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…
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