Evanston did something governments almost never do. It admitted, in detail, to a harm it had caused, and then it started paying for it.
Between 1919 and 1969, the city of Evanston used its own ordinances, zoning, and practices to segregate Black residents, redline their neighborhoods, and drive down the value of Black-owned homes. In 2019, led by then-alderman Robin Rue Simmons, the city voted to repair it. The program pays eligible Black residents who lived in Evanston during those years, and their descendants, $25,000 toward housing, funded at the start by a local tax on legal cannabis sales. By 2026 it had distributed more than $7 million to hundreds of residents, part of a $20 million commitment, and it stands as the first reparations program of its kind in the country to actually pay out.
"Evanston has set a new precedent. It has shown that racial reparations are possible."
Robin Rue Simmons, former Evanston alderman and founder of FirstRepair
Then, in June 2026, the United States Department of Justice moved to shut it down. The DOJ joined a lawsuit calling the program racially discriminatory and arguing it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. "Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. The case turns on a genuinely hard constitutional question, and it is worth stating both sides plainly: the government argues that distributing public benefits by race is unconstitutional on its face, and Evanston argues that the harm it is repairing was itself defined by race, documented, specific, and caused by the city's own hand.
I put Evanston in this issue because it is where the argument stops being abstract. Most reparative commitments die quietly, in the gap between a pledge and a payment. Evanston closed that gap, kept paying for four years, and is now the place where the country may decide whether documented, locally funded repair is allowed to stand. That question sits close to my own work. The systems I build are designed to put decisions and dollars in a community's hands and to show their work when someone demands to see it, which is exactly what a program like this has to do to survive a challenge like this one.
Whatever the court decides, Evanston already proved the thing people called impossible. A city can name its own harm and pay for it. This fall, the question is whether it gets to keep going.
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