The Nation’s First Municipal Reparations Program, Grounded in Black History

Evanston, Illinois, made national headlines in 2019, becoming the first city in the nation to fund reparations for its Black citizens. Although other municipalities have since passed resolutions in support of reparations, Evanston remains the only city in the country to actually distribute funds. A community-based archive called Shorefront Legacy Center—the recipient of a 2020 grant from Mellon—played a key role in bringing the program to life. 

Before Shorefront Legacy Center, the influence of African American communities in Evanston was largely excluded from the official record, despite the presence of elite higher learning institutions and historical societies nearby. Shorefront founder Morris (Dino) Robinson recalls a conversation with a staff member at a local historical organization nearly three decades ago, who told him that the African American community had contributed “nothing of intrinsic value” to the city’s history. He says that, although Black people had lived in Evanston for more than 150 years, the Evanston History Center possessed just three folders on the Black experience. Robinson explains that most of this documentation amounted to the sentiment that “there are Black people here, they were domestic servants, and they went to church.” 

Determined to prove the historic value inherent to his community, Robinson founded an interest group in 1995, Through the Eyes of Us, dedicated to researching the history of Black communities on the North Shore. The group introduced the Shorefront Journal in 1999 and evolved into a full-fledged archive in 2002. Ever since, Shorefront has been collecting personal narratives and oral histories, photographs and artifacts, and other cultural ephemera to document and preserve Black life on the North Shore—a history that is otherwise at risk of being lost forever.  

Though the Shorefront team may be its stewards, local history belongs to the community. Robinson explains, “We are students first and foremost. We are able to collectively get all this history together and make context out of it, but we rely on our community for its history.”  

Missing from historical societies and public school curricula, the history of Black Evanston was passed down from generation to generation through family stories, pictures tucked away and collecting dust in attics, and other mementos that some families may not even realize hold great historical significance. Earning the trust of the community has been critical to unearthing and preserving those legacies. The Shorefront team shares this history with the public through youth programming, public presentations and lectures, an online journal, and partnerships with other historical institutions, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.  

After nearly three decades of this work, Robinson has become a celebrated community figure—even receiving a key to the city in 2017 and having a street named after him in 2021. When Robinson decided to step back from the nonprofit in 2022, he selected podcaster, video producer, director, and member of his advisory board Laurice Bell as the organization’s first executive director. Robinson remains connected to Shorefront and took Bell’s place on the advisory board.  

Evanston reached a moment of reckoning when the city passed a historic resolution committing to local reparations in 2019. Two weeks later, 600 people—a crowd that included actor Danny Glover—turned out for a town hall meeting to discuss how the money should be spent.  

The city then approached Shorefront for evidence of city practices and policies that had adversely impacted the Black community. Robinson and independent researcher Jenny Thompson expanded on his previous research on the history of redlining on the North Shore and authored a 77-page report that would become the historical and legal basis for the nation’s first municipal reparations legislation. 

The report revealed how a system of redlining, restrictive covenants, racist zoning ordinances, and other segregationist practices—in some cases even forcibly removing entire homes from white neighborhoods—restricted Black residents to the city’s Fifth Ward. By the late 1930s, 95 percent of Fifth Ward residents were Black, and much of the housing lacked electricity, water, or sewers.  

Over the following decades, the area continued to be subject to pervasive disinvestment. Robinson explains, “There were no banks; there were no grocery stores except for small spaces. The grade school that we had has been closed for fifty-five years due to forced integration and busing.” Denied access to critical social services, the Black community came together to run their own hospital, schools, and a YMCA branch, and founded a local chapter of the NAACP. 

An enduring impact of these practices and policies was effectively to deny Black families the opportunity to build generational wealth through home ownership. More than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, the economic disparity between Black and white residents remains stark. In 2018, for instance, JP Morgan issued 150 mortgages to white borrowers and just 17 to Black applicants. A 2021 study further showed that the average household income for Black Evanston families trailed that of their white counterparts by $46,000.  

After consulting the report and soliciting community feedback through a series of public meetings, the Reparations Subcommittee identified housing as the strongest case for reparations and devised a plan to fund it.  

Passed in March 2021, the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program provides $25,000 to Black residents who can demonstrate that they lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and their direct descendants. Initially, to avoid an undue tax burden, recipients could use the funds only for down payments, mortgages, home repairs, and other housing-related costs, but the program has since expanded to allow for direct cash payments. The program is funded with the city’s real estate transfer tax and tax revenue from recreational marijuana purchases—an intentional choice, made in recognition of the ways that marijuana criminalization disproportionately affected people of color. From 2017 to 2019, for instance, Black residents accounted for 16 percent of Evanston’s total population and 70 percent of the city’s marijuana arrests. A total of $20 million in payments has been approved over ten years, with $3 million already distributed. The remainder has been transferred to the local Black-owned Liberty Bank, where it will expand the bank’s lending power while it awaits distribution.  

Although evidence shows the program is overwhelmingly supported by Evanstonians of all backgrounds, it recently encountered its first legal challenge. A class action lawsuit filed in June 2024 alleges that the race-conscious criteria used to determine eligibility for the program violates the 14th Amendment. Yet, even the naysayers will have their perspectives preserved in Shorefront’s archives. With a front-row seat to the landmark process of conceiving, debating, passing, and implementing reparations, Shorefront is working actively to ensure that the program is documented from start to finish. 

“We might not agree with certain things, but part of the problem with archives and history is that people have cherrypicked. People have decided who can be part of it,” Shorefront executive director Laurice Bell remarks. “Whether someone agrees with reparations or disagrees with reparations, their histories belong at Shorefront.”  

Building on this work to document the program, Shorefront’s Intergenerational Reparations Interview Project brings elder recipients of reparations to be interviewed by local high school students. Launched in early 2024, the project gives recipients the opportunity to tell their own stories, ensuring that their lived experiences will be reflected in the historical record. The conversations will be recorded, digitized, and shared through Shorefront’s online journal.  

The project is a continuation of Shorefront’s work to challenge prevailing narratives by telling local history through the eyes of those who experienced it firsthand. “Shorefront does not only archive history. We have helped rewrite it,” Bell says. “In centering voices that have often been sidelined and silenced, we challenge the status quo.” 

Reparations recipients initially planned only to attend the first session of the project, but many were so enthralled by the students’ level of engagement that they decided to attend all six weeks of the program. Bell explains that student participants are eager to “learn more, not only about these people, but about themselves.” An Evanston native herself, Bell knows well how powerful it can be to learn about the history of one's community—work she does every day at Shorefront. 

“I grew up in Evanston. This history is my history,” Bell says. “Every box I open surrounds me with my ancestors and their stories. There is not a lonely moment that I have when I'm at Shorefront.”