Evanston’s Road to Reparations

When she was in third grade, in the mid-’80s, Robin Rue Simmons took the bus to a playdate at the home of a friend she’d never visited before. The trip was a quick one. At eight square miles, Evanston wasn’t tiny, but it was far from sprawling. As she crossed the North Shore Channel and headed up McCormick Boulevard, then west along Central Street, she noticed a change. People on the sidewalks were white, not black. There were shops and grocery stores. As the bus neared her friend’s street, she saw neatly trimmed lawns, with poplars and elms shading wide, clean streets. Unlike in her neighborhood, the 5th Ward, with its aluminum-sided two- and three-flats separated by narrow alleys, the lots here were spacious. The façades were limestone and brick, with bright white trim and Spanish tile roofs. Manicured hedges guarded many of the homes, most of which had their own driveways, some of them laid in elegant herringbone patterns. By the time she’d arrived at her friend’s house, she felt as if she had entered a foreign land.

It’s not that the neighborhood struck her as better than her own, just different. She loved the 5th Ward. It was comfortable, happy, familiar. Rue Simmons was black, her family was black, her schoolmates and teachers were black. After school, she made crafts at a black-run family center. In her neighborhood, as the saying went, you couldn’t sneeze without someone offering a handkerchief. People looked out for each other. Rue Simmons felt safe and cared for in the 5th Ward, and certainly not poor.

The very word “reparations” is enough to prompt harsh rebuttals from the political right and misgivings even from some on the left.

And yet, once she’d followed the curved walkway to her friend’s front door, been led inside by a housekeeper, and gazed at the high ceilings and gleaming surfaces, the contrasts were harder to reconcile. In her neighborhood, three generations often shared the same two-flat, children sleeping in bunk beds. At her friend’s home, each kid had a bedroom, and there were still rooms left over for guests. Her friend’s mother served snacks, something Rue Simmons knew a visitor to her own home would likely not be treated to, not out of a lack of hospitality, but because both her parents worked full time.

The day was fun