Keeping Hope Alive: FirstRepair hosts National Town Hall for Day Two of Annual Reparations Symposium
- Atarah Israel
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
For the reparations hub’s fifth annual conference on advancing reparative justice, FirstRepair called on all participants to acknowledge, commit and transform.
A room speckled with kente-clad bodies and pumped fists shuffles into silence. The air turns somber as Tina Penick, FirstRepair’s executive assistant, croons the Black National Anthem. She lilts the final lines, “May we forever stand/True to our God/True to our native land,” and the crowd erupts into solemn applause.
There wasn’t an empty pew at Second Street Baptist church two Thursdays ago. Just one day prior, organizers, researchers, artists and legislators from across the country gathered at the first U.S. city to enact a reparations program to kick off the Fifth Annual National Symposium for State and Local Reparations.
“All that you touch, you change," town hall moderator Dr. Marcus Hunter said, opening the event with a tribute to Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. "All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. Reparations are change.”
The first day of the symposium featured a never-before-seen Black Art Gallery and Marketplace, a historic bus tour of Evanston and an award ceremony.
After a packed second day replete with breakout sessions, a guest appearance from Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and an interactive keynote lecture from MacArthur Genius Fellow Tonika Lewis Johnson, conference attendees had the option to attend the National Reparations Town Hall. There, they celebrated 18 of the 126 direct descendants of Black Evanstonians that have received reparations so far.
“At first I will say I was a little frustrated on what I had to do to prove who I was, but I understand because they’re rewarding people whose family was red-lined, whose family was affected,” Delois Burts, one reparations recipient, said. “It was such a blessing that I can get this money to enhance my house, or to help me financially in whatever way I need.”
Burts first heard about an initiative in Evanston seeking redress for the harm caused by its legacy of racial discrimination through her church, Faith Temple. Her great grandmother owned a restaurant and operated a cab company out of her house during a time when Black residents were sequestered to Evanston’s fifth ward and purposefully denied the same access to home ownership through vague, hostile zoning policies.
Now, decades later, Burts says that her funds are going toward her own house enhancements.
“[My great grandmother] did a lot in her house,” Burts said. “I was able to live there, so that is a blessing to me. I’m honored.”
Reparations funds were initially only to be used for three purposes—home ownership, home improvements and mortgage assistance. In March 2023, however, Evanston’s Reparations Committee granted recipients the option of receiving direct cash payments of $25,000 to be used at their own discretion.
“We began working not only with our elected, but most importantly with our community members,” Simmons told me. “One of the most important best practices of reparations is that the harmed or the injured community is prescribing what the redress is. That first step for reparations here in Evanston has been housing.”
“The notion that there’s limited assets and we ought to fight over those assets, is a game."
-Judge Lionel Jean Baptiste, Circuit Court of Cook County
The movement for reparative justice in Evanston has an enduring history, with much of the pioneering work attributed to Judge Lionel Jean-Baptise. In 2002, he created a resolution in support of reparations on a national scale. Despite his efforts, it wasn’t until 2019, under the leadership of then alderwoman Simmons, that the reparations movement in Evanston gained momentum and resolution 126-R-19 was passed, establishing a dedicated fund and committee.
“My thinking evolved to reparations two years into that time as alderwoman,” Simmons said. “I wasn’t thinking about its national impact or where we fit into the goals for HR 40. I was really thinking about my responsibility to my neighbors, my friends, my family, those that elected me in office and even those that didn’t elect me in office.”
Simmons is now also a commissioner for the National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) and a member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), two organizations that organize for reparations at the national level.
The work to implement a reparations program in Evanston culminated in a living 79-page harm report, which Shorefront Legacy Center founder Dino Robinson co-authored with Dr. Jenny Thompson, Director of Education at the Evanston History Center. It details the history of racial discrimination, including housing inequity, in Evanston and its direct impact on descendants of the Black community. Robinson and Thompson continue to update the report today.
“Evanston was ‘a town that once forced negroes’ to sit in balconies only of movie houses, to use only a ‘colored bathing beach’ on the lakefront, to use city owned parks only for ball games among all-white or all-Negro teams, to stay off all city boards and commissions, to have no colored school teachers at all.”
-Edwin B. Jourdain Jr., Evanston's first Black City Council member, in a letter to W.E.B. Dubious in 1939. Read the report here.
“Read all these articles if you want, but this did happen,” Robinson said. “What the city understood, and what Robin understood, was we don’t have to do anymore research. Research has been done time and time again. The minute you say, ‘Let’s do a research study, first,’ that’s kicking the can down the alley. We don’t want to delay anymore.”
No liberation without backlash: Contending with conservative challenges
Beyond strategy-sharing and celebration, the town hall served as an opportunity to respond to an increasingly hostile White House. In a recent attack against Black populations, for example, President Donald Trump’s administration terminated free-entry days at National Parks on MLK Day and Juneteenth, and added a free day on his birthday.
“We really are a repudiation of everything they think,” Dr. Julianne Malveaux, political economist and one of the town hall panelists, said that night. “That’s why you have the idiot who lives in the house that enslaved people built, who wants to ban DEI, take the names of our brothers and sisters who served this country and erase them.”
However, hostility brewed even before the Trump administration's second term. In 2024, the City of Evanston was hit with a reactionary lawsuit from conservative legal group Judicial Watch. It arrived one year after the infamous Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) suits against Harvard and the University of Carolina were decided, effectively dismantling affirmative action. In both the lawsuit against FirstRepair and the affirmative action suits, lawyers repackage conservative cries of reverse racism, claiming that redressing harm in a tangible way are violations of the 14th amendment.
“The notion that there’s limited assets, we ought to fight over those assets and we have to take away affirmative action, is a game,” Judge Jean-Baptise said during the town hall.
Despite challenges in court, FirstRepair’s gaze has extended far beyond financial disbursements for Black people. It has concretized itself as a hub that creates and preserves community history. In addition to hosting the symposium, it also boasts year-round community programming, a lending library and a reparations-themed hip hop album that was performed live during the symposium’s mixer.
“Our history is key to our power, it’s key to our unity, it’s really key to our progress,” Simmons said. “[By] knowing, keeping, preserving and sharing that, we’re building a better community here in Evanston. Other communities are doing the same, and that’s why there’s such an effort to strip away our history—because it’s commonly known that we have power in that.”
Long road to repair: Moving forward with a purpose
The packed pews of Second Baptist Church evoked the memory of another town hall—a 2019 meeting at the First Church of God following the passing of resolution 126-R-19. The Simpson Street church was teeming with 600 members of all sectors of the Black community who wanted to have a hand in deciding how best to use the funds. Now, advocates from across the country gathered at yet another home base to expand on the strategies that have worked thus far.
The city council of Palm Springs, Calif., for example, passed a resolution for reparations five years after Evanston did. In 2024, they approved a $5.9 million settlement with former residents of a Black and Latino neighborhood that was razed to make space for commercial developers. The residents are still reeling from what has been described as a “city-engineered holocaust.” Other cities, like Tulsa, Okla., are demanding justice for the never accounted for lynchings, massacres and racial terror that devastated their neighborhoods.
“We want our money, because the wealth gap is a direct descendant of lynching culture,” Dr. Malveaux said that night. “We want our money, but we also want our minds repaired. For us to claim ourselves, claim our power and reject white economic envy.”
After each panelist spoke to their respective locales in Newark, New York, Tulsa and Evanston, the meeting adjourned with a benediction and a group chant. Each attendee uttered “keep hope alive” as the space rumbled with an energizing thrum.
“All that you repair, you heal," Dr. Hunter said to close the symposium, once again riffing from Butler. "All that you heal, heals you. The only lasting truth is love. God is love. Reparations are about love. So, I charge you—I charge us—to go forward as architects of the future of this country that has never been seen, but that the people have already earned.”