EVANSTON, Illinois. Kenneth Wideman has spent his entire life in Evanston, in the 5th Ward, a community bounded by elevated railroad tracks and a canal.
His parents relocated there from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, a 60-year-long exodus of 6 million Black people from the Jim Crow South. In the 1940s, when Wideman was born, Evanston was the biggest Black suburb in the state, with the 5th Ward housing 95% of the city’s Black residents.
But there was a reason why that neighborhood was so heavily populated by Black people.
Through targeted zoning, the city started evicting Black residents from areas beyond the 5th Ward in 1919. Subsequently, federal authorities enabled discriminatory banking practices and racially restrictive housing laws, which deterred lenders from offering high-risk loans in primarily Black communities like the 5th Ward.
Following the federal Fair Housing Act’s prohibition on racial discrimination in housing, local fair housing rules were established by Evanston city officials in 1969. However, decades later, the city clerk’s 2019 report found that the 5th Ward is the only neighborhood in Evanston with sections designated as food deserts, has the lowest median income below the city’s average, and the lowest property values in the city.
In an effort to make amends for its history of racial discrimination, the city launched the nation’s first reparations program that year. More than 200 individuals have received $25,000 cheques and in-kind financial support from Evanston since the program’s launch in 2022.
A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit against the city in May, claiming that the program discriminates against applicants based on their race and is therefore unlawful, breaching the Equal Protection Clause.The lawsuit seeks to end the program completely by prohibiting the city from using race to determine eligibility, even if restitution payments are still being made.
A federal judge will soon render a decision.
Wideman was among the initial round of awardees, who were chosen based on their 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 am extremely grateful and fortunate to have received the reparations,” he stated. It could have been more, in my opinion. 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.
Ambulances wail down a busy thruway en route to a hospital near Kenneth Wideman s apartment, where he lives alone.
He is usually coming from or going to doctor s appointments because he has chronic health issues. In 2024, Wideman can go to any hospital in the city, but in 1945, his mother had to go to a segregated hospital to give birth to him.
A husband and wife team of Black doctors, Arthur Butler and Isabella Garnett, ran the hospital out of a converted residential home because the city s two main hospitals, the Evanston Hospital and St. Francis Hospital, did not take Black patients at the time.
He and his family attended segregated schools, beaches, restaurants, stores, playgrounds and theaters. I didn t know what segregation was, Wideman said. Now that I know about it, I m figuring out this was segregated, that was segregated.
Wideman s family, like many other Black families at the time, lived in a multigenerational home in the 5th Ward with 14 people. He shared a room with four people, but Wideman said growing up with his grandmother was the best thing that ever happened to him. He recalls sleeping with his head on his grandmother s stomach. Nothing else compared, he said, and I have done a lot of things in my life.
Wideman s current apartment is sandwiched between the campus of Northwestern University, where he worked as a facilities manager for three decades, and the community center where he applied for the city s reparations program after hearing about it through word of mouth.
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.
I think people deserve reparations, he said.
I hope that other people will have the opportunity to receive reparations, he added. And I hope they would get more than what I got.
Despite its history, which Wideman knows well, he loves Evanston. Wherever I go, they ask me where I m from. And I tell them I m from Evanston, Illinois, he said. This is a great town.
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.
The afternoon sunlight passes into the living room through bay windows and a stained-glass panel of roses he made by hand.
It was unusual for a Black family to move to this part of town, he said, and even now they are one of just a few Black families on their street. As soon as we moved into the house, all the for sale signs started going up down the street.
A lot of neighbors didn t want us, he said, especially the older neighbors. They asked the people who sold the house to us, Why did you sell to a Black family?
In the 5th Ward things were different. We had no keys to unlock the doors, you know, and if you did something wrong, your neighbors always told your parents.
He went to university in Nebraska, where he played football, and then he served a couple years in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. When he moved back to Evanston, he took a job working at the public utility company.
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. Right down the neck of the Ku Klux Klan, she said. Hilton loved horseback riding and taking care of the animals. I wanted to just stay there and enjoy that type of country lifestyle.
Her parents moved the family to a house in the 5th Ward because it was predominantly Black. They felt it would have been difficult to live in another neighborhood, she said.
She said she did not let encountering racism and segregation in Evanston bother her. That s them. I let them deal with that, she said.
She is outgoing and chatty, and living with her extended family means she is often in the middle of multiple conversations at once as people walk in and out of the living room.
She decided to apply to the reparations program when it began offering checks last year.
At first, Evanston s reparations program offered recipients only in-kind financial assistance, which could be used toward mortgage payments, a down payment for a house, or home improvement projects.
A real estate broker since she was 18, Hilton had been promoting the program to her clients, but because she lives in an apartment, she hadn t initially been eligible.
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.
Former city Alderman Robin Rue Simmons orchestrated the city s reparations push in 2019. She grew up in the 5th Ward and saw firsthand the disparities between the livability of Black Evanstonians and that of white, she said, sitting in the lobby of a downtown hotel. Securing the political will and passing the reparations proposal was in some sense the easy part. Then came the task of constructing the program from scratch. We didn t have a model to follow, she said.
The $20 million program, funded by the city s cannabis sales tax and real estate tax, is set to continue for another five years, with plans to expand to economic development and education-based initiatives.
Since the end of the Civil War, calls for some form of reparations for slavery have continued unabated.
Federal legislation called H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study reparations for slavery, has been reintroduced every year for the past 35 years.
In the absence of federal legislation, state and municipal reparations programs have taken off. Currently, more than a dozen cities, three counties and four states have passed legislation and are either researching the need for reparations or developing proposals.
Evanston is the first to set up a program and make actual reparations payments.
We have a long, long road ahead of us, said Simmons, who now leads a reparations consultancy organization. There is still more to learn. There is far more to achieve.
Support for this article was provided in part by the Neal Peirce Foundation.
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