THE EVANSTON REPARATIONS EXPERIMENT

In the first American city to offer reparations to its Black residents, a million questions remain— including whether the payments should even be called reparations

- Susan Berfield and Jordyn Holman

Lucious Sutton disconnected the waterline, the gas line, and the sewer line for the home he’d built on Bauer Place on the northwestern edge of Evanston. He and his brothers removed the appliances and the furniture. They secured the windows. Then he watched as men he didn’t know— maybe they worked for the city, maybe for a property developer—jacked up the wooden house, set it onto a truck, and drove it a mile-and-a-half to the neighborhood the city had deemed more suitable for Black families. A sheriff stood by.

It was May 1929, five months before the onset of the Great Depression. Evanston, just north of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan, even then thought itself the ideal American town, with fine homes, a university, and a certain class. The city’s population had grown by tens of thousands in a decade, so that by the time Lucious and his wife, Minerva, were removed from their property, 63,000 people lived there, almost 5,000 of them Black. Homebuilding was lucrative, and the rules of segregation—some coded, some official—were well established. A 1921 ordinance allowed the city to limit where Black residents could live by rezoning residential blocks into commercial ones; racial covenants kept them away from other neighborhoods. More rules and restrictions were to come.