Reparations in Evanston
On March 22, 2021, the Evanston City Council voted to use money from a special fund to pay reparations to the city's Black residents. Evanston, a city of 75,000 people in Illinois, was the first city in the United States to approve reparation payments to its Black residents. In 2019, Evanston's city council committed $10 million over a decade to the reparations effort from a new tax on legalized marijuana. The first reparations payments are focused on funding home repairs and mortgages for Black families who suffered lasting damage from decades of discriminatory housing policies. Between 1919 and 1969, Evanston’s Black citizens were forced to move to an area of the city known as the Fifth Ward due to redlining. Today many Black Evanston citizens still live in the Fifth Ward.
(For Reuters. With reporting from Brendan O’Brien.)
