FirstRepair, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting reparations efforts and the Black community, held a launch event Wednesday morning to introduce a four-week democracy program for high school and college students in Evanston.
About a dozen people, including both Northwestern University and Evanston Township High School students, attended the kickoff for the Student Democracy Program in Scott Hall, 601 University Place, on the Northwestern campus.
Over the next few weeks, FirstRepair will hold four sessions “exploring reparations, youth advocacy, and policy change,” the group’s website says. The program is for students across the city and in nearby communities.
The program was inspired by “Black History Saturdays” an education program for youth and community members based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and founded by Kristi Williams.
Williams, an Oklahoma native, is a great-niece of Janie Edwards, a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the state’s Greenwood community in 1921. She joined the launch event as the main speaker.
‘Find what makes you angry’
“Black history is one of the most important things to me,” Williams said at Wednesday’s event. “I’m so passionate about it. And people ask me, ‘Why did you start Black History Saturdays?’ And my answer is simple, I got pissed off. I really did,” she said. “So I always tell people, ‘You have to find something that makes you angry and do something with it.”’
One key part of Williams’ weekly Black history lessons is the program’s collection of literature that has been banned in Oklahoma schools. She said she has over 2,500 titles, including books that are banned in other states.
Williams said after Oklahoma’s passage of House Bill 1775 in 2021, public schools have been barred from teaching “Black History,” including details around the massacre in her home city of Tulsa.
“You can’t teach Black history in public schools, based on House Bill 1775 and our governor said he doesn’t want anything to be taught that makes white students uncomfortable. Those were his words. And so what you’re learning today, I can’t go into a school to teach in Oklahoma.”
Williams said she was inspired by the work done in Evanston after connecting with Robin Rue Simmons, executive director of FirstRepair and a former Fifth Ward alderman who led the city’s reparations legislation in 2019.
Tulsa reparations
In early June, Tulsa approved a reparations package of $105 million on the anniversary of the massacre.
Simmons said when she first met Williams, reparations in Oklahoma seemed impossible, “This was a long, long road to get to at least an acknowledgement in the city of Tulsa, where during the centennial, they wouldn’t even allow reparations to be mentioned in the resolution.”
Efforts to pass reparations in Tulsa included the community-led “Beyond Apology” commission, which Williams’ was a member of, and produced recommendations for the city.
“With Kristi’s leadership and others in her community that also have become family, they led the initiative, Beyond Apology,” Simmons said. “Beyond Apology did what reparations should do. The first best practice of reparations is that the harmed community is prescribing what redress is. It is informing the process. It is leading the process.”
“And there I saw community leadership in action, unapologetic, hard-working, creative, fearless and collaborative.”
FirstRepair will host four similar sessions in partnership with Northwestern, as a part of the summer series focused on reparations and civic engagement for students.
