The War on Reparations

The nation continues to add insult to injury by denying rightful compensation to victims.

Attacks on racial justice are increasing. At the same time honest reporting and writing on such topics is being tamped down in national news outlets. I’m working hard to resist this trend by writing articles like this. Will you help me by becoming a paid subscriber today?

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This week two decisions regarding reparations to Black people made it seem less like the country is wrestling with the topic and more like some are in an all out war against it.

City of Evanston Sued Over Its Reparations Initiative

The city of Evanston, Illinois in 2019 became the first municipality to offer reparations to its Black residents who lived in the city during a time when Black people were forbidden to live in certain neighborhoods because of segregation.

The city conducted extensive research to determine precisely how Black people had been discriminated against in their city and to devise recommendations for repair.

They adopted a resolution that stated:

WHEREAS, the City of Evanston government recognizes that, like most, if not all, communities in the United States, the community and the government allowed and perpetuated racial disparity through the use of many regulatory and policy oriented tools. Some examples would include, but not be limited to the use of zoning laws that supported neighborhood redlining, municipal disinvestment in the black community; and a history of bias in government services.

Photo Credit: ABC News

In the effort to build generational wealth and repair the harm of housing segregation, in particular, applicants could receive up to $25,000 for the following:

A. Home Ownership Benefit: The Home Ownership Benefit provides down payment/closing cost assistance to purchase real property located within the City.

B. Home Improvement Benefit: The Home Improvement Benefit provides funds to repair, improve, or modernize real property located within the City.

C. Mortgage Assistance Benefit: Mortgage Assistance benefit provides funds to pay down mortgage principal, interest, and/or late penalties for real property located within the City.

The committee in charge of these reparations funds has already disbursed payments to more than 100 families with more on the way.

But the right-wing legal group, Judicial Watch, filed a class action lawsuit against the city in protest of the reparations.

The class action, civil rights lawsuit challenges “on Equal Protection grounds Defendant City of Evanston’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a program that makes $25,000 payments to residents and direct descendants of residents of the city five-plus decades if not more than a century ago. Plaintiffs seek a judgment declaring Defendant’s use of race to be unconstitutional.

The “equal protection” clause is found in the 14th Amendment which was passed in the wake of the Civil War expressly to defend recently emancipated Black people from racism.

So now, after years of painstaking community work, Evanston’s attempt to provide economic relief to descendants of Black people the city government discriminated against may be aborted in the infancy of the program.

Tulsa Race Massacre Reparations Lawsuit Dismissed

In a similar instance of denying reparations, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by three surviving victims of the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre.

Overnight on May 31, 1921, white marauders decimated more than 30 blocks in an area of the city where Black people resided and did business—Black Wall Street, as it was known. Historians believe up to 300 people may have been killed in the white race riot.

“Exacerbating matters were insurance companies that denied many claims for what today would be tens of millions of dollars in property damage, including the destruction of two Black hospitals and 1,256 residences, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.”

Three survivors, all over the age of 100—Viola “Mother Ford” Fletcher, Lessie Benningfield Randle, and Hughes Van Ellis who has since died—filed a lawsuit alleging that the city of Tulsa were complicit in the brutality and the destruction.

They further charge that they suffered in the decades after directly because of the massacre and its aftermath.

Mother Fletcher said that if not for the destruction of their neighborhood and the relocation it forced, “I would’ve gotten an education, to where I could get a better job, especially being a nurse.”

Now the only two surviving eyewitnesses of the Tulsa Race Massacre have had their hopes of reparations all but extinguished.

Justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court state that the:

…“grievance with the social and economic inequities created by the Tulsa Race Massacre is legitimate and worthy of merit.”

“However, the law does not permit us to extend the scope of our public nuisance doctrine beyond what the Legislature has authorized to afford Plaintiffs the justice they are seeking,” the court wrote in its decision.

Attorneys for the survivors plan to file a petition for a rehearing, but the clock is running out for the two centenarians to see reparations for their trauma and suffering.

The War on Reparations

Judicial Watch is intentionally targeting the city of Evanston and twisting the effort to provide directed relief for targeted harm into some kind of “reverse racism” argument.

They want to claim that because Black people are being given the justice they have so long been denied that other groups (namely white people) are being excluded from the chance to access those benefits.

White people have been benefiting from racism and white supremacy since before the Declaration of Independence. They do not need reparations for racial discrimination because they were the ones doing the discriminating.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court is claiming their hands are tied by the letter of the law. That reparations is a “political” issue that cannot be adjudicated by the courts.

In their decision, the justices follow a long line of officials who kick the can of reparations down the road hoping that people will literally die off and the conundrum will go away.

While calls for reparations have increased in the past several years, especially since the racial justice uprisings of 2020, this nation’s political and legal leaders continue to stubbornly deny justice to the victims and descendants of slavery and segregation.

The lawsuit against Evanston’s reparations initiative and the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s dismissal of the lawsuit to bring reparations to survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre indicate a grievous reality—sometimes the lack of repair is worse than the wound itself.

What other reparations initiatives do you know about? Can faith communities or other bodies aid in the effort for reparations? Comment below.

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