Where Evanston’s Reparations Payments Are Going

Kenneth Wideman has lived in Evanston his entire life, in a neighborhood bordered by a canal and elevated railroad tracks called the 5th Ward.

His parents moved there from South Carolina, part of an exodus of 6 million Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South over a 60-year period known as the Great Migration. By the time Wideman was born in the 1940s, Evanston was the state’s largest Black suburb, and 95% of the city’s Black population lived in the 5th Ward.

The concentration of Black residents in that neighborhood, however, was no accident.

The city began pushing Black residents out of neighborhoods outside the 5th Ward through targeted zoning in 1919. Later, federal agencies facilitated racially restrictive housing rules and banking discrimination, discouraging lenders from making “risky” loans in predominantly Black neighborhoods such as the 5th Ward.

In 1969, after the federal Fair Housing Act prohibited housing discrimination based on race, Evanston city officials passed local fair housing ordinances. But decades later, the 5th Ward had the lowest property values in the city, median income below the city’s average, and is Evanston’s “only neighborhood with areas classified as food deserts,” according to a 2019 report by the city clerk.

That year, the city set out to create the country’s first reparations program to atone for its history of racial discrimination. Since the program began in 2022, Evanston has awarded $25,000 checks and in-kind financial assistance to more than 200 people.

In May, a conservative legal group sued the city, arguing that the program is unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause because it discriminates against applicants based on race.Although reparations payments are still being dispensed, the lawsuit aims to stop the program in its entirety by preventing the city from using race to determine eligibility.

A ruling from a federal judge is forthcoming.

Wideman was part of the first cohort of recipients, selected by age. To be eligible, a person has to be Black and prove they lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 — the period when state-sponsored segregation and redlining were rampant — or be a direct descendant of someone who did.

“I’m very fortunate and blessed to receive the reparations,” he said. “I think it could have been more. But I’m happy.”

Wideman is one of three Evanston residents who sat down with NBC News to discuss their experience of growing up in the 5th Ward, applying for and receiving reparations.

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City employees laid out high school yearbooks and phone books so that applicants could prove they lived in Evanston during the specific period, and they helped seniors fill out the electronic application.

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Ron Butler grew up in the 5th Ward, but in 1976 he and his wife, Cheryl, decided to move to south Evanston, to a modest two-story house in a residential neighborhood where they live now.

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Butler was part of the second cohort of reparations recipients.

The check came “right on time,” he said. His house needed the windows replaced and a new furnace with central air, so he and his wife both pooled their $25,000 checks. “The money goes fast,” he said.

“It meant something to me, because, you know, it gave me a little help,” he said deliberately. “You know, Evanston is a very expensive place to live.”

“I always said that you can keep the mule, but give me the 40 acres,” he said. “Give me the 40 acres in Evanston.”

Cherylette Hilton moved to Evanston when she was a teenager from a little town in Georgia called Waynesboro. {snip}

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Hilton used the money to buy a car and put the rest in the bank, she said, for her grandkids and great-grandkids. She is still a real estate broker but spends most of her time volunteering with children in juvenile detention or formerly incarcerated adults transitioning back into society, as well as taking care of her family.

Evanston is now very expensive, she said, noting that $25,000 is “just a drop in the bucket” — a common complaint among interview subjects.

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