Chicago takes another baby step toward reparations

Chicago is taking yet another baby step along the road toward providing some form of reparations for descendants of African-American slaves.

Two years after naming his own chief equity officer and charging Carla Kupe with overseeing the work of a $500,000 reparations task force, Mayor Brandon Johnson is launching a public engagement effort to “gather lived experiences of harm of Black Chicagoans.”

Information about those “systemic harms” — gathered through panel discussions, town hall meetings, public hearings and a public survey — will be used to produce a reparations study that will serve as a “historic step towards acknowledging, addressing, and repairing generations of harm experienced by Black communities,” city officials said.

Johnson campaigned on a promise to provide reparations and is under pressure to deliver on that promise — and find a way to pay for it — with less than a year to go before the mayoral election.

The city has established a May 31 deadline for completing a public survey that can be accessed at Chicago.gov/RepairChicago.

In a press release about the effort, Johnson said his "Repair Chicago" campaign is about “listening to Black Chicagoans across our city, acknowledging the harms of the past and present, and building a path forward rooted in truth, accountability and opportunity.”

“Your experience is evidence and we’ve placed it at the center of our work,” Johnson said. “By engaging directly with residents, we are grounding this work in the voices and lived realities of the people it is meant to serve.”

Kupe, the chief equity officer, said it is impossible to “talk about reparation without centering the lived experiences of Black Chicagoans.”

Repair Chicago is an “opportunity to listen deeply, learn collectively and ensure that community voice is not symbolic, but foundational to the policies and recommendations” that the city ultimately makes to repair the damage done by slavery.

In November 2019, Evanston made history by establishing a $10 million reparations fund to make amends to that north suburb's Black population for historic wrongs traced to racial inequities. The money will come from a cannabis sales tax.

A prime mover in that effort was former Evanston Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, who said at a 2022 Chicago City Council hearing that "more than 100 municipalities" had advanced local reparations ordinances.

"What city more so than Chicago should be advancing reparations for its crimes and harms against its Black community?" Simmons asked.

"When I led this work in Evanston, I did it looking at a $46,000 household income gap between Black and white Evanston. I imagine it is more so in Chicago. In Evanston, we had a 13-year life expectancy difference. This data was enough for us to advance reparations. In Chicago, it's 30 years."

The Chicago City Council has had a reparations subcommittee since 2020. Little progress was made during former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s single term.

Now-former Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th), who chaired the Health and Human Services committee that created the reparations subcommittee, was asked to explain the slow pace after a June 2022 hearing on the issue.

“The mayor is not as supportive as I would have hoped. A lot of us are willing to go further. But there's been some recalcitrance by an administration that does not think this is the way to go," Sawyer said at the time.

An early version of the reparations resolution championed by millionaire businessman Willie Wilson had the teeth of an ordinance and called for a series of commitments from cash-strapped city agencies, including free rides on the CTA, free tuition at City Colleges and a bigger share of city contracts.

That was scrapped because, as Sawyer put it, "It was over the top." That was followed by a version that called for a 16-member commission charged with holding hearings and developing a plan to "ensure equity, equality and parity for citizens of African descent in Chicago who are mired in poverty."

It would have remained in place for 20 years to monitor and ensure compliance. That version was also scrapped, in favor of the subcommittee.