Chief Dan George need not apply, but Rachael Dolezal is welcome to.

Evanston, IL being sued for racism by its white people... because it's paying its black residents $25,000 each for the legacy of slavery

Three years after Evanston proudly became the first local government in the US to start paying reparations to its black citizens – in this case technically to atone for decades of ‘institutional racism’ in local housing – it is being sued in a federal court for exhibiting exactly the sort of prejudice it decries.

A conservative activist group, Judicial Watch, has filed a legal challenge to Evanston’s controversial $20 million (£15.7million) programme, claiming that it discriminates against non-black people – including whites, Hispanics and Asians – as they are ineligible for the $25,000 (£19,600) handouts.

To qualify for this extraordinary largesse, recipients must be black Americans – or their direct descendants – who lived in Evanston as adults between 1919 and 1969, the year when the town finally ended what it admits was an official policy of ‘racial segregation’ in housing. The lawsuit also claims that the reparations should be limited to people who can actually prove that they suffered discrimination.

Using money from taxes levied on cannabis businesses – the drug is legal in Michigan – and a special levy on the sale of homes worth more than $1.5 million (£1.2million), Evanston has so far set aside $10 million (£7.9million) and paid half of that to 193 residents.

The radical initiative, adopted in 2019 after a city council vote rather than a public referendum, doesn’t specifically mention slavery, which was abolished in the US in 1865, but it hardly needs to. Many of Evanston’s 12,000 black residents (16 per cent of its 75,000 population) are descended from slaves.

Nationally, six in ten African-Americans believe their ancestors were slaves. And their belief that they deserve reparations runs deep – few black children aren’t taught about the pledge by Civil War Union General William Sherman in 1865 that every freed slave family should be given up to 40 acres and a mule. They also know the US Government never honoured that promise.

Reparations campaigners argue that even if slavery ended, discrimination lived on in myriad ways. In Evanston, housing included restrictive covenants and a policy known as ‘redlining’, in which banks refused mortgages to black people if they tried to buy homes in white areas.

This now-illegal practice – once widespread across the US – forced most of Evanston’s African-American community to live in just one small, poor neighbourhood, the ‘5th Ward’ on the west of town. Evanston officials say successive generations of black people have suffered as a result of not being able to invest in valuable homes.

Critics deride reparations as tokenistic white guilt – but Evanston’s liberal leaders are basking in plaudits from activists calling their town the ‘new Montgomery’ – after the Alabama birthplace of the civil rights movement. Officials insist this is only the start of their reparations plans. The project’s driving force, local black campaigner Robin Rue Simmons, has been touring the US and was even asked to address the United Nations as demands for reparations grow around the world.

‘The moral urgency of the issue does not allow us to just keep on talking,’ intoned Evanston’s earnest Democrat mayor Daniel Biss. ‘And it can be scary to go first... but someone’s got to go first.’

However, it could prove a short and very expensive experiment, if Judicial Watch gets its way.

The Washington-based group, intent on nipping the concept of reparations in the bud, has filed its lawsuit on behalf of six named plaintiffs who say they lived in Evanston over the relevant period and would have otherwise qualified for the reparations but for the fact they’re not black.

They and their backers say the reparations scheme breaches the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which states all Americans are given equal protection under the law. Ironically, the amendment was added to protect freed slaves after the Civil War.

‘This programme redistributes tax dollars based on race,’ said Judicial Watch president, Tom Fitton. ‘That’s just a brazen violation of the law.’

He called his civil rights lawsuit a ‘historic defence of our colour-blind Constitution’.

>>>>Evanston’s reparations creators insist they’re undaunted.

‘This lawsuit is not a surprise,’ said Rue Simmons at a meeting last week.

[A]fter some people complained that it was ‘demeaning’ to be told how to spend their money – initially it had to be spent on housing – there are no restrictions on how it is used. One recipient splurged the lot on installing a lavish marble bathroom in her home.

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Kelly Burke, a white kindergarten teacher who has an allotment in the 5th Ward but lives in another part of town, admitted she was sticking her neck out when she said: ‘I’m all for equality and helping people, but Native Americans have as much right to reparations as anyone, as do all aboriginal people across the planet.

‘I’m of German and Irish ancestry, and my people were brought here as indentured servants. Hasn’t everyone suffered discrimination? Everyone is liberal in Evanston and wants to do the right thing, but then people stop and say, “Who’s going to pay for it?” ’

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Retired African-American rubbish collector Toylee Stanley insisted that, when he and his young family arrived there in 1970, ‘if you could pay, you could live wherever you wanted in Evanston’ – although his wife then reminded him that the first house they tried to rent suddenly became unavailable as soon as they turned up.

Reparations are ‘OK’, said Mr Stanley, as long as they don’t involve a big cash handout.

‘Sometimes if you get things easy, you don’t take care of the things you should take care of,’ he explained. ‘People got a handout during Covid and they didn’t want to work any more.’

The rest of the US, and beyond, is watching keenly to see what happens with the Evanston lawsuit.