[Ta-Nehisi Coates] If I injure you,
the injury persists even after I actually commit the act.
If I stabbed you, you may suffer complications
long after that initial, actual stabbing.
That's the case with African-Americans.
They're people well within
the living memory of this country,
they're still suffering from the after effects of that.
[demonstration leader] What do we want?
Reparations!
[demonstration leader] When do we want?
Now!
Reparations are meant to redress
or compensate for a really egregious injustice.
It can be compensation in terms of money.
There also needs to be a moral reckoning.
The historical injustice has never been addressed.
Ending an injustice is not the same thing
as making up for its enduring effects.
[Alderman Robin Rue Simmons] We need
to have that controversial conversation
ongoing, so that we can begin to do something about it.
Repair is happening because we said, yes.
A world shocked beyond belief,
these are barbaric works of the dying Nazi beasts.
I'm originally from Germany.
And I grew up there.
The Holocaust was discussed in every single school subject,
and I felt horrible about my history and ashamed of it.
[inaudible 00:01:40]
the hideous handful who survived...
But then one day I met Mieciu Langer,
a survivor of five concentration camps
and a death March in his youth.
After he passed away, I learned from his widow
that he had received a reparations pension since the 1970s,
first from the west German government.
then from the government of reunited Germany.
It was a small pension.
It measured no way up to the losses he had as a youngson.
There is no money amount that could possibly
represent those losses.
When I came to the United States, I was drawn to that topic
of reparations from my experience with
Mieciu.
The procedure that I use to estimate reparations,
I took census information about the enslaved population
in each year from 1776 to 1860.
I'm adding up all the hours,
multiplying it with wages customary at the time.
And then adding a conservative 3% interest.
I arrive at a outstanding debt of $20.3 trillion
in 2021 dollars.
We can see by the polls
that support for reparations
is over 70% among black Americans.
A small but growing number of white Americans
also believe that reparations
are due to African-Americans.
And I think that's an important distinction.
It's not a handout, it's a debt.
No Justice!
No Peace!
No Justice!
No Peace!
No Justice!
No Peace!
The advocates for reparations
explain in a heartbreaking way.
You know, the systemic ways in which blacks
and black families have been prevented
and held back from building up
the kind of generational wealth
that many white Americans can expect.
I think reparations ask us to imagine
what America could be like
without that kind of discrimination.
As we begin to repair the legacy of that discrimination,
like what could America look like?
[Alderman Robin Rue Simmons] As an elected alderman here,
I serve my most immediate neighborhood,
which is the 5th ward,
the historically black community in Evanston.
We are a small city.
We're just north of Chicago.
Aesthetically beautiful, mature trees.
You know, the home of Northwestern University.
Majority white and majority affluent.
The black community right now is less than 17%.
We had been in the mid-twenty percents before,
as, as early as 2010.
So there've been an Exodus in the black community.
I saw that there were historic and intentional
systemic barriers between black Evanston
in joining the same livability as the rest of Evanston.
And we were going along still celebrating our diversity
and inclusion and, and that being a brand,
but still carrying year after year, the racial separation.
Household income gap, the wealth gap,
the education gap, and so on.
I didn't have the thought to localize reparations
until February of 2019.
And it was in that moment,
that I immediately sent out the initial email
to make the recommendation
to the Equity Empowerment Commission
to begin the road to repair in the city of Evanston.
The local governments also have their own
specific, egregious acts against the black community
that are verifiable and documented
and have measurable harms.
So in my role as a local elected,
I thought that I might lead locally.
You know, the frontline is where your feet are.
The first real grassroots
movement for reparations,
that was led by a woman named Callie House.
It was in the 1890s,
and it was almost a two decade long struggle for her.
And she made a claim to the federal government for pensions.
She used the mail to, to communicate with Washington
and then also to encourage people to join the movement.
I know,
at one point she had almost 300,000 people had signed up,
were paying dues and the government, in response,
accused her of using the mail for fraud.
She was actually convicted by an all white jury
and spent a year in prison.
Reparations for slavery
have been paid repeatedly in history,
but to the wrong side, to the slave owners,
rather than the enslaved.
The French government sent a fleet to Haiti
to demand reparations for the abolition of slavery there.
Similarly, the British government paid reparations
to the enslavers in, in great Britain.
In United States too, reparations were paid
to slave owners in Washington DC.
When slavery was abolished there in 1863,
the recipients were white.
It was considered normal, and it's interesting
that the program becomes controversial
when the recipients are black.
[Alderman Robin Rue Simmons] Staff recommends
city council adoption of resolution 126-R-19,
establishing the city of Evanston Reparations Fund
and creating a revenue source for the fund.
So in 2019, we pass resolution 126-R-19,
which restricted the first ten million dollars
of cannabis sales tax to fund reparations programing.
We selected that as a city as our funding mechanism
because 71% of the marijuana arrests
were in the black community.
And if you remember, I said,
we're only less than 17% of the population,
So certainly over-policing is an issue
and was an issue, in fact, then.
So what more appropriate way
than to use that tax revenue for repair.
Eligibility is black residents that lived here
between 1919 and 1969
and their direct descendants.
And they will receive, if selected,
a $25,000 direct benefit that can be used
for housing, to build wealth.
They can use it to purchase a home.
It can be used to make any type of home improvements,
but it has to be used to build wealth through home equity.
Evanston passed this program,
and now it is the first city in America
to begin a program of reparations.
That is a pretty momentous occasion.
It's gotten a lot of attention, and you know,
it is showing a way, that,
a city can repair harm done to its citizens.
Now, the program, initially, this $400,000
that will be given out in grants
of up to $25,000 will go to probably about 16 families.
I think the city council is aware
that it's a small, modest program, and it's a first step.
[public commenter] I am confident that my four parents
and the many elders who raised me
and paved the way for me are rejoicing
because this is a move forward
for the nation and the world.
Reparations, when you hear the term,
and as someone who's lived 18 generations
in one Parish and a Southern state, this is not reparations.
A vote in support of reparations programs is a sign
that my family is welcome here.
It is a sign that Evanston cares about families
that look like mine.
It is an act of equity.
When one is building a house, one does not build a kitchen
and then say, we will add other rooms
as we figure out what kind of home we're going to build.
It's just bad public policy.
And it blatantly leaves an impression
that black people are not entitled to the same levels
of concern and care as other city programs and projects.
Reparations is a sensitive, you know,
very controversial topic that gets at trauma
that the black community has suffered.
And a grant of $25,000 doesn't, to many people,
seem to even begin to really repair
that harm or acknowledge the damage.
There is concern that, you know,
calling this reparations takes away from this very big idea
that the US federal government needs to be responsible
for a very big program that would benefit all
eligible black Americans.
[Alder Robin Rue Simmons] I had a colleague,
when I first began to discuss this in 2019
recommend let's call it anything other than reparations,
just to avoid the controversy.
That made it very clear, we needed to call it what it is,
but everyone in this process is going to be uncomfortable.
The black community, we are renaming our injury,
and that's uncomfortable.
The white community, they're dealing
with their legacy of racism.
You know, if our ancestors were enslaved, you know,
their ancestors were enslavers.
And so those are uncomfortable conversations
that we're having together as a community.
And it's really been a very productive experience
over the last couple of years.
I've been appointed to serve on the reparations committee,
so I will be looking at how do we increase
this initial ten million to, you know, a hundred million
in the next few years, and how do we expand
the work from a 10 year goal to in perpetuity?
Because it'll take that long for us
to get to bridging our racial divide in Evanston.
I've been also appointed
to the national African-American reparations commission,
and I will serve along my colleagues there,
supporting other localities and lending my voice
and advocacy to advance H.R. 40 as well.
H.R. 40 is a resolution
to study reparations.
To look at what they might mean in America,
what they might cost, how they might be structured.
It's a way to answer some of the important
and also sort of logistical questions about reparations.
Who would be eligible?
You know, what would a program look like,
and how would we pay for it?
[President Joe Biden] Reparations means
making up for things that happened in the past.
We should study reparations and make a judgment,
what they should be, what they should do.
There's certain things we already know.
And I support that study.
Let's see where it takes us.
[Alder Robin Rue Simmons] We have a president
who has said he supports the study of reparations.
The country has been awakened and punched in the face
with our racism that we experience far too often
through social streaming and other ways of
public lynchings of black people.
We are entering an era of repair.
The Roman Catholic church just made a commitment
to a hundred million dollars for reparations.
There have been universities that have done the same.
Corporations are beginning to set aside dollars,
specifically not just for our marginalized communities,
but the black community.
Localities are doing the same in advancing reparations.
In Germany, 20 years
after the reparations program,
the young generations ask the older generations,
Where were you?
What did you do?
What happened in our city?
In our town?
We have a situation where we have street names,
memorials and military bases
still named for Southern generals,
for the traitors in this country.
But not enough for the people
that actually helped abolish slavery
and that put us on the right track of history.
So I think there's a lot that education can do.
And a bottom-up process would be fantastic.
[Alder Robin Rue Simmons] We're all learning
and growing together.
We all aspire to repair the community,
and we're learning from our history,
but we have to take a first step
and we've taken our first step in Evanston.