About This Case Study

In the 2020s, reparations in the United States moved from argument to implementation — unevenly, locally, and in forms that do not resemble one another. This case study works with three artifacts of that move. The Movement for Black Lives Reparations Toolkit is a movement blueprint: an organizing document that frames what reparations must include to deserve the name. Evanston, Illinois built the first municipal reparations program in the country, paying $25,000 housing benefits rooted in the city's own documented history of housing discrimination. And California convened the first state-level reparations task force, whose 2023 final report assembled the historical record and a sweeping set of recommendations for the legislature. The puzzle is that one word covers all three: a demand framework, a housing grant, and a state study are all called reparations, and the differences between them are not accidents or half-measures. They are design decisions — different answers to the same underlying questions.

Five design questions organize this case study, and together they are its instrument: What harm is being repaired, defined how and over what period? Who is eligible, and how is the line drawn? What form does repair take — cash, benefit, service, institution, apology? Who pays, from what source? And who decides — who designed the program, who administers it, and what role do the harmed communities hold? The analytical move is to read each framework as an instrument: its answers to the five questions reveal the theory of harm and repair underneath it. Once the grid is built, you will apply it to a fourth case: Tulsa's Greenwood Trust, the $105 million trust announced in June 2025 on the massacre's 104th anniversary — three funds for housing ($24 million), cultural preservation ($60 million), and education and economic development ($21 million), city-anchored, with funding targeted by June 1, 2026, and no direct payments announced. The goal is a transferable evaluation instrument rather than a one-case opinion: five questions you can ask of any repair program you encounter after this one.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Movement for Black Lives Reparations Toolkit. Read the toolkit.
• The Mellon Foundation's account of Evanston's program — the nation's first municipal reparations program. Read the story.
• The California Reparations Task Force's final report (2023), via the state Attorney General. Access the report. You will need the recommendations, not the full volume.
• The City of Tulsa's Road to Repair pages, for the fourth case in Phase 3. Visit the plan.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency: All four cases are moving. Evanston's program has proceeded in phases, California's report awaits legislative action that continues to unfold, and Tulsa's Trust had a funding deadline of June 1, 2026, whose outcome your own searching may need to establish. Record the date of every program fact you cite and the date you accessed each source.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Name one program you know of that tried to make up for a past harm — a settlement, a scholarship fund, a memorial. Who received it, and who paid?
• If two programs both call themselves reparations, but one pays individuals and the other funds institutions, are they the same kind of thing? What would settle the question?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Three Frameworks (10–12 minutes)

Establish the sources before drawing on them. Skim each of the three and log, in a line or two per framework: who produced it, what kind of document it is — a movement blueprint, an implemented municipal program, a state commission report — its date, and its scope. Note what each kind of document can do that the others cannot: a demand can be maximal, a program must be administrable, a study must be defensible. Resist, for now, any verdict about which is best; the analysis comes later.

For groups: Each member takes one framework and briefs the others in two minutes: producer, type, date, scope.

Phase 2: Build the Grid (20–25 minutes)

In your notes, rule five rows — harm defined, eligibility, form of repair, funding source, who decides — and three columns, one per framework. Then fill the grid:

1. The harm defined. What injury does each framework name, over what period, documented how? Note how narrowly or broadly each definition runs — and what the narrowness or breadth costs and buys.
2. Eligibility. Who qualifies, and how is the line drawn — residence in an era, descent, documentation? Mark where eligibility runs through lineage rather than race alone, and consider why a program's lawyers might insist on that.
3. The form. Cash, housing benefit, services, institutional investment, apology, policy change? Note which forms are one-time and which continuing, and which go to persons versus places.
4. The funding. Who pays, from what source — a dedicated tax, general funds, philanthropy, the state? The source is an answer to a deeper question: who is accepting responsibility.
5. Who decides. Who designed the framework, who administers it, and what role do the harmed communities hold — petitioners, advisors, or governors of the program?

The three documents do not answer at the same grain; where a framework is silent on a row, record the silence as an entry. The gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: Build one shared grid; assign each row to a pair, then walk the full grid together and mark every cell where two members read the same document differently.

Phase 3: The Fourth Case (12–15 minutes)

Now add a fourth column: Tulsa's Greenwood Trust, as summarized in the opening and documented on the Road to Repair pages. Fill what you can and work through:

• Which of the three frameworks does the Trust most resemble, and on which rows? Where does it answer a design question differently from all three?
• Which rows cannot be filled from the public materials — and what does that opacity itself tell you about the program's stage or its design?
• One design fact to sit with: the Trust invests through funds rather than paying individuals. Which of your three frameworks would count that as reparations, which would not, and on what stated ground?

For groups: Fill the fourth column together one row at a time; where the group disagrees, annotate the cell with both readings rather than voting one away.

Phase 4: The Instrument and Its Strain (10–12 minutes)

Step back from the cases to the instrument itself:

• What did the grid reveal? Name the two rows where your four cases diverge most, and say what the divergence tracks — scale of government, era of harm, or theory of repair.
• The strain test. Where does the grid strain? Consider harms that resist definition — terror, silence, cultural loss; programs that mix repair with ordinary development; cases where who-decides and who-receives pull apart; and the risk built into the method itself, that five administrative questions flatten a moral claim into a program spec. Name at least one thing about repair the instrument cannot capture.
• Transferability. Choose one case beyond this unit — your own city, an institution, a nation — and state which two of the five questions you would ask first there, and why those two.

For groups: Run the strain test collaboratively; choose transferable cases individually, then share — the spread of cases chosen is itself a finding about where the instrument feels usable.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Across the three frameworks, the design question with the most divergent answers was __________. Applied to Tulsa, the grid showed me __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which question divides the frameworks, exactly what the fourth column exposed, and exactly where the instrument met its limit.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your four-column grid and your two transferable questions from Phase 4 — together they are the evaluation instrument this case study exists to build, dated to the day you built it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 runs as individual briefings; Phases 2 and 3 build one shared grid with rows assigned to pairs; Phase 4 is collaborative except the transferable case, which is chosen individually and compared. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The scholarly architecture beneath the design questions: Darity, William A., Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022 [2020]. Publisher page. The case, precedents, and program against which local designs are argued; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The essay that reopened the national debate: Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "The Case for Reparations." The Atlantic, June 2014. Read the essay. Procedural at its core — study the harm, then let the accounting begin — and the origin of much of the vocabulary the frameworks share; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• A fourth grid to try: Human Rights Watch. "The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma." 2020. Read the report. The international vocabulary — restitution, compensation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition — offers a differently shaped instrument for the same cases; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.