(Headline USA) A Chicago suburb started doling out $25,000 reparations payments to qualifying black residents this month in what leftists are calling “a test run for the whole country.”
Evanston, Illinois, has awarded reparations to 16 locals so far as part of a $10 million package first approved in 2019. By the end of this year, the city’s reparations committee said it will have paid all 140 qualifying residents in the city, which has a population of about 75,000 people.
To qualify, black residents had to have lived in the city between 1919 and 1969, when Evanston passed a fair housing ordinance, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The $10 million reparations package was originally supposed to be funded from taxes collected on legal marijuana sales. But city officials agreed to speed up the process by allotting real estate transfer tax money from properties worth more than $1 million into the reparations fund as well. So far, just $1.2 million has been added to the fund.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Bliss said he sees his city’s efforts as an example for the rest of the country.
“Our job here is just to move forward and to continue being that example, to continue illustrating that a small municipality can make real tangible progress,” he said.
Leftist professor Justin Hansford, who heads the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, agreed: “I see it as like a test run for the whole country.”
Several blue parts of the country are considering similar reparations proposals, including New York and California. The latter state’s reparations task force has proposed reparations payments of more than $1 million per qualifying resident. California Democrats, however, have thus far refrained from endorsing the cash payments.
“Dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
