The Slavery Reparations Series
If any town has reparations to make to their black community members, Oak Park is surely one of them. Like Evanston, Oak Park passed a Fair Housing Ordinance in 1968 that paved the way for change in the suburbs. And just as in Evanston, the current black residents of the community claim that white citizens were able to build wealth, and black residents, as a direct result of the church fire and other actions that pushed them away from Oak Park, were legally prohibited from doing so. In 2020, the Oak Park Reparations Task Force was established and in 2021 they appeared at a City Council meeting, where their recommendations and proposals had an opportunity to be heard. Most of their desired initiatives are identical to those in Evanston. They wanted to establish a housing fund to help black citizens become homeowners. The fund would be paid for with 100% of the newly legalized cannabis sales tax, the same funding setup Evanston selected to pay for their reparation bills. Additionally, the task force requested that the local government of Oak Park issue a formal apology to its black residents, because the government received the greatest benefit from the blacks being pushed out of the business district all those years ago.
Just as in Evanston, Oak Park also has felt mixed emotions and reactions to these initiatives from their black community members, with most people seeming to feel as if a reparation bill won’t help them at all. And that’s why, unlike Evanston, Oak Park has decided to consider the people’s concerns and opinions before taking up the bill for a vote. They want to ensure that the bills are made as much by the people as for the people and are currently in a data-collection phase in efforts to obtain some useful feedback as to in what direction their reparations should be heading.
What I’m not seeing in the case of Oak Park are the citizens’ concerns that a reparations bill would help the ones that most benefited from the racial injustice and discriminatory policies of the past: banks and major corporations. Although some have expressed the same concern that taking up reparations on the local level could ultimately lead to a laxed and lazy federal government, too afraid to implement similar policies nationwide, where they really need to be.
Join me again soon for the next installment in the Slavery Reparations Series! As always, thank you for reading and supporting our movement. We’d love to hear your thoughts so drop a reply below! And remember, every share or repost, every like, and every reply gets us out there in the algorithm and on the feeds of others who we can educate, one day at a time.
Contributing Sources:
Romain, M. (2022). Oak Park Taking Small, Studied Steps Toward Reparations. Oak Park taking small, studied steps toward reparations – Oak Park
About the Author:
Tia is an investigative journalist here at BLACK. She holds degrees in Political Science and Applied Economics from SNHU and she is a first-year law student at Purdue Global Law School, pursuing her J.D. She also has a certification in Human Rights from Wassmuth Center for Human Rights in Boise Idaho and she recently interned for the Office of Budget and Entitlement Policy at Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Tia is a RESULTS 2024 Organizing and Advocacy Fellow and Outreach and Partnerships Coordinator. She lives with her husband and three children in Hurricane, West Virginia.
In her free time, she enjoys contemporary art, fashion, home décor, reading, and family. Tia is passionate about protecting American consumers and corporations and is a strong proponent for open markets, human rights, and equality for all. Her current focus is slavery reparations, entitlement program solvency, and budget appropriations process reform. While Tia is not black, she supports the fight for equality and stands with BLM. She believes that unearned privilege creates a duty to act against racial inequality and injustices.
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