Louis Weathers still remembers one of his first experiences with racial prejudice in this Chicago suburb along Lake Michigan, home of Northwestern University.

At his integrated junior high school, a white teacher didn’t want Black students such as Weathers showing up their white classmates with the right answers to questions, he recalled.

“Every time we raised our hand, she wouldn’t call on us, but when we didn’t raise our hands, she would—to make you look like a dummy,” Weathers said. “We got onto that, though. When we didn’t know the answer, we raised our hands.”

A suburb of Chicago has become the first to start paying reparations to qualifying black residents in what is being seen as “a test run for the whole country.”

The city of Evanston has already paid 16 locals from a $10 million package first approved in 2019, the Evanston RoundTable said Monday.

By the end of the year, the reparations committee expects to have paid $25,000 each to 140 qualifying residents in the city of about 75,000, officials also told the Wall Street Journal.

Several of the attendees at the California Department of Justice’s final Reparations Task Force meeting created a scene during the public comment section of the event Thursday, demanding reparations from the board.

Several excited California residents took advantage of their opportunity to address the board directly, yelling into the mic that the time for reparations is "now!" 

A man in Tampa, Florida, wants the city to hand out $3 million in reparations for each Black resident.

"No Black person cares about them speed bumps or parks and recreation," the man, who is Black but was otherwise unidentified, said during Thursday's City Council meeting. "What Black people care about is our reparations. This city owes us, each and every Black person in the city of Tampa, at least $3 million in reparations."

San Francisco resident Pia Harris hopes for reparations in her lifetime. But the nonprofit program director is not confident that California lawmakers will turn the recommendations of a first-in-the-nation task force into concrete legislation given pushback from opponents who say slavery was a thing of the past.

There’s an old photo of my junior high school football team with me, the one with the dorky glasses, in the back row. The adult close to me is Coach Hammer, the shop teacher. Yes, Hammer was his real name, yeah, it’s still funny. He was a good teacher and coach, fair, even-tempered. I recently learned he was a Korean War combat vet—he never mentioned it—and just passed away a few years ago.

Then there’s Ron (not his real name), the kid I bullied, near the front. In an age of apologies and reparations, his image begs an answer: What do you do about the past?

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to dig himself out of a political predicament when it comes to slavery reparations proposed by his own task force.

Fox News Digital was first to report Tuesday evening that Newsom, after months of complete silence on the issue, declined to endorse the cash payments – which could reach as high as $1.2 million for a single recipient – recommended by his reparations task force, arguing that dealing with the legacy of slavery "is about much more than cash payments." 

California’s Reparations Task Force voted on Saturday to recommend that the state issue a formal apology for slavery and potentially provide billions of dollars in cash payments, moving forward a historic effort to enact remedies and compensation for descendants of African Americans who were enslaved in the U.S.

The vote at a public meeting in Oakland marks the beginning of the end of the nine-member panel’s two-year process to craft a report recommending reparations for slavery, which is due to the state Legislature by July 1.

After 15 public hearings and testimony from more than 100 expert witnesses and the public, the California Reparations Task Force approved calculations on Saturday that estimate as much as hundreds of millions of dollars owed to eligible Black residents.

The California Reparations Task Force approved recommendations to compensate for the harms of slavery that could translate into billions to the state’s Black residents as the panel moved closer to presenting its historic report to the state legislature.

The nation’s first statewide reparations task force wrapped up voting late Saturday at its meeting at Mills College in Oakland, finalizing a lengthy list of recommendations for its final report to the legislature ahead of the July 1 deadline after two years of work.