In January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that enslaved Black people in Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” But it took two and a half years—and the arrival of around 2,000 Union troops in Galveston Bay, Texas on June 19, 1865—for hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people in the state to receive that message of freedom. Since 2021, the United States has commemorated Juneteenth, the day that Black people in Galveston learned of their liberation, as a federal holiday. Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom, coupled with the recognition that people can have freedom on paper but not in practice.
Unless, of course, you work in President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which spent Juneteenth trying to entrench white supremacy. On June 16, the DOJ filed a motion to intervene in a class action lawsuit against Evanston, Illinois, a city just north of Chicago, which aims to shut down a first-of-its-kind municipal program providing reparations to the city’s Black residents. If successful, the lawsuit would compel Evanston to award money damages to “each person aggrieved by the City’s discriminatory conduct.” In other words, instead of paying Black people for generations of racist harm, Evanston would have to pay all the white people who feel left out.
In 2021, the Evanston City Council created the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program in order to redress the city’s history of housing discrimination. As Black people left the Deep South in droves in the early 20th century, the Black population of Evanston grew dramatically, jumping from roughly 125 Black residents in 1880 to around 2,500 in 1920 to over 6,000 by 1940. And white residents decided this was a problem. As such, beginning in 1919, the city formally adopted policies curbing Black people’s access to housing, and, in turn, wealth.
Zoning laws, for instance, forced Black people into a single enclave that was then targeted for disinvestment, and denied resources like schools and grocery stores. Black people who lived outside of that zone had their homes demolished to make way for “economic development.” These policies worked in tandem with other discriminatory practices, like redlining and restrictive housing covenants, to enforce segregation and stymie Black people’s economic mobility. And they persisted until at earliest 1969, when the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act.
Beginning in June 2019, Evanston’s City Council passed multiple resolutions acknowledging how the city “contributed to the decimation of historically Black neighborhoods,” and establishing a funding source to provide $25,000 in housing-related grants to Black residents affected by discriminatory housing practices between 1919 and 1969, as well as those Black residents’ direct descendants in the city. Since 2022, the fund has made over $5 million in payments to over 200 individuals affected by Evanston’s racist housing policies.
White residents again decided this was a problem. In May 2024, six non-Black residents of Evanston filed a class action lawsuit against the city, represented by a conservative activist group called Judicial Watch, alleging that the reparations program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by using race as an eligibility requirement. The complaint asks a federal district court in Illinois to declare the program’s use of race unconstitutional, block the program from continuing to use race as a requirement for receiving payment, and award them and all class members—non-Black Evanston residents ostensibly harmed by Evanston’s anti-Black housing policies—damages in the amount of $25,000 each.
Evanston sought to dismiss the case, but in March 2026, the district court decided that the case could proceed. Then on June 16, the federal government filed a motion to intervene. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the United States may intervene in cases seeking relief from alleged unconstitutional racial discrimination if the Attorney General “certifies that the case is of general public importance,” and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did so here. Apparently, making amends for harm to Black people is the kind of conduct that Trump’s DOJ considers a top priority to thwart.
Evanston residents and reparations advocates suspect the reason why the case is so important is because Evanston is the nation’s first municipal reparations program, and serves as a model for other cities. Robin Rue Simmons, a former Evanston City Council member who now chairs the city’s Reparations Committee, wrote in The Evanston Roundtable, a local newspaper, that the DOJ is trying to “establish a chilling precedent,” using federal litigation to deter communities from “pursuing repair” and divide multiracial coalitions. Reverend Michael Nabors, a pastor in Evanston, similarly told the Chicago Tribune that the federal government is “afraid” that the success of reparations in Evanston “is going to start a tidal wave, as well it should, of reparations around the country.”
While Evanston’s reparations program is groundbreaking, reparations itself is not. And in her new book Getting To Reparations, the law professor Dorothy A. Brown explains that public support for reparations grows when people learn more about how racial discrimination persisted well past the formal end of slavery, and that the federal government has paid reparations before—for example, to enslavers who lost “property” when slavery was banned, Tribal Nations for stolen land, the families of Italians who were lynched in Jim Crow Louisiana, and the families of Japanese-Americans held in internment camps during World War II. Basically, the Trump administration wouldn’t want Evanston to start giving people any ideas.
Juneteenth invites Americans to reflect on the work that remains to actually repair the scourge of white supremacy. Cities like Evanston are trying to do that work. Trump’s DOJ is trying to stop them.
