For Damages Done

Dan Featherson, inside his home in Evanston, IL. Photo by Sebastián Hidalgo/American Reportage for palabra.

Dan Featherson was 11 years old when his parents got an official-looking letter saying they had to leave their house because it was being foreclosed.

He remembers his parents acting quickly, trying to rectify the matter with their bank in Evanston, Illinois. They scrambled to find another place, and then called on relatives to come help move their belongings.

“By the time they went to get the stuff out (of the house) there was a lock on the door and all the stuff was cleared out,” said Featherson, now 49 and a real estate broker in Evanston. “I remember them both crying at the door.”

Featherson recently learned more about the circumstances surrounding the foreclosure of his family's home while talking with his mother about the first-of-its-kind initiative in Evanston: Reparations for Black residents, starting with payments to families who suffered housing discrimination in the city, between 1919 and 1969.

Over the next 10 years, Evanston is dedicating $10 million to different reparation initiatives. After housing, compensation for damage done by past economic and education discrimination will follow.

Starting this summer, Black residents and descendants who can show they were harmed by discriminatory housing policies in the city can apply for $25,000 to use on home repairs or a mortgage.

In March, the Evanston City Council approved the first $400,000 for the program, meaning 16 families can receive payments this first round.

Alderperson Cicely Fleming, the only “no” vote on appropriating the money, argued for direct payments instead, so residents could spend the money however they wanted. Her spokesperson, Jes Scheinpflug, said Fleming views the Evanston initiative as a “housing program like many others” and that it sets a “pretty low bar and precedent by calling it reparations.”

Scheinpflug said Fleming would not be available for an interview for this story. 

“You get pushback with people saying, ‘Oh, this is not reparations.’ Well, it actually is,” countered Featherson. “If you look up any definition of reparations, reparations can be monetary. It could be in goods and it can be just to try to repair the wrongs that have been done in our community. And believe me, our community needs a lot of repair. Our community needs a lot of mental help, a lot of trauma help, a lot of mistrust help.”

Featherson said he never understood how the bank came to repossess his family’s home. His mother, a registered nurse for 30 years, and his father, a longtime CTA conductor, were always working.

After his parents lost the house, he recalled, an attorney told Featherson’s mother the bank had been wrong to take their house. But it was too late to do anything about it: Someone else had already bought the house.

RIGHTING THE WRONGS

Calls for reparations for African Americans have grown louder, reaching a new apex last year with global protests after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd.

The push has given new life to a bill that’s been introduced in Congress every year since 1989. It calls for a national commission to study the impacts that slavery and discrimination have had on generations of Black people and then make recommendations for reparations. That bill, H.R. 40, won a committee vote for the first time on April 13 — the furthest the legislation has gotten. 

In California, meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill last year to create a panel to study and make recommendations for reparations. 

“Since the public lynching of George Floyd and the devastating impact of COVID on the Black community, more and more leaders are beginning to understand and pursue the need for reparations for Blacks in America,” said Evanston Alderperson Robin Rue Simmons, lead sponsor of the city’s reparation program.  

“We’ve heard from local elected state elected officials, and we’ve even heard from the (author) of H.R. 40, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, celebrating our commitment to reparations and its impact on driving the national discussion,” said Simmons, a lifelong resident of Evanston’s 5th Ward, where the majority of the city’s African Americans have historically lived.

REDLINED AND SEGREGATED 

Evanston’s housing history is steeped in “redlining” — the practice of segregating neighborhoods through racist lending practices — and became a driving force behind the reparations measure. 

A national exhibit came to Evanston in 2019, showing the role the federal government played in ensuring racial segregation and widening wealth inequality during the New Deal era of the Roosevelt administration. By 1940, the federal government codified the dark art of redlining with detailed maps of more than 200 cities as a resource for lending institutions, ranking the riskiest and safest places to make loans.

“This neighborhood houses the large negro population living in Evanston,” reads the map’s description for the 5th Ward at the time. It was shaded red, meaning it was considered “hazardous.”

“Here live the servants for many of the families all along the north shore. There is not a vacant house in the territory, and occupancy, moreover is about 150 per cent, for most houses have more than one family living in them.”

The description goes on to say the “concentration of negroes in Evanston is quite a serious problem for the town as they seem to be growing steadily and encroaching into adjoining neighborhoods.”

The exhibit was an eye-opener for Evanston residents who have long viewed their city as progressive, insulated from the racial discord historically seen elsewhere, “not realizing the same activities were actually happening here,” said Dino Robinson, an Evanston historian. 

“Not necessarily not realizing it, maybe turning a blind eye to it,” added Robinson, executive director and founder of the Shorefront Legacy Center, which aims to preserve Black history on Chicago’s north side.

PAYING THE DEBT 

Money for reparations in Evanston will come from a 3% tax on the city’s recreational marijuana sales — an apt source for the money, Simmons said.

“It is appropriate that we use (that) tax revenue because of the evidence of over-policing in the Black community,” she said.

Statewide, before Illinois legalized marijuana, Black people were 7.5 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. 

“I think what happened in this situation is there were a lot of things that fell into place at the right time that made it a no-brainer,” Robinson said about Evanston’s reparation program. “If this was attempted 10 years ago, it probably would never have gotten off the ground.”

The Evanston initiative comes at a pivotal time in the nation’s history. Even though it’s just one program in one city, it could have an outsized impact on the world, said the Rev. Dr. Iva Carruthers, general secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, an interdenominational organization focused on social justice issues. 

“It is absolutely important because the United States is the epicenter for global relationships in terms of the very issues we’re talking about: The economic forces that get translated into who is given human value and dignity,” she said. “What happens in the United States ripples all over the world, both for those who are empowered and for those who are oppressed by empire.”

ONE FAMILY’S LEGACY 

In the mid-1960s, when Featherson’s parents met in Evanston, decades of discriminatory policies limited their options to the 5th Ward, an area west of downtown, away from the multimillion-dollar mansions by the city’s lakefront. 

Six years ago, when Featherson and his wife were looking for a place to raise their two children, he came across a single-story brick house he recognized right away: His parents’ old home was listed in a foreclosure sale. The house on a tree-lined street in the 5th Ward was in need of repair, but that didn’t scare him off. He bought it for $115,000 and went to work rehabilitating it as best he could, spending $15,000 on repairs.

He said getting additional money from the city to fully repair his home “would definitely help” build equity and “sustain the legacy in the house.” 

But he said he might wait for others who need the money more to apply first. He urged others not to see it as a handout. 

“It’s something that builds hope. Something that can build America into a better place,” he said. 

Blacks are 16% of Evanston’s 74,600 residents, a smaller share of the population than 10 years ago when they were 20%. The 5th Ward is more racially diverse than it once was but it remains mostly Black, and the area’s reputation as Evanston’s 

least desirable neighborhood has created a self-perpetuating reality: The 5th Ward has fewer businesses than the rest of Evanston, children are bussed to other neighborhoods that actually have schools, and residents have to travel far for fresh food. 

Featherson’s mother, Evangeline, lives a couple of blocks away, in another house his parents bought before his father, Robert, died in 1996.

Featherson said he hopes the reparations initiative makes people who have moved away “fall back in love with our community.”

“The people who built this country, the people who made this country great, the people who are still suffering from systematic racism, can turn the page and start seeing that yes, the system is now trying to work for us,” he said.