RAMONA BURTON, a 77-year-old resident of Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, remembers the first time she encountered blunt racism. When she was six or seven years old she visited her uncle in St Louis. The family were turned away from a restaurant in the city, because black people were not allowed to sit indoors. Before then, Ms Burton says, “I didn’t really know what prejudice was, because I had black and white friends.” Afterwards, she began to notice it. At school teachers treated black children differently, she says. Black families in Evanston lived in a more crowded, run-down neighbourhood. “Something’s wrong here,” she remembers thinking.

In 2022 Ms Burton was among the first beneficiaries of a scheme set up by the city in 2019 to pay “reparations” to victims of racism. She received $25,000, which she spent renovating her home. The money was exciting, she says. “I felt good that I could fix my house up.” But, she goes on, it is hardly full recompense for what people of her race have suffered in America over the centuries. “I looked at it like this isn’t 40 acres and a mule”—a promise made to freed slaves by William Sherman, a Union general, towards the end of the civil war.

Since 1989 three different black representatives in Congress have introduced HR40, a bill to create a commission to explore a federal reparations programme. Five states and some cities have also launched their own commissions. Yet the scheme in Evanston, a multicultural and deeply liberal spot that is the home of Northwestern University, is the only one to have actually paid out money. Its proponents hope it will inspire something bigger. With Donald Trump and the Supreme Court attacking diversity schemes, firing black officials and gutting the Voting Rights Act, that seems decidedly quixotic.

Since the programme started 127 people have received payments. In the early stages recipients were permitted to use the money only for home improvements. More recently money has been paid in cash. This summer another 44 people, selected by lottery from a pool of 465 applicants, will be next to benefit. In total $20m is earmarked to be given away. Most of the 11,000 black people in Evanston do not qualify.

For legal reasons the scheme compensates only people hurt by redlining and other racist policies adopted by the City of Evanston in the first half of the 20th century. But Robin Rue Simmons, a former alderwoman who pioneered the scheme, says the goals are bigger. This, she says, is about “the gravest crime against humanity, the institution of slavery and its legacies”. Half the money comes from a real-estate transfer tax, the rest from a tax on cannabis sales.

Ms Rue Simmons, who now runs a charity that campaigns for reparations more broadly, still believes that a nationwide scheme is possible and necessary for America to fulfil its promise of liberty and equality of opportunity. The Evanston scheme, however, is faltering. Cannabis-tax revenues have raised a fraction of what was hoped. At a meeting of the city council’s reparations committee in March Krissie Harris, the chairwoman, reported that a “rebellion” against the project is part of the reason cannabis buyers are shunning the city’s dispensaries. Judicial Watch, a right-wing activist group, is challenging the scheme in court on behalf of white residents, arguing that on constitutional grounds a government cannot discriminate by race.

Ms Simmons says that reparations are not only necessary on their own terms—they will also help protect black culture. Older residents, like Ms Burton, talk about discrimination in their youth, but also nostalgically about the strength of the community. Evanston, like the Chicago region in general, is becoming less black. Ms Burton worries this is weakening black political power. Mr Trump, she says, is “trying to take us back to Jim Crow”, and younger people do not appreciate the threat. Yet having done up her house, she is following the exodus. She is going to sell it and move closer to her son in Atlanta. ■

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