, you hopefully have a house that’s not only worth more than you bought it for, but also you own 100% of it.”
A family prevented from buying a house in 1950 lost not only the house but everything it would have produced for their children and grandchildren. That gap is far from theoretical. Black residents make up more than 17% of Evanston’s population but only 8.7% of its homeowners, according to census data, while white residents are 61% of the population and nearly 80% of homeowners. The average home in the city is now worth about $460,000, according to Zillow, a figure that increased by 3.5% in the past year alone.
Furthermore, the rollout of these one-time payments has experienced significant delays. While Evanston first relied on its cannabis tax, too few dispensaries opened, forcing the city to add the real estate tax in 2022. Payments are sent only as funds come in, and the program’s oldest recipients have paid for that pace. By March 2023, of those who had lived through the discrimination, only 16 had received their grants. Seven had died waiting.
Critics of the plan, however, claim that the program goes too far. In a June 2026 DOJ press release, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued that by paying people based on race, the program violates both the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act. Liam Zheng ’30 shared his thoughts, saying, “I get why they did it, but deciding who gets the money by race feels like drawing a line similar to the one the city is trying to fix.”
However, the Constitution does not forbid every racial classification; it forbids unjustified ones. In Adarand Constructors v. Peña (1995), the Supreme Court held that such classifications are constitutional “only if they are narrowly tailored measures that further compelling governmental interests.” Correcting a government’s own documented discrimination is one of the few interests courts have accepted, and Evanston’s program is built on exactly that record. It pays only those who lived in the city while its discriminatory policies were enforced, and their descendants. Honors African American history teacher Jerome Bailey acknowledged that redlining hurt some non-black American families, “but the overwhelming majority of people who faced discrimination from redlining, from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and in the restrictive covenants were African American.”
Moreover, though Evanston’s grants are significant signs of progress, they are not substitutes for measures that directly address persisting inequalities stemming from racial discrimination, measures that include audits of home appraisals in historically Black neighborhoods, rewritten zoning codes that expand affordable housing, and funding that does not rise and fall with marijuana sales. “$25,000 is better, but it won’t bring back what they could’ve had,” Bailey says. “A check can pay a family, but it cannot rebuild what 50 years of policy took.”