California may be the first state to study reparations for Black people, but at the municipal level, Evanston, Ill., leads the country. In 2019, the city became the first in the United States to approve a program to redress the harms of segregation and housing discrimination endured by Black people since emancipation.
Evanston’s $10 million package, funded through a tax on recreational cannabis sales, will be dispersed for reparations initiatives over the span of 10 years to residents who qualify. In January of this year, 16 recipients, who were selected through a lottery, received $25,000 housing grants.
Evanston’s success and the ongoing fight for reparations in Congress both get a closer look in The Big Payback, a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Festival earlier this year; it debuts on PBS/KQED 9 on Jan. 19, 2023. It’s co-directed by filmmaker Whitney Dow and actor and activist Erika Alexander, best known for bringing the beloved character Maxine Shaw (Attorney at Law!) to life on the ’90s sitcom Living Single.
KQED talked with Alexander about the film, her activism and how her character Maxine Shaw inspired many Black women to pursue law and politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KQED: What sparked the idea for The Big Payback?
Erika Alexander: I’ve been doing work within advocacy and activism for quite a while. I was Hillary Clinton’s most traveled surrogate for 2007 and 2016. I met Ben Arnon, who was a Barack Obama delegate, in 2008, and we started a company called Color Farm Media. Our goal was to represent underestimated, marginalized voices.
Our first film was the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble. After that, we wanted to do something about reparations. Whitney Dow — my white, male co-director — and I started at the Congressional reparations hearing in 2019, with Sheila Jackson Lee [and the bill] HR 40. While we were filming, we got a message from our producer, Zane Parker, who told us about Evanston and Robin Rue Simmons, the woman who passed the first tax-funded reparations bill in America. So we went to Evanston, and decided to change our entire P.O.V.
What stood out to you about Robin Rue Simmons, who was a local alderwoman at the time you filmed her?
She’s an amazing young woman who I don’t think really knew much about the reparations arena, but she had been inspired by a trip that she took to Africa. And so she proposed the idea of a reparations bill. And one of her councilwomen said, well, there’s a new tax on cannabis — and that gave them the necessary ammunition and the actual funding.
They passed it with a mostly white council. From there was the tough job of how to implement it, and to whom, and she hadn’t really thought of those things. But I think because she didn’t know much about it, and she just knew she had the energy and they had these new funds, they got it done. She’s pretty phenomenal. She was just determined.
The vice chair of California’s Task Force, longtime civil rights leader Amos Brown, has spoken about three “A’s” — admitting the problems of the past; atoning for them with reparations; and then acting in a unified way that ensures the plans get carried out. Especially at the federal level, it seems like we’re still working on the first step.
When I started this journey, I mistook the reparations movement for a personal admission and an apology, or payment toward the moral debt, toward me as an African American and my fellow African Americans. But now I’m convinced because of the work, and I’ve been educated by experts on the issue, that that’s a very limited point of view. This debt resides within the fabric of America. So racism, all the residual evils that reside within the DNA — redlining, terrorism, all sorts of horrible, ugly things — are not an individual obligation to pay. It is for the government to admit, apologize and then make reparations.
So however we’re talking about this, we all need to educate ourselves, because it’s going to be a lengthy process if we don’t come to the point where this is not about charity — as a woman so wonderfully puts it in the movie — it’s about justice. We are owed. We are more than past due.
What roadblocks did Rue Simmons and her allies have to navigate?
The biggest roadblock is money. Funding. The other big roadblock is the natural pushback that people feel — that “this is in the past and we shouldn’t have to address it,” or “they should have addressed it back then.” And they tried with the First Reconstruction. But we know that after Abraham Lincoln died, and Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 was rescinded and we got Andrew Johnson, that Black people had no more power and they were pushed out of the power they had. And then it was just decades of them really suffering a different type of slavery and being unyolked from the system.
