EVANSTON, Ill. — Kenneth Wideman has lived in Evanston his entire life, in a neighborhood bordered by a canal and elevated railroad tracks called the 5th Ward.
His parents moved there from South Carolina, part of an exodus of 6 million Black people fleeing the Jim Crow South over a 60-year period known as the Great Migration. By the time Wideman was born in the 1940s, Evanston was the state’s largest Black suburb, and 95% of the city’s Black population lived in the 5th Ward.
The concentration of Black residents in that neighborhood, however, was no accident.
The city began pushing Black residents out of neighborhoods outside the 5th Ward through targeted zoning in 1919. Later, federal agencies facilitated racially restrictive housing rules and banking discrimination, discouraging lenders from making “risky” loans in predominantly Black neighborhoods such as the 5th Ward.
In 1969, after the federal Fair Housing Act prohibited housing discrimination based on race, Evanston city officials passed local fair housing ordinances. But decades later, the 5th Ward had the lowest property values in the city, median income below the city’s average, and is Evanston’s “only neighborhood with areas classified as food deserts,” according to a 2019 report by the city clerk.
That year, the city set out to create the country’s first reparations program to atone for its history of racial discrimination. Since the program began in 2022, Evanston has awarded $25,000 checks and in-kind financial assistance to more than 200 people.
In May, a conservative legal group sued the city, arguing that the program is unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause because it discriminates against applicants based on race.Although reparations payments are still being dispensed, the lawsuit aims to stop the program in its entirety by preventing the city from using race to determine eligibility.
A ruling from a federal judge is forthcoming.
Wideman was part of the first cohort of recipients, selected by age. To be eligible, a person has to be Black and prove they lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 — the period when state-sponsored segregation and redlining were rampant — or be a direct descendant of someone who did.
“I’m very fortunate and blessed to receive the reparations,” he said. “I think it could have been more. But I’m happy.”
Wideman is one of three Evanston residents who sat down with NBC News to discuss their experience of growing up in the 5th Ward, applying for and receiving reparations.
Michela Moscufo for NBC News
Kenneth Wideman, 79: ‘There were places Blacks could go and places Blacks couldn’t go’
Ambulances wail down a busy thruway en route to a hospital near Kenneth Wideman’s apartment, where he lives alone.
He is usually coming from or going to doctor’s appointments because he has chronic health issues. In 2024, Wideman can go to any hospital in the city, but in 1945, his mother had to go to a segregated hospital to give birth to him.
A husband and wife team of Black doctors, Arthur Butler and Isabella Garnett, ran the hospital out of a converted residential home because the city’s two main hospitals, the Evanston Hospital and St. Francis Hospital, did not take Black patients at the time.
He and his family attended segregated schools, beaches, restaurants, stores, playgrounds and theaters. “I didn’t know what segregation was,” Wideman said. “Now that I know about it, I’m figuring out this was segregated, that was segregated.”
Wideman’s family, like many other Black families at the time, lived in a multigenerational home in the 5th Ward with 14 people. He shared a room with four people, but Wideman said growing up with his grandmother was the best thing that ever happened to him. He recalls sleeping with his head on his grandmother’s stomach. “Nothing else compared,” he said, “and I have done a lot of things in my life.”
Wideman’s current apartment is sandwiched between the campus of Northwestern University, where he worked as a facilities manager for three decades, and the community center where he applied for the city’s reparations program after hearing about it through word of mouth.
City employees laid out high school yearbooks and phone books so that applicants could prove they lived in Evanston during the specific period, and they helped seniors fill out the electronic application.
“I think people deserve reparations,” he said.
“I hope that other people will have the opportunity to receive reparations,” he added. “And I hope they would get more than what I got.”
Despite its history, which Wideman knows well, he loves Evanston. “Wherever I go, they ask me where I’m from. And I tell them I’m from Evanston, Illinois,” he said. “This is a great town.”
Ron Butler, 78: ‘A lot of neighbors didn’t want us’
Ron Butler grew up in the 5th Ward, but in 1976 he and his wife, Cheryl, decided to move to south Evanston, to a modest two-story house in a residential neighborhood where they live now.
The afternoon sunlight passes into the living room through bay windows and a stained-glass panel of roses he made by hand.
It was unusual for a Black family to move to this part of town, he said, and even now they are one of just a few Black families on their street. “As soon as we moved into the house, all the ‘for sale’ signs started going up down the street.”
“A lot of neighbors didn’t want us,” he said, especially the older neighbors. “They asked the people who sold the house to us, ‘Why did you sell to a Black family?’”
In the 5th Ward things were different. “We had no keys to unlock the doors, you know, and if you did something wrong, your neighbors always told your parents.”
He went to university in Nebraska, where he played football, and then he served a couple years in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. When he moved back to Evanston, he took a job working at the public utility company.
Butler was part of the second cohort of reparations recipients.
The check came “right on time,” he said. His house needed the windows replaced and a new furnace with central air, so he and his wife both pooled their $25,000 checks. “The money goes fast,” he said.
“It meant something to me, because, you know, it gave me a little help,” he said deliberately. “You know, Evanston is a very expensive place to live.”
“I always said that you can keep the mule, but give me the 40 acres,” he said. “Give me the 40 acres in Evanston.”
Michela Moscufo for NBC News
Cherylette Hilton, 73: ‘Just a drop in the bucket’
Cherylette Hilton moved to Evanston when she was a teenager from a little town in Georgia called Waynesboro. “Right down the neck of the Ku Klux Klan,” she said. Hilton loved horseback riding and taking care of the animals. “I wanted to just stay there and enjoy that type of country lifestyle.”
Her parents moved the family to a house in the 5th Ward because it was predominantly Black. “They felt it would have been difficult to live in another neighborhood,” she said.
She said she did not let encountering racism and segregation in Evanston bother her. “That’s them. I let them deal with that,” she said.
She is outgoing and chatty, and living with her extended family means she is often in the middle of multiple conversations at once as people walk in and out of the living room.
She decided to apply to the reparations program when it began offering checks last year.
At first, Evanston’s reparations program offered recipients only in-kind financial assistance, which could be used toward mortgage payments, a down payment for a house, or home improvement projects.
A real estate broker since she was 18, Hilton had been promoting the program to her clients, but because she lives in an apartment, she hadn’t initially been eligible.
Hilton used the money to buy a car and put the rest in the bank, she said, for her grandkids and great-grandkids. She is still a real estate broker but spends most of her time volunteering with children in juvenile detention or formerly incarcerated adults transitioning back into society, as well as taking care of her family.
Evanston is now very expensive, she said, noting that $25,000 is “just a drop in the bucket” — a common complaint among interview subjects.
Former city Alderman Robin Rue Simmons orchestrated the city’s reparations push in 2019. She grew up in the 5th Ward and “saw firsthand the disparities between the livability of Black Evanstonians and that of white,” she said, sitting in the lobby of a downtown hotel.
Securing the political will and passing the reparations proposal was in some sense the easy part. Then came the task of constructing the program from scratch. “We didn’t have a model to follow,” she said.
The $20 million program, funded by the city’s cannabis sales tax and real estate tax, is set to continue for another five years, with plans to expand to economic development and education-based initiatives.
Since the end of the Civil War, calls for some form of reparations for slavery have continued unabated.
Federal legislation called H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study reparations for slavery, has been reintroduced every year for the past 35 years.
In the absence of federal legislation, state and municipal reparations programs have taken off. Currently, more than a dozen cities, three counties and four states have passed legislation and are either researching the need for reparations or developing proposals.
Evanston is the first to set up a program and make actual reparations payments.
“We have a long, long road ahead of us,” said Simmons, who now leads a reparations consultancy organization. “There is still more to learn. There is far more to achieve.”
Support for this article was provided in part by the Neal Peirce Foundation.