EVANSTON, Ill. — As a child in the 1960s, Allie Zemtseff saw how her mother, a Black woman, was turned away by landlords while apartment hunting in white neighborhoods. So she was incredulous when the Trump administration this summer accused the city of racial discrimination because of a program it created to compensate Black residents for past housing segregation.
"I thought, 'How ridiculous,'" said Zemtseff.
Through Evanston's reparations program, the first in the U.S. to compensate Black people for historical discrimination, Zemtseff got an apology from the city for its role in keeping Black people out of white neighborhoods decades ago, and $25,000, which she used to renovate her kitchen.
"Of course it's only for Black people," she said, "because we were the ones affected by the discrimination."
Since the city approved reparations payments in 2021, it has given $25,000 grants to more than 300 people and injected new life into the long-stalled movement to pay African Americans reparations for slavery and other forms of discrimination.
But now the Trump administration, which has vowed to eliminate government programs that promote racial equity, is trying to kill Evanston's program before similar ones take hold in other cities. In June, the Justice Department announced it would join a conservative group's lawsuit alleging that the city's plan is racially discriminatory because only Black people qualify.
It's a stark illustration of how the Trump administration is trying to radically reshape the role that government plays in fighting discrimination and addressing long-standing racial inequities.
"What's happening in Evanston is the most important civil rights story that no one has heard of," said Alvin Tillery, a professor of race and politics at Northwestern University.
"To believe that white people have to get all of the same benefits of people of color when you're trying to fix the harms that white people did to people of color, either actively or in the past — it's just an abomination," Tillery said.
The Justice Department, however, argues that Evanston is violating the Constitution's equal protection clause, which prohibits government discrimination based on race.
"Simply handing out money based on race ... is not the answer," Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department's civil rights chief, said in a June statement announcing the department's plan to join the lawsuit by Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group. "It is race discrimination, pure and simple."
In an appearance on a conservative talk radio show days later, she said allowing Evanston to continue paying reparations to Black people would create "a slippery slope," adding, "We're going to put a stop to it." The Justice Department did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
The idea for Evanston's reparations program took root in 2019, when Robin Rue Simmons, then a councilmember representing the city's historic Black neighborhood, the 5th Ward, was researching why its Black population was shrinking. She saw a link between the affordability problems Black families faced and a zoning law the city adopted in 1921 to steer Black people to a single neighborhood, where for decades local banks refused to approve mortgages, limiting the ability to build family wealth.
"And so I knew that we had to have targeted redress," Rue Simmons said. "As targeted as the harmful zoning that reinforced redlining."
A report that the City Council commissioned from Morris Robinson, a local historian, pinned much, though not all, blame for segregation in Evanston on past city policies. The City Council acknowledged the harm, apologized and committed $20 million collected from the city's tax on cannabis sales and real estate transfers to pay reparations of $25,000 per person. Applicants had to be Black and prove that they or one of their ancestors had lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, during the height of housing segregation.
"It's meant to build wealth, ultimately," Rue Simmons said. "And that allows us to stay here."
Testing the limits of a race-based program
Laurice Bell runs the Shorefront Legacy Center, a community archive that collects papers and objects documenting Evanston's Black history. During the reparations program's application window in 2021, she said, people started coming to the church basement that houses the archive and asking for help.
"They were looking for proof that their families had been here during that time period," Bell said.
Michael Bekesha, the attorney who filed Judicial Watch's lawsuit in 2024, said that's precisely the problem with Evanston's program.
"There is no requirement that somebody prove that they were discriminated against or one of their relatives was discriminated against," he said. "It's simply that you lived in Evanston for a certain time period and what the color of your skin is."
The six plaintiffs in Judicial Watch's suit "do not identify as Black," he said, but have ties to Evanston and would have qualified for a $25,000 payment "but for the color of their skin."
Supreme Court precedent has held that race-based programs must generally be designed to remedy specific, documented discrimination, and Bekesha believes Evanston's program violates that requirement.
"Under the Constitution, everyone has to be treated equally when it comes to the color of their skin," he said.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss rejects the claim that the city is handing out money based only on race.
"Deliberate decisions were made that sent property values of property owned by white folks up, and property values owned by Black folks down. And that created a wealth gap that is felt today," Biss said. "This is a program that is trying to undo the consequences of racial discrimination."
Broader repercussions
Reparations experts say the Trump administration, with its legal challenge, is trying to undermine the viability of reparations efforts themselves.
"There are huge implications as to whether or not this is something that is going to be seen as unconstitutional," said Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor who founded the Ogletree Reparative Bar Association, a coalition of lawyers supporting dozens of local reparations efforts across the country.
The American reparations movement is premised on the idea that African Americans deserve compensation and other types of repair because the legacies of slavery and historical anti-Black discrimination are so ingrained and widespread that the harm continues to this day.
But Hansford advises cities that reparations programs resting on that argument are unlikely to survive legal scrutiny.
"You have to be able to write a detailed explanation of what took place, what year, what the government did to create the harm. And in Evanston, you saw a city committed to doing that," he said. "Every city in the country ought to be able to do the same thing, because these histories are national."
Deep roots, and a desire to stay
Kimberly Holmes-Ross has deep roots in Evanston. Her grandparents migrated from Tennessee in the early 1900s. She said the reparations program gave her family an opportunity to revisit its own history. To prove they were eligible, her mother dug out the closing documents for the house that she and her husband bought in Evanston's 5th Ward in the early 1960s. They bought directly from the builder on a high-risk, high-interest contract because banks wouldn't give them a mortgage.
Holmes-Ross' son is using the reparations money he got to remodel his mom's basement into an apartment that will let him stay in Evanston. Holmes-Ross used her own grant to replace plumbing and wiring in her mother's house in the 5th Ward and to add a small front porch where her mom, a longtime community leader who also served on the City Council, often sat for fresh air before her death in 2024.
"She told us we had to apply," Holmes-Ross recalled. "She said it's not even about the money. It's about the acknowledgment. The city is acknowledging the harm."
In Evanston, city leaders are vowing to continue paying people who applied for and qualified for reparations even as the legal challenge moves through federal court. Rue Simmons, who created the program and now helps administer it, said she's also encouraging cities wary of facing their own lawsuits to press ahead, albeit carefully.
"It's emboldened us," she said. "It has organized us. It's strengthened us to pay more attention."
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