Dr. Willie L. Wilson, center, was joined by Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois lawmakers as he introduced a Reparations for African Americans bill recently. Wilson says reparations are due NOW…
By Cepeda, Roanoke Times — CHICAGO — In the spring of 1995, I sat in a stuffy classroom studying “Literary History of England, from Beowulf to 1800,” while overlooking Southern Illinois University’s iconic Pulliam Clock Tower. I was on the verge of boiling over. Somehow, the lone Hispanic (me and the lone black person in the tiny class were engaged in a shouting match over reparations for slavery. Rep. John…
Kim Foxx, the Illinois State’s Attorney for Cook County, announced that her office is set to expunge thousands of misdemeanor cannabis convictions in the coming months. By Ny Magee, The…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Hutchinson Report — When actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he was the victim of a hate attack by MAGA backers complete with a noose around…
By Miles Kampf-Lassin, In These Times — “We are far from done. This is the beginning and we should use this momentum to keep going forward.” Chicago has long been a city on the brink. Decades of racial stratification, disinvestment, segregation and endemic poverty have left large swaths of the population struggling to survive, while new development has disproportionately favored wealthier residents. The communities left behind by this process are…
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker — One hazard of the trolling that the United States has been subjected to from the White House for the past twenty months is that even the most alarming patterns can be hard to discern, and the most prominent dots impossible to connect. Yet a seemingly different pattern preceded the speech that Barack Obama delivered on Friday, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in which he…
Emanuel’s pro-corporate policies ravaged Black and Latinx communities across Chicago. His successor will be tasked with reversing this trend. By Saqib Bhatti, In These Times — This week, Chicagoans celebrated Rahm Emanuel’s announcement that he will not seek another term as mayor. But while Emanuel’s departure is welcome news to many, the next mayor of Chicago will have to come up with an aggressive plan to repair the damage that Emanuel’s…
Reparations at UChicago (RAUC) and UChicago for a Community Benefits Agreement hosted a teach-in with guest speakers this past Tuesday. The speakers drew connections between seeking a community benefits agreement (CBA) for the Obama Presidential Center and demanding reparations from the University for benefiting from slavery.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America held a news conference to lay out a multitude of demands in respect to the University of Chicago’s founding. The group is calling on the city to void all contracts with the University until it complies with a 2002 ordinance requiring all companies conducting business within the city to disclose all records in respect to slavery. The Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance…