Illinois’s reparations commission is launching a series of public hearings throughout the state, with the first one set at Chicago on Saturday. 

It marks a major public step for the state’s African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission as it moves forward with plans to pay reparations for slavery, even as one Illinois city, Evanston, already faces a lawsuit for its first-of-its-kind reparations program — and while Chicago is facing criticism for its recently-announced task force. 

The state commission says it is aiming “to gather diverse perspectives from the public to shape recommendations for tangible actions towards justice and restitution for Black Americans in Illinois who are descendants of America’s Chattel Slavery.”

While the state’s commission was created in 2021, its past couple of years have been focused on research and educational outreach events, its 2023 agenda indicates, as well as launching a Juneteenth awareness campaign.

The commission notes that its mandate from the Illinois legislature is to “investigate and make recommendations for reparations to individuals who can demonstrate their lineage as African American descendants of the American slave trade.” It did not immediately respond to a request from the Sun for comment about how lineage would be determined and verified by the state.

At the Chicago hearing on Saturday, speakers will discuss the “intergenerational impact of enslavement, racial terror, political disenfranchisement, and ongoing racial discrimination,” the commission notes. The Sun reached out to two speakers at the upcoming hearing for comment but neither immediately responded. 

The state’s commission hearings come less than a month after Chicago announced it would create its own city reparations task force and promised to “shape the future of our city by confronting the legacy of inequity that has plagued Chicago for far too long.” Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, also formally apologized for the “historical wrongs committed against Black Chicagoans and their ancestors who have and continue to bear injustices,” citing a “legacy of slavery” in the state. 

That task force has been met by criticism from some within the state who say it’s a distraction from the city’s policies that have harmed Black residents.

“Mayor Johnson’s ‘Reparations’ gambit is nothing but a political ploy to put his critics on the defensive, and to regain support in the Black community that feels the Mayor’s migrant policies have left them behind,” an Illinois Policy Institute policy advisor, Paul Vallas, argued of the task force. “While the Mayor ‘apologizes on behalf of Chicago for historic wrongs committed against Blacks in Chicago,’ who is he apologizing for?,” he asked, noting that half of all Chicagoans weren’t even born in the city. 

The Chicago Teachers Union has also “systematically degraded a school system that is overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and poor through a series of strikes and work stoppages,” he argued, including notoriously long school closures during Covid. Mayor Johnson also has worked to defund and reduce police presence on the streets, Mr. Vallas noted, despite 80 percent of murder victims being Black. 

A Chicago suburb, Evanston, is also facing pushback — in the form of a lawsuit — for its reparations program granting $25,000 to Black residents of Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and their descendants. The city hasn’t responded to multiple questions from the Sun about how eligibility is determined and verified by the city to prevent fraud. The lawsuit against the program, filed by Judicial Watch, argues that the racially-based payments are unconstitutional. It has garnered national attention as a signal of legal challenges to come as other states and cities, including California, Boston, Detroit, and Asheville, push forward on reparations.