Justice Department receives permission to join Evanston reparations case

Municipal and university reparations programs continue as federal policies shift

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department received a federal judge’s permission this month to intervene in a lawsuit initially filed by Judicial Watch against Evanston, Illinois, seeking to block the city’s municipal reparations program and its $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. The department alleges that Evanston’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, said the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without identifying specific harm and argued that it differs from historical reparations programs. “The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Bekesha said.

N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons), the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, has spent years trying to answer what repairing slavery’s damage would actually look like, a question that has vexed the United States since abolition. She helped turn that effort into Evanston’s $25,000 housing grant and is now spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country. “Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons said.

The Trump administration has pursued efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history and issued an anti-DEI order aimed at U.S. universities. It has entered the legal fight in Evanston seeking to stop the program. The anti-DEI order and the administration’s broader efforts to curtail federal support have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work as the United States marks its 250th anniversary.

Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, North Carolina, who were considering creating reparations programs of their own. Justice Department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said in a statement that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.” She added, “Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them.” The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

Georgetown University was among the institutions leading reparations efforts. It continued to offer admission consideration for descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’s past despite the Trump administration’s anti-DEI order aimed at U.S. universities. The initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana. Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs take the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments. “It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” Hunter said.

Juan Woolfolk, 36, one of the Georgetown descendants, is using the $10,000 scholarship he received indirectly through a foundation set up for descendants to pursue a degree in museum studies at Southern University at New Orleans. Woolfolk called the scholarship a “tremendous opportunity,” especially amid what he described as a seeming attack on presenting the nation’s past accurately.

Across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders. “People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said. At Harvard, Cellini’s team identified nearly 500 living descendants of enslaved people tied to Harvard’s past. Just days after Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and signed an anti-DEI order aimed at U.S. universities, Harvard fired the entire team. Research by the outside company American Ancestors continued, but Harvard had yet to provide redress to living descendants. Harvard declined to comment, and the Education Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

Some Virginia universities have quietly taken steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. Apart from those state-law-required scholarships, Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery, said there had been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office. “I don’t think there is any will to do anything that would threaten federal research dollars,” von Daacke said.

The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity. Seminary spokeswoman Nicky Burridge said, “We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached. Ebonee Davis-Hayes, the seminary’s director of reparations, said, “The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one.”

In Evanston, Joe Martin, a 46-year-old reparations recipient who works as a Delta flight attendant, said he was pleasantly surprised with the program. Martin said the nation’s history has been to ignore the contributions of Black Americans helping “build America” or the terror they endured. The Trump administration supports stopping the program Martin receives. “We all know the history, 40 acres and a mule didn’t go down the way it was supposed to,” Martin said, adding that someone establishes a program that’s legitimate and “the government’s like, naw.”

For more than three and a half centuries, the trans-Atlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million did not survive the journey. Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the United States, where enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery that treated the enslaved and their children as property until abolition in 1865. Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans of their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth, and that wealth remains largely concentrated among white families.

From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule to modern-day reparations proposals, efforts to address slavery’s legacy are entering a new era of political uncertainty. William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen, said, “I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word.” He added, “Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility.”

The fight over reparations in the United States comes as at least part of the world community reexamines the past. In March, the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution; only Argentina, Israel and the United States voted against it. Fifty-two countries abstained, including England and 27 members of the European Union.

Trump told his supporters during a speech in September, “They want to steal your money for reparations.” He said, “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money” and “The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”