Chicago's First Reparations Town Hall Draws Englewood Residents

More than 850 buildings came down in Englewood between 2008 and 2018. That fact sits behind nearly everything said Thursday night at Kennedy-King College, where Black Chicagoans showed up to tell city officials what reparations should actually mean.

About 25 residents filled the auditorium at 6301 S. Halsted St. for the first town hall in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Repair Chicago engagement series. It’s the city’s first formal attempt to bring the reparations conversation directly into the neighborhoods that absorbed the worst of Chicago’s history of racist policies like redlining and Jim Crow. The Reparations Task Force, formed in 2024, organized the event as the opening public step in that work.

Charles Beavers, 64, has lived in Englewood his whole life. He watched what he watched. Banks closed. Retailers packed up. Restaurants shuttered. Gone. He didn’t need a report to explain what happened to the neighborhood that once held the second-largest commercial district on Chicago’s South Side, centered near 63rd and Halsted.

“When I was driving down Halsted, it just made me cry to see the economic plight that has occurred in this community,” he said. “I remember when Woolworth’s was across the street. I remember when all the banks were here.”

He paused before going further.

“My daddy picked cotton. This didn’t happen that long ago. My wife’s father, he picked cotton too,” Beavers said. “I know exactly where my people come from. If I had to defend my right to reparations, we’d be here all day.”

That’s one generation back. Not ancient history. The redlining maps that strangled investment in neighborhoods like Englewood are readable documents, not artifacts. The retail corridors Beavers described are vacant lots now. The 850-plus buildings demolished between 2008 and 2018 didn’t fall on their own.

City Chief Equity Officer Carla Kupe and Vetress Boyce from the Reparations Task Force walked the room through a five-point framework covering acknowledgment and truth-telling, direct financial restitution, institutional reform and legal accountability, community repair, and long-term economic investment. It’s a framework in 2026, not a finished policy. Still, the city’s never brought a conversation this structured to the neighborhoods most directly harmed.

Kupe’s formal definition of the city’s mission drew a hard line: “Reparations are an ongoing commitment to redressing historic and ongoing systemic and structural harms that are human rights violations unjustly inflicted on Black residents and communities due to their shared racial and ethnic identity.”

Boyce outlined what repair could look like in practice. She mentioned expanding curriculum in Chicago Public Schools to cover the history of racism in the United States, along with full tuition coverage and other educational supports. The specifics are still being built out, piece by piece, through town halls like Thursday’s.

The Repair Chicago series is expected to continue into 2026, gathering community input before the task force produces formal recommendations. Thursday’s session drew a relatively small crowd, about 25 people, but the testimony carried weight that numbers don’t capture.

Beavers wasn’t the only one who came with a personal ledger. Other residents described the compounding effects of disinvestment across generations, the way neighborhoods don’t just lose buildings but lose the businesses, the foot traffic, the tax base, and eventually the people who made them worth living in. It’s a cycle well-documented in the Block Club Chicago coverage of the event.

The task force was stood up in 2024. The first town hall was held in 2025 under the Repair Chicago banner. That process is now running into 2026 with no final policy on the table yet. What’s clear from Thursday night is that the residents who showed up don’t want a symbolic gesture. They want to know what the city’s going to do about 850 buildings that aren’t there anymore. About Woolworth’s. About the banks. About what Halsted used to be.

“This didn’t happen that long ago,” Beavers said. He’s right.