The African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC) is asking for public input regarding its potential recommendations to right the wrongs of chattel slavery in Illinois.
“The formation of the commission was one of the elements of the economic opportunity pillar that was designed to eliminate the Black community's barriers to economic access, equity, and opportunity. Specifically, the commission is tasked with developing and recommending measures to ensure equity, equality, and parity for African Americans who are descendants of U.S. chattel slavery,” Commission Chairman Martin Slaughter Jr. said in an interview with WVIK.
The survey, open until September 6th, asks residents about their ancestry, opinions on offering cash payments as a form of reparations, and creating a reparations program. Additional questions ask the respondent to rank policies that could be enacted by state action, including creating a public credit union for descendants, implementing a land trust to transfer state surplus land into a trust for housing cooperatives, and cultural preservation efforts.
“And we want to be able to inquire of the public: what do we think are the policies? How should we rank the policies that we're prescribing as potential remedies for the harms that have been experienced by Black Americans in the state of Illinois who descend from U.S. chattel slavery and have been the folks who have been impacted by these harms?” Slaughter Jr. said.
The commission released a harm report earlier this year. Slaughter Jr. states the report details how Illinois benefited from slavery and its continuing vestiges of enslavement in the state.
“So even thinking about policing and the amount of race riots that we've experienced in the state of Illinois, thinking about the story of dear sister Sonya Massey, who was murdered by a police officer in Springfield (2024) in the same way that her great-grandfather was murdered in the Springfield Race Riot of 1908 by a white mob. And it was gruesome,” Slaughter Jr. said.
Reparation discussions have been ongoing for decades in America as Slaughter Jr. pushes back on the notion it’s not necessary, as chattel slavery ended in 1865.
“And while that is, you know, certainly an argument, the idea here is that the harm never stopped with enslavement. Post-Reconstruction, you had racial violence and racial terror. You had approximately 110 different instances of what some might call historical race riots, which were oftentimes race massacres that were inflicted upon the Black community,” Slaughter Jr. said.
“Land theft, redlining, so many different intentional policy decisions that were made to disadvantage Black Americans specifically. And reparations is an opportunity to be able to repair that harm by undoing those negative policies, by compensating individuals for the loss of economic opportunity, which has intergenerational impacts.”
Slaughter Jr. notes the survey will take between 10 and 15 minutes and urges everyone, not just Black Americans, to participate. He asks respondents to read the executive summary of Taking Account: A History of Racial Harm and Injustice Against Black Illinoisans to better understand the context and the recommendations that the ADCRC has put forth.
“And as a country that prides itself on being the land of the free and the home of the brave, we have to be able to live up to the ideals that we profess,” Slaughter Jr. said. “One of those ideals is to right the wrongs which we have actively participated in, the wrongs we've actively perfected systems of, and slavery is one of those wrongs.”
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