The Department of Justice is officially allowed to join a lawsuit against Evanston’s historic yet highly contested reparations program after a judge approved the agency’s motion last week, according to court records.
District Judge John F. Kness approved the DOJ’s motion to join a 2024 class-action legal challenge from Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit, against the City of Evanston's reparations program, which launched in 2021 with the stated goal of remediating past racial housing discrimination of Black residents between 1919 and 1969.
Joining six residents who are not Black but say their relatives lived in Evanston during the 50-year reparation qualification period, the DOJ claims the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.
“Evanston has chosen to distribute substantial benefits to persons solely because of their race or the race of their ancestors,” the federal government’s motion states. “The Program does not provide any opportunities for compensation for residents of other races who may have lived in the area where black residents were segregated and suffered adverse housing consequences as a result.”
The first U.S. city to fund a local reparations program, Evanston officially approved its program in 2021.
Nearly five years later, the Justice Department announced in June its intention to join the Flinn, et al. v. City of Evanston lawsuit and now has the necessary approval to move forward with its plan.
“This is an effort to intimidate,” former Evanston mayor Daniel Biss told WBEZ in July after the DOJ announced its plan to join the lawsuit. “This is an effort by the Trump administration to tell anyone who’s interested, ‘back off, we’re going to come for you.’”
Evanston’s first reparations policies offered a maximum of $25,000 in housing grants to Black people who lived in the city or had ancestors who lived in the city during the 50-year period of racially discriminatory housing policies. In 2023, Evanston amended its policy to offer eligible applicants unrestricted cash payments, rather than requiring the $25,000 to go toward housing subsidies.
The DOJ’s brief emphasized that Evanston no longer requires beneficiaries “to provide any account of how they use the funds.”
The Evanston accepted reparation applications for 45 days in 2021 and has not accepted any applications since November 5 of that year, according to the DOJ. In a 2024 motion to dismiss the case, the City of Evanston stated it “does not have any current plans to reopen applications.”
Evanston paid 141 applicants who qualified as an “Ancestor” and has begun paying 454 others who qualified as “Direct Descendants,” totaling more than $5 million worth of reparation, according to the DOJ.
In its lawsuit, the DOJ acknowledges instances in which race can be used when “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” But the Department details that Evanston’s program is too general and does not identify a specific scope of past discrimination the city intends to correct.
“The City’s racially discriminatory program is not narrowly tailored to remedy specific identified instances of past discrimination,” the brief states. “They contain virtually no information about what the alleged discriminatory acts or policies were, during what years the discriminatory acts occurred, the policies that were in effect, or the scope of the injury caused by these acts or policies.”
Biss, who ended his second mayoral term on Sunday and is running to represent Illinois' 9th congressional district in Congress, has been at the forefront of the reparations program since its founding. During his July interview, he rejected the claim that Evanston’s program is not specific in its eligibility requirements or intended goals.
“The city dug deep in our history. We worked with scholars to understand what we’ve done. We documented real harm that not only happened in the past but is being felt right now by residents of Evanston," the then-Evanston-mayor told WBEZ.
Evanston motioned for the case to be thrown out in July 2024, stating that the six complainants had not proven they were “ready” and eligible to apply for the grants during the time the program was accepting applications, notwithstanding their racial identities.
