(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Illinois is studying reparations to the descendants of slaves. The state’s African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission is out with a new report which is not the beginning of the end so much as it is the end of the beginning.
You could put in far more money than the state will ever have – “quadrillions,” commission chairman Marvin Slaughter, Jr., says with a laugh. He knows that’s impossible. But he’s latched onto a familiar theme.
“The harms of the past don’t just remain in the past,” said Slaughter, “and unless we take seriously the charge to create an equitable future, to create an equitable present, we run the risk of repeating the same harms that generations of the past have experienced in the present and in the future.”
Springfield’s Sonya Massey, killed by police in July 2024, is part of the story as well. She is a descendant of William Donnegan, lynched in the Springfield Race Riot of 1908. “Over a hundred years later, we see his granddaughter murdered in similar circumstances. She was taken to the same hospital where he passed, where she was pronounced dead as well.”
The riot led to the creation of the NAACP.
Slaughter says while Illinois has been considered throughout its 207-year history a “free state,” slavery and forms of slavery existed, permitted by certain exceptions.
Among the commission’s future events is a public hearing April 25 at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago.
