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On Tuesday, the Trump administration filed a motion to join a lawsuit attempting to block the U.S.’s first and only reparations program.
The federal government is supporting a 2024 lawsuit by right-wing group Judicial Watch, which argues that the Evanston, Illinois reparations program violates the rights of non-Black residents.
In a court filing on Tuesday, the Department of Justice called the program “racially discriminatory” because it allots benefits based on race.
The program was approved in 2021, and allotted $20 million to Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and experienced discriminatory housing policies. Their direct descendants can also apply, as can residents of any race who experienced housing discrimination in the years after 1969, as long as they demonstrate proof of discriminatory practices.
The program offers up to $25,000 per applicant, which can only be used for home repairs, down payments on properties, and interest fees or late penalties on property in Evanston. Since 2021, the city has distributed $7 million to hundreds of residents thus far.
Some have criticized the program as having narrow limitations, providing funds that can only go toward local properties and that end up back in the hands of banks.
The program emerged as a result of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, which saw the largest protests in U.S. history against police violence and continued racial injustice. In the wake of the protest movement, over a dozen cities created task forces to look into reparations for descendants of slavery – but only the city of Evanston has carried out a program.
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“Under the pretext of paying reparations for events more than 100 years ago, the city of Evanston has chosen to distribute millions of dollars in cash and housing benefits to people because of the color of their skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department. In a manner that has become commonplace in the Trump administration, her remarks attempt to flip civil rights language on its head, claiming that discrimination is actually against non-Black people.
Robin Rue Simmons, who served as alderman of Evanston’s historically Black 5th Ward and spearheaded the reparations program, said that the lawsuit is a “fear tactic.”
The Trump administration’s attempt to join the lawsuit against the Evanston reparations program is an “attack on the revived hope that Black communities have felt having a path, through a hyperlocal process, to reparations,” she said.
Simmons spoke of redlining policies between 1919 and 1969 that harmed Black families in Evanston, as banks and property owners would not sell or rent to Black families in most of the city, instead pushing Black residents into a segregated enclave of the city, the 5th Ward.
In 1919, during the height of the Great Migration, Black families began to migrate in large numbers to the Midwest to escape the Jim Crow South. When Black families arrived in the city of Evanston – less than 20 miles from Chicago – the city implemented racial zoning policies and discriminatory housing practices. Black families were prevented from moving into homes in most of the city, banks refused to provide loans to most Black families, and the 5th Ward experienced disinvestment and neglect.
The city became one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., and discrimination in providing mortgages to Black homebuyers continued to the eve of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion.
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