Reparations United’s Defense of Evanston’s Restorative Housing Program by Kamm Howard, Executive Director
On May 23rd, the organization Judicial Watch “filed a class action lawsuit against Evanston, Illinois, on behalf of six [non-Black] individuals over the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement for a reparations program…” The lawsuit suggests that Evanston’s Restorative Housing Program (ERHP) is a race-based claim to address “societal discrimination” that happened five decades ago. As such, it is unconstitutional.
Reparations United holds that not only is this untrue, but also that the lawsuit should be dismissed outright. Many movement regulars know that every chance I get, I stress that we have moved into a new era of reparations activism globally – the era of reparations enforcement – coming out of the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa.
The participating nations at WCAR concluded in their outcome document – the Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA) – that the Transatlantic Slave Trade, slavery (enslavement), apartheid (euphemistically referred to as Jim Crow segregation in America), and colonialism were crimes against humanity. As a global shift in the movement, now our reparations claims would be based on the internationally recognized crimes of enslavement, apartheid, and colonialism.
Reparations United holds that the Evanston Restorative Housing Program is a crime-based claim for apartheid housing policies, and as these acts were crimes against humanity and as there is demonstrated continued impact of these crimes, the City of Evanston is proper to redress those crimes and their continued impact with the Restorative Housing Program.
With crimes against humanity, three categories are examined: 1) Category of crimes – genocide, enslavement, apartheid, torture, systematic rape, displacement, etc. 2) Category of perpetrators/offenders – governments, soldiers, leaders, corporations, institutions, etc. And 3) Category of victims – civilians, women and children, ethnicities, prisoners of war, territorial victims, etc. The Restorative Housing Program rests firmly on the crime of apartheid housing policies. The Restorative Housing Program recognizes the City of Evanston as the offending party.
The Restorative Housing Program named those eligible as territorial victims – residents of a particular area of the City of Evanston from 1919-1969 and their descendants. The City of Evanston created a zone of victimization – a clearly demarcated area red-lined on city maps whereby they’d engage their apartheid housing crimes. That zone was in the 5th Ward. The fact that a particular ethnic group lived there and that they moved others of that same ethnicity to the red-lined zone of criminality was a criterion of choice of the City of Evanston.
For the ERHP, victimization of the crime and continued impact of the crime is the basis of the redress (not race), and thus it is victimization that automatically and specifically determines eligibility. Those who were not housed in the red-lined zone have no eligibility for redress – not because they are not of the same ethnicity as the lawsuit suggests but because their ancestors did not reside in, nor were forcefully moved to, the City of Evanston’s designated area of apartheid housing policies. No victimization, no eligibility.
Also, Judicial Watch argues that the City of Evanston did not show that there was a violation of a law that existed at the time. This is another way of saying the apartheid laws were legal at the time. I would suggest three forms of thought that counter this argument: ongoing and continuing character, dynamic interpretation, and flawed law.
Evanston’s apartheid housing policy, although ended in 1969, must be seen as a “continuing act, having a “continuing character,” i.e., continuing impact upon current Evanstonians and/or their descendants who were the victims of those policies. Still today, housing values are lower in the 5th Ward, mortgages are more difficult to obtain, interest rates are usually higher, credit scores lower, insurance and other related housing services are more costly, wealth was not passed equally to heirs, etc. – not because of race but because of the historic location of the zone of criminality.
Another area of thought is that of “dynamic interpretation.” That is, that laws have to be interpreted in accordance with current understanding of the relevant terms, “especially if these terms were general whose meaning has evolved over time.”
Jim Crow was not just a system of social segregation or simply “societal discrimination” or “an amorphous concept of injury” as named in the lawsuit, but apartheid – a criminal system of terror, murder, plunder, labor theft, wealth extraction, wealth prevention, dignity crushing, knowledge depriving, and other social, economic, and political limiting and debilitating practices backed by life and liberty-threatening force of the state – in this case, the City of Evanston. The “flawed law” concept also comes into play when enslavement and apartheid acts are said to have been legal at the time. Flawed laws “qualify as non-laws.” Law, for it to be law, must have been “established to serve justice.”
The laws of enslavement and apartheid were, on the contrary, established to create an unjust, violent, and terror-backed social, economic, and political order in conjunction with denying justice to those it victimized. Thus all the “slave” codes, Black codes, court decisions (Plessy vs. Ferguson), congressional acts (Fugitive Slave Act), and yes, red-lining laws, etc., must be seen as flawed law and thus non-law.
The Restorative Housing Program, in effect, asserts that crimes against humanity – apartheid housing policies – were committed, there is continued impact of those crimes, and thus reparations or remedial action is obligatory. In any event, until this is argued in court or dismissed outright, we must all counter the false assertion that we are pursuing race-based claims for reparations. Because, in fact, we are not. Evanston did not.
We must forcefully declare, as the international community did in Durban, that Evanston has, and we are continuing to, pursue crime-based remedy for the egregious crimes (enslavement and apartheid) committed against our ancestors as well as ongoing neo-apartheid crimes that continue to negatively impact us today. The lawsuit should be thrown out on its face! As well as those who wrote it!
*Author’s Note. I do not represent myself as a lawyer or someone legally defending or working with any one legally defending the City of Evanston. I consider myself a reparations expert/scholar/activist/organizer with extensive praxis regarding reparations and international law.