The Current Leadership of the Will County Board Doesn’t Respect Black People
The current leadership of the Will County Board thinks it knows what’s best for black people without talking to black people in Will County. “I think it’s disrespectful and outright abhorrent that the current leadership of the Will County Board would even push such an agenda without speaking with black stakeholders in Will County. For white liberals in Will County to write a resolution with such inflammatory rhetoric without consulting black stakeholders like the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry is a travesty,” said Dr. Cornel Darden Jr., President/CEO of the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
Reparations is a touchy and extremely complex issue in the United States of America. The current Will County Board leadership’s position is sketchy on the issue. In the current proposed resolution, it allocates $500 a month per board member, to a board that will meet on a regular basis to discuss the best way to give reparations to black citizens of Will County. This ostensibly is a slush fund for the current leadership of the Will County Board to provide patronage money to their current political cronies. In the first four months of tax collection for recreational marijuana, the county has brought in a little over $24,000. The proposed resolution provides for a little over $56,000 a year to be allocated to pay board members of this reparations Committee.
“I think it’s outright reprehensible. I was outraged when I heard of this resolution from the Will County News. We’ve been consistently advocating for black business issues in this county for years. Many of our clarion calls to end open, hostile, and notorious discrimination have fallen on deaf ears, even with the current leadership of the board,” said Dr. Cornel Darden Jr. President/CEO of the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce.
“We’re the largest Black Chamber of Commerce in the State of Illinois and the current leadership of the Will County Board thinks it can use black people for political gain. The current leadership of the Will County Board does not take black people seriously.” said Dr. Darden.
“As a historian and college professor, I find it God awful that white people would manipulate history to this effect, in the form of a resolution, to score political points and to set up a slush fund for their political cronies, all while pretending that they care about black people. We [the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce and the Will County Black Contractors] still haven’t heard from the current leadership of the Will County Board about minority contracting issues and the disparity study that we’ve advocated for for years.
They have no respect for black businesses in this county and won’t even collaborate with us to get things done. They think they can ignore us and that they don’t have to talk to us. We’ve had to protest and consistently email them and call them out on social media to even get them to consider a disparity study. Now they come with this slush fund?” said Dr. Darden.
The Will County Black Contractors and the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce were responsible for pushing the disparity study agenda reported here in this Herald News article, but neither group was mentioned anywhere in the article. “There would be no disparity study without our efforts. Anyone in the know knows that we’ve been the single voice pushing for these issues and the current leadership tries to ‘blackball us’ and spread rumors about black businesses and our association, yet our membership continues to grow. They can’t ignore us for long.”
“County Board member Jackie Traynere of Bolingbrook told us to ‘pound sand,’ called us ‘bad Muslims,’ and said that she doesn’t want to work with the black chamber unless she can pick our leadership,” said Dr. Darden
According to Dr. Darden, the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry is calling for an immediate halt to discussions of reparations for black people in Will County until the current leadership begins to actually respect the stakeholders in Will County.
“Ask the County how many liquor licenses they’ve given to black businesses while they pretend to care about reparations. Jumaane Stevens, owner of Right Here Convenience Store and Chamber member needs one right now!”
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- reparations
- southland
- southland black chamber
- will county
- will county black contractors
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Will County Democrats want Black residents to decide how to spend revenue from cannabis tax as reparations for slavery
By TED SLOWIK DAILY SOUTHTOWN |OCT 15, 2020 AT 4:21 PM
The Democratic Will County Board majority is advancing a controversial proposal to use revenues from taxes on cannabis sales as reparations to address economic hardships that endure due to the enslavement of Blacks.
“I know some of the language is pretty bold,” board member Rachel Ventura of Joliet said Tuesday during a teleconference by the Democratic caucus. “I feel this is something we could do historically as a county to move our country in the right direction.
Democrats seized four seats and a 14-12 county board majority during the “blue wave” elections in 2018. Ventura first publicly proposed the possibility of reparations in December, when the county board voted to allow and tax cannabis sales in unincorporated areas.
Steve Balich, a Republican county board member from Homer Glen, said he opposes the concept of reparations. He obtained a draft of a resolution that Democrats discussed Tuesday during their caucus. A video recording of the teleconference is publicly available.
“That language is appalling,” Balich said Thursday. “The words they used to describe what slavery was … for me it seemed real offensive, that all white people are racist and white supremacists, and I don’t see that.” (Editors note: Illinois was not a Slave State and Will County was a hub for the underground railroad. The only place there were ever any slaves was the far Southern tip of Illinois)
The draft resolution is titled “Repairing the Transgenerational Damage Done through Slavery, the Black Codes, the War on Drugs, and Mass Incarceration in Will County, IL.”
“The state of Illinois and all its counties owe an incalculable debt to our Black and African American brothers and sisters, for the systemic injustices, brutal physical abuse, insanable emotional damage and economic limitation and theft visited upon them throughout our history,” the resolution states, in part.
During the caucus teleconference, Ventura asked fellow Democrats to be “courageous” and to “negotiate from a moral standpoint.”
“I know there might be some pushback from the Republicans,” she said.
Balich said his Italian ancestors were oppressed when they came to America and that people of many European ethnicities suffered cruel injustices throughout American history.
“They treated Italians like they were dirt,” he said.
His point was, if Blacks as a group are compensated for past injustices, what about other groups?
Ventura and other Democratic county board members discussed the process for advancing the resolution as well as the wording and content of the measure for about 40 minutes during the nearly two-hour caucus.
The draft proposes the county board create a nine-person committee that would decide how cannabis revenues would be spent. All nine members would be Black, the proposal stated, and one county board member would be appointed to serve with eight citizens.
The committee would have equal gender representation, according to the draft. Democratic board members discussed a desire for equal geographic representation of Will County, which covers 849 square miles and is the state’s fourth most-populous county.
Ventura said there may be a constitutional problem with a resolution that dictated the racial makeup of an official body that would decide how to spend public funds.
“I am possibly up for negotiation on that,” she said. “If a judge voids it, we could rewrite it.”
Recreational cannabis sales became legal in Illinois on Jan. 1. Through the first four months of the year, Will County received more than $26,000 in tax revenues from cannabis sales, according to the draft resolution.
The resolution proposes paying each of the nine committee members a $500 monthly stipend. The $54,000 annual cost would come from county funds other than cannabis revenues, Ventura said.
“There is potential for this money to grow and be beneficial to communities that were harmed,” she said.
Democrats hope to pass a resolution and begin distributing funds in 2021. The county board’s executive committee is expected to consider the resolution next month and assign the proposal to a committee for additional study.
The resolution symbolizes efforts to acknowledge systemic racism and injustices that have denied Blacks opportunities to obtain wealth, Ventura said. The proposal is a legislative response to messages in the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.
“Instead of standing on the side of the road with signs and chanting, we are actually going to try to take some steps to move our country in that direction,” she said.
North suburban Evanston is among the few governmental entities nationwide that has advanced a measure to create a reparations fund. During a town hall in August, officials fielded citizen suggestions on how the money should be distributed.
Suggestions included building a new school focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and offering a series of $25,000 grants to support homeownership for Black victims of housing discrimination.
Will County Democrats discussed how eligibility for the all-Black committee would be determined. Ventura said the “one drop rule” would be applied. The principle holds that anyone with any Black ancestry could claim to be Black.
Ventura said she has spent the last several months working with Black community members throughout the county to draft the proposal.
Balich questioned the timing of the discussion by the Democratic caucus and how the county board would take up the proposal after the Nov. 3 election.
“I don’t like the idea of bringing it up now,” Balich said. “It’s a very opinionated thing. They’re worried it might hurt them in this election.”
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.
