A Chicago activist has revived a reparations campaign that calls for an annual exemption from property taxes after Mayor Brandon Johnson approved $9,000 housing payouts to migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border.
The mayor’s action led to outrage in the Black community due to concerns the incoming wave would eventually price them out of their own neighborhoods.
Howard Ray, the founder of ReRan who last year unsuccessfully campaigned for the alderman seat in Chicago’s 37th ward, blasted Mayor Johnson for the $750-a-month payments to incoming migrants that is intended to help cover their rent and other living costs.
A majority of Chicagoans have been up in arms over the mayor’s recent benevolence to asylum seekers, while Black residents have become outraged after helping to elect the Democrat last fall, although Johnson did recently rebuff an additional $300 million in funding to help ease the crisis.
A call for reparations
Ray sought to highlight the racial disparity between incoming migrants and the city’s longtime Black residents, claiming that the Black community had long demanded similar public funds but never received any, although he failed to mention decades of subsidized housing for Black Chicagoans.
Ray vowed that his latest effort on reparations was “just a start,” while noting that the Black community in Chicago still held onto grievances that dated “back to slavery.”
Ray’s push for reparations emerged in 2023 as he claimed Black Chicagoans were increasingly moving away from the area due to rising county and city property taxes.
Ironically, Ray’s movement is based in Illinois, which was a free state from the day it was admitted to the union in 1818. However, Ray highlighted the lingering injustices of the Jim Crow era in Southern states, which led many Black people to migrate north in search of freedom.
“The injustice that has been done to us as Black Americans over the years, from slavery to Jim Crow, the lynching, redlining, numerous amount of things,” including disproportionate incarceration for marijuana offenses, justify the need for reparations, Ray said.
“They’re using our taxes to demise our communities,” Ray told Chicago’s Morning Answer, as he reintroduced his plan called the Reconstruction Era Reparation Act Now initiative, or ReRan, aiming to eliminate $6,000 a year in property taxes, exclusively for Black households.
“They’re using our taxes to support and advocate for the illegal immigrants. And in the meantime, we’re getting pushed out.”
The moving of migrants
The racial controversy in Chicago reflects a broader trend across the United States, with states such as Texas shipping migrants north, putting strain on major cities like Chicago as the federal government struggles to seal the porous border.
The issue was a significant concern for President Joe Biden, especially with voters heading to the ballot box this November.
New York City and Denver have also been inundated, with elected leaders calling on Biden to declare a national emergency, which would free up federal dollars to help mitigate the problem.
“I think it’s at this point, politically unsustainable for the Biden administration to maintain this unlimited flow into what’s essentially a welfare state network of cities like New York, Denver and Chicago,” said Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, according to CNBC.
As the crisis unfolds nationwide, public officials in some cities have been accused of sidelining Black citizens to accommodate the flood of migrants.
But Chicago officials were desperate for a solution, as countless migrants remain stranded while sleeping on the floors of police stations and O’Hare Airport for months.
According to some estimates, more than 35,000 migrants have been sent to Chicago since 2022, mostly from Texas, which has been Ground Zero of the border crisis since Biden took office more than three years ago.
Meanwhile, only 4,327 migrants departed Chicago, state officials said, representing about 12 percent of the total migrants sent to the city in the past year and a half.
“The Texas government will put migrants on a plane and, you know, tell them that Chicago is a great place to come, which it is. But you’re saying, you know, this is what Chicago is going to do for you. And then when they get here, they can see that what was told to them in Texas is not accurate,” said 36th Ward Alderman Gil Villegas, who spoke to ABC News 7 in Cook County.
The continuing deportations by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott were seen as a deliberate strategy to send immigrants to states governed by Democrats, as well as an affront to the Biden administration, leading to increased friction with Washington.
Meanwhile, only $800 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been designated to deal with the crisis on a national level, which has been widely criticized as inadequate because the affected cities were blindsided as lawmakers in border states began bussing the migrants north.
A crisis rooted in history… and data
The situation in Chicago exposed long-held resentment among Black residents who felt historically overlooked by local government leaders despite years of public funding for community and economic development programs.
Ray also noted the recent passage of the No Representation Without Population Act by the Illinois General Assembly, which requires state prisoners be counted at their home address for redistricting purposes, as state lawmakers sought to prevent prison gerrymandering, which Ray said “was another thing that pushed us out of our community.”
“We didn’t get money from the federal government because they were using that money to supply downstate towns with the prisoner population, using those numbers to help out those downstate resident townships that have prisons in their towns. So they used our people that were in Chicago. They went to prison to get those numbers, so they can get government funds.”
When asked if he had met with Mayor Johnson or any other state lawmakers about his reparations proposal, Ray said he sent emails and met with local aldermen who embraced his idea; however, no legislative action has ever been introduced.
As a candidate, Ray vowed to seek tax relief for Chicago’s disadvantaged communities.
“Yes, I believe some Chicagoans should receive tax relief based on the U.S tract data. Communities in blighted areas should receive some relief,” he told The Chicago Tribune last year. “Basically, I will propose my bill supporting property tax relief and lobby Chicago citizens and Council members to create a referendum for our city.”
During his campaign, Ray asserted that Black Chicagoans faced higher rates of evictions compared to other racial groups, emphasizing that a property tax exemption would be a fair form of reparations for the legacy of slavery.
Property taxes on a single-family home in Chicago and its suburbs typically range from $2,500 to $7,500 per year, while these taxes have increased in recent years, creating financial challenges for many lower-income households.
“We’re losing a lot of the Black culture in Chicago,” Ray said.
“A lot of the Blacks are moving out of Chicago because of crime and taxes … moving to the red states, the Southern states. By not paying property taxes, [Black people] will be able to be saved.”
Reparations in the form of tax relief would serve to compensate Black Americans for the enduring legacy of slavery more than 158 years after the end of the Civil War, Ray noted.
“We’re trying to preserve the Blacks to stay” in Chicago, Ray emphasized. “We don’t want our people to leave this city. We built this city.”
