Residents Make "Good Trouble" Demanding City of Champaign support Reparations Commission for African Americans
“Why is it normal to have to fight to be treated like a human or to expect civility and justice? The reality is that those things should be the norm.” - Dr. Jeff Trask
Jeff Trask , founder of the Champaign-Urbana Reparations Coalition is prepared to get into “good trouble” if doing so convinces the Champaign City Council to help establish and fund a Champaign County Reparations Commission for African Americans. Trask was one of 30 people who attended the council meeting Tuesday night in support of reparations and one of eight who urged the council during public comments to support the Commission. The issue was not an official agenda item and members of the Coalition have been meeting privately with council members to educate them about reparations. The City of Urbana and the Champaign County Board have already allocated $25,000 each to support the formation of the Commission.
The Coalition, established in 2023, is paving the way for local action. “Reparations include an acknowledgement that people were harmed, followed by an apology and compensation to remedy those harms,” Dr. Trask said in his public comments. “Reparations also can include actions such as legislative changes, policy shifts, creative compensation, new narratives, intentional programming and more, but always must acknowledge the harms to which those things are based. When we observe inequality and inequity in education and housing and healthcare, leasing, home ownership, employment, business, environmental conditions, safety income, banking, wealth, and other areas, it is due to the historical and present harms done to African-Americans. These disparate conditions are not due to any shortcoming in Black people, but from the resistance to human rights, civil rights, justice, and believing Black people matter.” The Coalition’s website includes a Question & Answers section to address popular misconceptions.
Makiya Thomas (above video), a Champaign resident and a captain at the Illinois National Guard, told the council: “When I took my oath of office to protect and defend this country, I swore to support the values of justice, equity, and accountability. But as a young Black woman who grew up navigating the realities of a single parent home in Illinois, I know firsthand that those values have not always been equally applied in our communities. My mother worked tirelessly sacrificing every single day to give me and my three brothers a fighting chance, but hard work alone cannot completely dismantle the generations of systemic hurdles placed in front of Black families.”
Champaign resident Eric Watkins Smith (see above video), a member of First Followers, an organization that works with formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, also spoke in support of the Commission. “Love cannot be legislated. It needs to be lived out. So I’m calling upon all those in earshot and beyond to come together and do something great right now for our families and be on the right side of history.”
After 30 minutes, public comment ended and then council members William Kyles, Shauna Clayborn and Mayor Deb Feinen spoke directly to the public about reparations. (In my experience, rarely have council members directly addressed the public about an issue council did not put on the agenda.)
Deputy Mayor William Kyles spoke first for 10 minutes. He said he believes in reparations and would be supportive of a council study session on the issue, but then immediately raised concerns that could delay action. Kyles didn’t think there were enough city staff to study the issue because the same staff are already working on the City of Champaign Diversity Advancement Program and on housing and homeless blueprints for the city. “So what would that look like if we were to just say, squeeze that (reparations) on? I don’t think that we would give it the time or the energy (it deserves). And that’s not the City of Champaign way for something that’s so specific and so important.” Kyles also expressed concerns about the city being vulnerable to lawsuits.
Council member Shauna Clayborn remarked: “I think it is important to continue the conversations, continue educating and helping us connect the dots to help show Champaign what this possibly could look like.” According to Mayor Feinen: “Everyone who has approached me on this topic has been open and willing to just continue to educate and share information. And that has been incredibly helpful as we continue to figure out how Champaign fits into this broader issue.”
In the audience that night was Dr. Sundiata Cha-Jua, retired University of Illinois Associate Professor of History and African American Studies. He is an active member of the Champaign-Urbana Reparations Coalition. After the meeting, I asked him for a response to Deputy Mayor Kyles’ comments about reparations.
“I don’t feel that he’s fully conceptualized the issue of reparations. He’s not able to separate it from civil rights or from notions of good government,” Dr. Cha-Jua said. “By good government, I simply mean that when the City of Champaign after decades puts in sidewalks in Garden Hills, puts in lights, that’s good government. That’s not reparations to Black people. We’re talking about specific harms on the basis of policies that discriminated against Black folks and caused harm and trauma and loss of wealth. And so we need specific remedies to those items. Deputy Mayor Kyles, like most of the council, has not really studied reparations.”
I asked Dr. Cha-Jua for some specific local examples of a harm deserving of reparations and he shared a personal story of growing up in central Illinois in the 1950s.
“Everyone that I know and grew up with their parents had to work two jobs in order to keep the family fed at a minimum. And you’re still scraping by,” he said. “When I was four (in 1957), we had an outhouse. I’m in the city of Decatur. Why the hell did we have an outhouse, right? And inside the outhouse was a wasp’s nest. A cousin and I decided that we were going to knock down the wasp nest, but I had to use the bathroom first. He wasn’t my smartest cousin. And so he came in with the rocks before I could get my pants up so I got stung by about a hundred wasps. My mother was an LPN (licensed professional nurse). She had been working as an LPN at St. Mary’s Hospital for two years, but they couldn’t afford to take me to the hospital. So for three days they took a wash bin, filled it with ice and water, and they dumped me in and out of it. And they made up these poultices and put it around my neck and obviously I survived, but why are we in a damn outhouse in a city?
“(We lived in) this four room shack, depending on the year, there were somewhere between 15 and 20 people living in that shack. And when we moved a block over to a house that had indoor plumbing, my cousin who was four years younger than me, broke the toilet because he was so fascinated by the water. He’d never seen it. So he just kept flushing it. These are the conditions that Black people lived in, and we know in Champaign, they had similar conditions. You repair those things. And the metaphor I use is that this is a race, but it’s a race that Black people have had to run with shackles balls and chains and the chains and the shackles cut into the ankle and the ball hits them in the calves and then the thighs and injures and breaks. And what civil rights did is they said, we take the balls and shackles off and now we can run the race evenly. Now reparation says we got to repair the damage. And the damage is physical, spiritual, and psychological.”
In December, 2025 the state of Illinois’ African Descent-Citizens Reparations Commission issued a 297-page report, “Taking Account: A History of Racial Harm and Injustice Against Black Illinoisans,” which the Coalition referenced during public comment. The Champaign-Urbana Reparations Coalition offers a survey for African-Americans interested in documenting the harms they have suffered.
Videos edited by Thair Thursday.