Kenneth Wideman loves his apartment near downtown Evanston. It’s a spacious one bedroom with an eat-in kitchen that opens to the living room and its four big windows, where he can sit in his favorite chair and watch the traffic and people along tree-lined Ridge Avenue.
It’s a two-minute drive to his sister Shelia Wideman’s apartment, making it easy for him to take her to the grocery store or to her doctor.
And perhaps best of all, he said with a chuckle, if the water heater breaks or the front walk needs shoveling, all he has to do is call the maintenance staff and “see them do the work.”
“This is the way I like it, just a home being a home,” said Kenneth, 77. “It’s very enjoyable.”
Last year, Kenneth and Shelia, 75, were given the option to become first-time homeowners after they were picked as two of the first 16 Evanstonians to each receive $25,000 in what’s considered the first attempt by a U.S. city to pay reparations to its Black residents.
But when their randomly assigned numbers were plucked from a bingo cage on that momentous January day, the Widemans inadvertently exposed a flaw in the fledgling program.
Most national conversations around reparations for Black Americans center on compensating descendants of enslaved people. Evanston, though, focused its initial effort on repairing the damage caused by a 50-year period of housing discrimination that often deprived Black residents from building wealth through homeownership and kept them segregated to a tiny enclave on the city’s western edge.
As such, program architects decided to forgo direct payouts and instead require recipients to work with a nonprofit to spend their reparations in one of three ways: On a down payment for a new home, on mortgage payments, or on home repairs.
Therein lies the problem. Kenneth and Shelia did not want to leave the rental apartments they’ve called home for the last several years.
“Taking care of a house would be really a burden on me and on my sister,” said Kenneth. “That’s why we got apartments.”
Their children couldn’t use the money either, the siblings said, given Evanston’s expensive real estate market, where a typical single family home can exceed $500,000.
As the year deadline to use the money approached, and with the closely watched reparations program stumbling through funding shortfalls and a glacial pace (at least six approved applicants have died waiting for the money), the city’s seven-member reparations committee faced the unimaginable prospect of rescinding the Widemans’ reparations benefits.
Instead, the committee — a mix of residents and council members — voted in March to push the program in a direction its sharpest critics had always wanted: They carved out a fourth option to existing rules, allowing the Widemans and 600-plus other waiting applicants to receive a direct cash payment to be used toward rent or other housing expenses. And they accelerated efforts to create a new reparations program that would pay out an as-yet undetermined amount of money with no conditions attached.
“The community was always wanting direct cash payments,” said Meleika Gardner, 53, an Evanston resident and creator of the online “Evanston Live TV” show. “That was always number one over anything else that the reparations committee was trying to sell everybody on.”
The new direction comes as a growing number of cities and states look to follow Evanston’s lead, even as some of its longtime Black residents continue to raise alarms over what they see as persistent racial disparities hidden beneath a veneer of tolerance.
Meanwhile, Evanston’s pioneering experiment with reparations adds to a simmering debate over thorny questions: Should what the city is doing be considered true reparations or is it, as some critics argue, little more than a housing voucher disguised as reparations? Does a piecemeal approach to reparations detract from, or lend momentum to, a larger federal program? And can any of these approaches fully repair centuries of harm inflicted on Black Americans and make good the unkept promise of 40 acres and a mule?
‘My blood and sweat and tears are here’
Kenneth Wideman gripped a cane in his left hand and walked over to his favorite chair — a black, faux-leather rolling chair reinforced with a couch cushion — removing his Vietnam veteran hat to wipe his brow on the unseasonably warm April afternoon.
While his sister is uncomfortable with the sudden attention, agreeing to her first interview for this story, Kenneth has embraced the spotlight: “I’ve lived a heck of a life.”
Kenneth remembers the time he said hello to Jackie Robinson as guards ushered the Brooklyn Dodgers star through Wrigley Field after a game, or when Jesse Owens gave him a first-place ribbon after his team won a relay race sponsored by the Chicago Daily News, or when he unsuccessfully tried out for the Chicago Bulls.
Kenneth and Shelia’s grandmother left South Carolina during the Great Migration of the early 20th century and came to Evanston with her family in search of freedom and opportunity.
She found a city all too willing to embrace Jim Crow.
By the 1940s, when Kenneth and Shelia were born, the city’s Black population had eclipsed 6,000 residents, most living in a triangular neighborhood bounded by train tracks to the east, Church Street to the south and the North Shore Channel to the north and east, in what now covers a good portion of the 5th Ward.
In an exhaustive report on the city’s website, Evanston historians Morris “Dino” Robinson Jr. and Jenny Thompson laid bare the ways in which those neighborhood boundaries were upheld.
Some Black residents who lived outside that crowded neighborhood were forced to move — their homes destroyed or, in some cases, lifted off the foundation and relocated — when the city rezoned their blocks for commercial use. Racially restrictive covenants ensured Black people could not own or rent property in white neighborhoods. The federally sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corp. redlined Evanston’s Black neighborhood with a “D” rating for its “undesirable population or an infiltration of it,” which left its residents unable to secure bank loans. Some, then, were forced to enter into predatory housing contracts with higher deposits and payments. They didn’t get the title until the contract was paid in full. Missing one payment could lead to eviction.
The Widemans lived with their aunt, uncle and cousins at Dodge Avenue and Simpson Street. Their grandmother took care of the kids while their mom and aunt did domestic work for wealthy white doctors on the North Shore.
Kenneth and Shelia said they were insulated from the effects of segregation by their family and the larger Black community that, while fighting for equality, created its own businesses and institutions to rival ones they were barred from accessing.
The siblings graduated from Evanston Township High School in the mid 1960s. Shelia took a job as a food preparer at the former Skokie Valley Hospital and eventually worked for 18 years at the Jewel on Chicago Avenue in Evanston.
Kenneth was drafted into the Army after high school and spent 11 months running a supply depot during the Vietnam War. Back home in Evanston, he was hired to clean student dorms at Northwestern University, a job he would keep for 33 years before retiring in 2011.
“My blood and sweat and tears are here in this community,” he said. “I love Evanston.”
‘This extraordinary moment’
On a chilly Wednesday night in December 2019, Kenneth slowly made his way through the crowd, several hundred in number, and took a seat on the red-upholstered pews inside First Church of God on Simpson Street. They came to hear remarks from actor/activist Danny Glover, and others, and to learn more about Evanston’s new reparations program.
About two weeks earlier, by a vote of 8 to 1, Evanston became the first city in the country to approve reparations for its Black residents.
Rewind 154 years, to 1865. Three months before the Civil War ended, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued an order dividing 400,000 acres along the coast from South Carolina to Florida into 40-acre plots to be given to newly freed slaves (the use of a mule for each new land owner came in a later order).
The offer was short-lived. Later that same year, President Andrew Johnson rescinded the order and the land returned to its former Confederate owners.
All the while, Black people continued to fight for reparations and watch as the U.S. government eventually paid out billions of dollars to Native American tribes and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
In 1989, and every year after for nearly three decades, U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., filed a bill to create a federal commission to study reparations. Conyers retired in 2017 and died two years later having never seen the bill pass. It was reintroduced this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, but has yet to come up for a vote.
Despite the national racial reckoning in 2020 that followed the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, public support for reparations remains starkly divided along racial lines.
In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 77% of Black adults supported reparations for descendants of enslaved people.
Among white adults surveyed, support dropped to 18%.
In Evanston, the path to legislating reparations began in 2002, when Lionel John-Baptiste, then alderman of the 2nd Ward, introduced a resolution, unanimously passed, that acknowledged the city’s history of racial discrimination while supporting Conyers’ federal bill.
But the city’s reparations effort would find its driving force in native daughter Robin Rue Simmons. In 2019, as 5th Ward alderwoman, she directed the city’s Equity and Empowerment Commission to look at how to fund reparations.
By June 2019, the City Council laid down the foundation for reparations with its adoption of a resolution committing to “end structural racism and achieve racial equity” in Evanston. Five months later, resolution 126-R-19 created the city’s reparations fund.
“Initially, everyone was really in support and excited,” said Gardner, the Evanston resident and show creator. “We were just proud of Robin Rue Simmons that she accomplished what she accomplished.”
The gravity of the moment was on display at the town hall the Widemans attended two weeks after the resolution passed.
“It is you, the citizens of this extraordinary moment, who will go down in history,” Glover told the crowd.
As a source of funding, the city turned to its 3% sales tax on the sale of newly legalized recreational marijuana. The significance of that choice was not lost on many, given the racial disparity of the war on drugs. In 2019, at Simmons’ request, the city analyzed three years of cannabis arrests and tickets, revealing that Black people accounted for 71% of cannabis possession arrests and 57% of tickets — at the last census, Black people made up 16% of Evanston’s 78,110 residents.
Still, crucial questions remained. Who would be eligible for reparations? How much money should each person receive? How should it be used?
‘It isn’t reparations’
As Evanston wrestled with those questions, cities and states across the country looked to replicate its perceived success. San Francisco; St. Louis; Asheville, North Carolina and St. Paul, Minnesota, are but a few of the cities that have started their own reparations initiatives.
Locally, Illinois launched a commission to study reparations, while a citizen-led group in Oak Park is doing the same.
Simmons decided not to seek reelection in 2021 — she remains on Evanston’s reparations committee as chairperson — and started a nonprofit that consults other cities on how to start their own reparations programs. She did not respond to emailed requests to be interviewed for this story.
Meetings and public discussions in Evanston yielded ideas around affordable housing, education and economic development. And in March 2021, it unveiled the first stage of its reparations initiative, the Restorative Housing Program.
Applicants needed to fall within one of three categories to be eligible for up to $25,000.
Top priority was given to Black people who, like the Widemans, lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 (called “ancestors” in program documents.) Next came “direct descendants,” defined as a “blood relative in the direct line of descent” of someone in the ancestor category. A third category of eligibility was carved out for people who did not qualify as an ancestor or direct descendant, but who could prove they faced housing discrimination due to post-1969 city policies or practices.
Applicants were required to select how they planned to use the money, though the Wideman siblings said they were uncertain of those rules when they went to the public library to fill out the application.
“I didn’t really understand too much what it was about,” Shelia said. “But I went along with my brother.”
The program’s initial rollout sparked inevitable backlash.
Online commenters called it a handout. Unnecessary. Unfair to white people. National conservative groups threatened lawsuits (one was filed, a public records suit that was dismissed in 2021).
Duke University economist William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, authors of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post titled: “Evanston, Ill., approved ‘reparations.’ Except it isn’t reparations.”
On the housing program, the pair wrote, “That’s a good step for the city to take, but let’s be clear: This is a housing voucher program, not reparations — and calling it that does more harm than good.
“The cause of justice demands proprietariness about the meaning of ‘reparations,’ and we object to these kinds of piecemeal and misleading labels. True reparations only can come from a full-scale program of acknowledgment, redress and closure for a grievous injustice.”
Proponents have pushed back at that characterization, calling Evanston’s efforts an important first step and comparing it to the work of civil rights pioneers.
“Any form of restorative justice is reparations, no matter how small or how big,” Robinson told the crowd at a fair housing workshop last month.
About 650 applications were received, a relatively small number in light of the roughly 12,500 Black residents in Evanston and the tens of thousands more living elsewhere who could have been eligible for reparations.
Approving applications has largely fallen to one staff member in the city manager’s office, Tasheik Kerr, who juggles that task among her other duties (a team of interns was recently brought in to assist). Applications are still being reviewed, she said. Only one has been denied thus far, for claiming to be someone who is deceased.
The city asked Libertyville-based nonprofit Community Partners for Affordable Housing to oversee the actual payment of reparations to contractors or home mortgage lenders, essentially on a volunteer basis. But the group is only able to take on one home repair project a month, and most of the first 16 recipients have selected that option.
Then there’s the issue of funding. The city pledged the first $10 million in cannabis sales taxes for reparations, anticipating it could receive as much as $750,000 a year based on three projected dispensaries in town.
Only one has opened but a second is being eyed for south Evanston, though the city recently rejected a proposal from 8th Ward Ald. Devon Reid to allow for cannabis consumption lounges in the city.
Officials sought to bolster the reparations fund by earmarking another $10 million in future taxes on real estate transfer sales exceeding $1.5 million. That puts the city’s total reparations commitment, for now, at $20 million.
Of that $20 million, only $400,000 has been approved to the first 16 ancestors selected in last year’s lottery, leaving 628 others waiting to find out if and when they’ll receive their reparations.
That delay is one of the concerns raised by Evanston residents, some of whom formed an online group, Evanston Rejects Racist Reparations. They also questioned why the money is going directly to financial institutions, some of which continue to face allegations of racial discrimination, instead of directly to the people.
“Many Black people were offended,” Gardner said. “Are you saying we can’t take care of our own money? Do you not trust us?”
The city initially balked at direct payments, believing they could jeopardize existing benefits or leave people on the hook for taxes. Evanston’s corporation counsel, Nicholas Cummings, said the city has since received a new opinion from a tax attorney who gave them a possible workaround.
People who choose cash in lieu of the other options in the housing program could still have to pay taxes, Cummings said. And they’d still be expected to use the money for housing-related costs, though, he added, the city doesn’t have the staff to enforce that.
Evanston officials said direct cash payments were always the goal, even before they learned the Widemans were at risk of losing their reparations benefits. But Reid, the council member who introduced the resolution to create a new, direct-cash payment, said the city has been too slow to get to that point.
“If you’re going to do it, do it and be bold with it,” he said. “I think our tiptoeing around is actually doing more harm than good.”
Moving forward
Inside Evanston’s Lorraine H. Morton Civic Center, named for the city’s first Black mayor (and its longest-serving), staff are scheduling meetings with the next wave of reparations recipients in the ancestor category.
Evanston officials cannot publicly disclose how much is in the reparations fund due to a state law that bars cities with fewer than five dispensaries from revealing cannabis sales tax figures, which critics say is a blow to transparency.
“We can’t follow the money,” Gardner said. “There’s something wrong with that.”
Almost $525,000 has been shifted from real estate transfer taxes in the first three months of the year, documents show, enough for 21 people.
As staff work through applicants in the housing program — they’re still waiting for direction on whether the application process will be reopened now that cash payments are an option — Cummings is gathering research for the future direct-cash program.
The first question: What harms need to be repaired? The architects of Evanston’s reparations program sought to insulate it from legal challenges by closely tying the remedy (in this case, housing benefits) to a specific harm (housing discrimination).
Programs that stray from that model have been struck down, most notably in 1989, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the city of Richmond, Virginia, violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause when it required companies that received city construction jobs to subcontract 30% of the work to minority owned businesses (that same 14th Amendment clause was successfully used earlier this year to halt a Cook County grant program for small businesses).
In Evanston, defining the harms inflicted on its Black residents will undoubtedly be painful work. The city, in many ways, struggles with dual identities. Internally and externally, it’s seen as a progressive, welcoming city. The kind where homes on any block are likely to display yard signs advertising social justice causes. The kind that would be the first city to turn talk of reparations into action.
And yet, it’s also a city that remains segregated. Most of its Black population is concentrated in neighborhoods west and south of downtown, with the largest percentage still located in the 5th Ward. Residents of the census tract covering much of that neighborhood still lag behind their white neighbors in several crucial metrics, according to a city study, from median household income and child poverty rate to health and life expectancy.
Black people are still the targets of racism. Last year, three nooses were found hanging from a tree outside two District 65 schools. A month later, swastikas and racist graffiti were scrawled in marker in a bathroom at a different school. Also last year, a group of more than 30 Black city employees released a scathing report documenting what they called a pattern of workplace discrimination.
That conflict between Evanston’s perception and its reality has led some older Black residents to call it “the lie by the lakefront,” Reid said.
“Initially I kind of disagreed with some of those seniors,” he said. “But sometimes, more and more, I see exactly what they’re saying.”
There is also the question of how much Evanston should pay in cash reparations. San Francisco’s reparations committee recently floated the idea of paying Black adults in that city $5 million each, a plan that Robinson said will “never see the light of day.”
Darity, the economist and author who criticized Evanston’s reparations effort in The Washington Post, has said that closing the vast wealth gap between Black and white Americans would carry a price tag of $14 trillion.
“It would be nice to tie it all together and say, much like professor Darity at Duke has done, that these policies have cost Evanston’s Black residents X amount of thousands of dollars,” Cummings said. “And then the committee can make a recommendation.”
Meanwhile, most of the city’s first 16 reparations recipients have used their money.
Stephen Frazier, 86, put it toward payments on the home he and his wife Caren, 80, share on Sherman Avenue in south Evanston, steps from the apartment complex where, nearly 60 years earlier, a white landlord who played football with Frazier at Evanston Township High School said he couldn’t rent to his former teammate for fear the other tenants would move.
“I’m glad that it has come to this,” Frazier said of reparations. But, he added, “there are some things there are never going to be good payment for, because they were so drastic. You can’t bring people back from the dead.”
As of this writing, the Widemans have still not received their share of reparations. But they applaud the city for starting the program and hope it will spread to others waiting.
“Maybe they could somehow get ahead in life, do something that they might want to do in life,” Shelia said. “And maybe they’ll forget about what happened and move forward.”
They both said they’re not sure how they’ll spend the money when it comes.
“I have an idea, maybe, what I would love but I don’t want to say because I don’t have — my hands are empty right now,” Shelia said, gesturing like a magician about to perform a trick.
As for Kenneth, he’s started keeping a list of possibilities. He’d like to put some of it in a bank account for his grandchildren, and use the rest for rent or furniture. He said he could use a new bed and another stool for the breakfast bar in the kitchen, and maybe a new living room chair, though, he said with a smile, it won’t replace his favorite one — “no way.”
