Justice Dept says Evanston's Black Reparations are illegal?

Evanston was founded and named in 1857 well after Illinois had effectively become a free state. That should not however stop the township from providing me, as a resident of Arlington Heights, reparation for the fact that I'm Jewish.

Evanston’s Race Reparations in the Dock

The Justice Department joins a case on race-based payments for long-ago discrimination.

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

July 5, 2026 2:48 pm ET

The Supreme Court has reinforced the Constitution’s ban on racial preferences, but some places aren’t getting the message. One offender is Evanston, Ill., which has a program that gives cash and other benefits to black residents as reparations for discrimination. Now the Trump Justice Department is aiming to stop the new discrimination.

Since March 2021, the Chicago suburb has pledged up to $25,000 to black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or to their children and descendants. The city says this is recompense for housing discrimination at the time. The program is funded by donations, real-estate transfer taxes and taxes from marijuana sales, and it has so far disbursed more than $5 million.

In 2024, six Evanston residents sued in federal court (Flinn et al. v. City of Evanston) on grounds that the program violates the Fourteenth Amendment. The Justice Department recently intervened on civil-rights grounds and charged that the program also violates the Fair Housing Act, which makes it unlawful to discriminate by race in real-estate transactions. Justice says Evanston makes payments only to black residents and that applicants don’t have to prove they or their ancestors faced discrimination.

When the lawsuit was filed in 2024, Evanston had approved payments to 141 residents or descendants who filed applications confirming that they identified as black. “At no point in the application process,” the complaint says, were reparation recipients “required to present evidence that they or their ancestors experienced housing discrimination or otherwise suffered harm because of an unlawful Evanston ordinance, policy, or procedure.”

In its landmark 2023 Students for Fair Admissions ruling, the Supreme Court said race preferences are unconstitutional, with the possible exception for “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” But race cases are judged on strict judicial scrutiny, so a government that wants to dispense reparations “must identify the specific instance of past discrimination that it aims to remediate and . . . determine the precise scope of the injury it seeks to remedy.”

Some of the Trump Administration’s best work has been dismantling racial bias in the federal government and higher education, and progressive cities will be watching the Evanston result for how this plays out in housing. San Francisco, Detroit and other cities have considered reparations.

Housing discrimination was part of a shameful period in America, and U.S. laws now punish it. But payouts based on race—new discrimination to make up for past discrimination—are an illegal remedy when divorced from specific evidence of harm.