Four alderpersons voted against a resolution offering Black Chicagoans an apology for America’s enslavement of their ancestors, producing a racially charged clash within the City Council and a final roll call that one supporter called “appalling.”
Alds. Raymond Lopez (15th), Nick Sposato (38th), Anthony Napolitano (41st) and James Gardiner (45th) sparked outrage from some of their colleagues for refusing to endorse the resolution, which ultimately passed.
The measure sponsored by Ald. Lamont Robinson (4th) issued a formal apology from the City Council “to the Black citizens of Chicago for the historical injustices of slavery, segregation, systemic racism, and the policies that have perpetuated racial inequality.”
It overwhelmingly passed 43-4 but not without fireworks at a marathon City Council meeting Thursday.
“Shame on you!,” Robinson shouted after Lopez, Sposato, and Napolitano announced they would vote against the resolution.
“You have to be able to share with your constituents, your Black constituents — in all damn 50 wards — why you would say no to this resolution. Shame on you!” Robinson said.
While the City Council is no stranger to racially charged debates on how to address the city’s long, continued history of segregation and inequity, the “no” votes against the symbolic resolution came as a shock to some of the Council’s most level-headed members.
“I was hoping this would be a unanimous one — of all the things we can unanimously support,” said Ald. Maria Hadden (49th), who is Black. “This is a surprising, shocking, appalling piece.”
The debate played out against a national backdrop of the Trump administration’s crusade against diversity goals in government and businesses and its efforts to sanitize how Americans look back on the evils of slavery.
This month, President Donald Trump ordered the National Park Service to remove from a Georgia historic site an iconic 1863 photograph titled “The Scourged Back” of a formerly enslaved man bearing the scars of past whippings on his back.
Gardiner, a Northwest Side alderperson, didn’t explain his no vote. In a brief comment, Napolitano said he voted no because there has been “just as much harm done” to this city “over the last couple of years” as in the past.
Sposato, a supporter of Trump, said he would not take responsibility for sins of the past.
“There’s a lot of blame to go around, but certainly not the city of Chicago, certainly not my family,” Sposato said. “I apologize to absolutely nobody. I want my name off there. I do not want to be associated with this.”
Lopez, a Southwest Side alderperson, said he wouldn’t endorse the resolution because Chicago’s “own economy was not slave driven.” Lopez noted that the city became a haven for freed men and women escaping southern slavery. Half a million people came to Chicago as part of the Great Migration.
Lopez said the City Council should focus instead on how to correct current-day injustices “as opposed to constantly looking backwards.”
“If we want to talk about the injustices to the Black community, I want to talk about where we have failed. We don’t have to look that far back,” Lopez said.
Hadden acknowledged Lopez’s point that the city “didn’t directly deal in enslaved people,” but she rebutted that “the money that built this city and controlled the power did.”
She further argued that Lopez and Sposato’s arguments against the resolution were “emblematic of some of the worst behavior that we’re seeing coming out of DC.”
“Those who would accuse us of going backwards by recognizing fact and truth, I challenge that sentiment. We’re not the ones going backwards,” Hadden said. “Recognition and apology is part of repair… which are necessary to moving forward.”
The resolution notes that slavery thrived in the Midwest after French explorers introduced it to the region in the mid-1700s. Even after Illinois was deemed a “free” state in 1818, state laws in place through the Civil War “subjected free Black residents to oppressive restrictions, including the denial of voting rights.”
It goes on to state that following slavery’s abolition in 1865, Black Chicagoans continued to face racial discrimination through redlining, segregation, housing discrimination and other systemic inequities “which persist today.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson last year issued a formal apology from the city as a whole to Black Chicagoans through an executive order when he created a task force to study possible economic reparations for Black residents.
Evanston, the city’s neighbor to the north, approved the country’s first reparations program for Black residents years ago.