The Oak Park Village Board is considering taking its first steps toward a path for local reparations after being presented the findings of a task force along with several requests to remedy historic wrongs against the village’s Black community.
Despite this, some on the board cited the ongoing lawsuit against Evanston’s reparations program as a concern since that program is the only one that could be studied as an example for Oak Park.
“We are committed to helping the board reach its goals and the community reach its goals,” Village Manager Kevin Jackson said at the uly 16 Village Board meeting. “We did have a relationship with Evanston to understand what’s going on right now with (its) initiative and if there is a legal basis to be found. We haven’t found it at this point. We would build any initiatives on top of that.”
Jackson said other steps could be taken beyond reparations in the equity sphere to attempt to repair some harms.
The citizen-led task force, headed by Christian Harris and Nancy Alexander, began in fall 2021 as an offshoot of Walk the Walk, a protest group formed in response to the murder of George Floyd. The nine-person task force worked to create a report outlining the race-related harms perpetuated against Black residents of Oak Park in an effort to convince the village to start a reparations program.
“We didn’t want to wait for the village to move forward,” Harris said. “There were things we could do as far as studying the history that could be done.”
That report was completed in February but presented to the Village Board at its July 16 meeting.
In the presentation, Alexander told the story of Mount Carmel Baptist Church, located in what is now the West Gate commercial area of the village. The church bought a lot at the corner of Cuyler and Chicago avenues in 1903 but had the building permit rescinded by the Village Board after initial approval when area white residents pushed back, preventing them from constructing their church on the site.
The church was instead built where Marion and Westgate streets now exist until it was firebombed on Christmas Day 1928. The area was predominantly filled with Black-owned businesses but faded as Black residents were slowly pushed out over the decades.
Alexander also spoke of Dr. Percy Julian, a gifted researcher and chemist who moved with his family to Oak Park in 1950, and the racism he experienced. The family home was firebombed twice and had to fight with the water commissioner to get their water turned on, according to Alexander.
He was only able to purchase his home with the use of a straw buyer — a white person who purchases a home with the intention of selling the property to a Black family. Alexander said this was a common practice in Oak Park in the 1960s to allow Black families to skirt racial housing policies.
That home is still owned by his daughter Faith Julian but Alexander said she struggles to make ends meet despite the village honoring her father by naming a middle school after him.
“Oak Park has lauded itself as open, progressive, welcoming, proactive, diverse, (and) pioneering (while) ignoring the racial insults of the move-in memos that informed white homeowners on a block that there was a Black family about to move in or the steerage of Black renters to certain areas of Oak Park by the Residential Corporation,” Alexander said.
To those who ask why the issue should be explored now, Harris said that while working toward equity and inclusion is commendable, it doesn’t address the wrongs of the past.
Some of the requests of the task force include an official apology from the village for the policies and practices that harmed Black Oak Park residents, partnerships with financial institutions to provide low-interest loan and down payment assistance programs for Black residents, and the funding and creation of a nonprofit restorative justice fund in Percy Julian’s name.
The task force would also like to see the board buy the Julian home and allow Faith Julian to remain there as long as she would like. After the daughter has left the home, the task force proposed the foundation operate out of it.
An estimated $350,000 would be needed in start-up funds to hire staff and file the proper nonprofit paperwork for the restorative justice fund along with an additional $250,000 proposed from the village’s Inclusionary Zoning Fund to be used for a restorative housing program, officials explained.
Oak Park Trustee Lucia Robinson said she is less interested in Evanston’s program and would like to see the village take on researching the past harms instead of relying on an outside entity such as the task force.
“There really is a lot more work for us to do,” she said. “It’s important that the village take some ownership here for the process. I don’t even want to engage and even think about an apology unless we fully understand what we’re apologizing for. We can’t apologize for something that another group has identified.”
Trustee Susan Buchanan pushed back, arguing village feedback was inadequate and saying she wants a proposal from staff on how Oak Park can begin to address the issue.
“The apology, first and foremost, is way overdue. This was asked for in February,” Buchanan said. “I don’t need proof of harm in writing to provide an apology.”
Robinson followed up, saying she simply wants all harms documented to fully encompass them in an apology.
Outgoing village attorney Paul Stephanides said an apology would not put the village in a legally vulnerable place.
“We can’t sit on our laurels. We can’t let another year pass without having done something,” Trustee Brian Shaw said.
Trustee Cory Wesley shed further light on historic harms, focusing specifically on zoning policies. He spoke of how in 1947 the village brought on controversial urban planner Harland Bartholomew, who was hired by municipalities to implement legal zoning practices that would result in racial segregation.
“In 1921, Oak Park becomes only of one of 27 communities in the country to implement zoning,” Wesley said. “Not only did we become one of the first communities in the nation to create zoning and implement one of the most strict zoning ordinances against apartments, then we go and hire the guy who literally pioneered race-based zoning in the United States.”
With the meeting being Harris’ last day with the task force as he moves on to another position in the reparations space, he expressed disappointment by the board’s response and doubts any steps will be taken to push a reparations program in Oak Park.
“Oak Park is a wonderful place in the sense that it’s always willing to have the conversation … but that’s where it starts and ends 99% of the time,” Harris said.
