llinois made national headlines this year, and not for corruption or another governor going to prison. (Since the 1960s, four former Illinois governors, three Democrats and one Republican, have been incarcerated.) Instead, the headlines reflected groundbreaking steps the state has taken toward addressing systemic racism.
In March, the Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first locality in the United States to vote to pay reparations to Black residents. Evanston’s city council authorized a first allocation of $400,000 from the city’s reparations fund, slated to go to sixteen Black families for housing repairs or a downpayment on a new home.
The fund was established in November 2019, when the council voted to set aside the first $10 million collected in taxes from recreational cannabis dispensaries to financially address the city’s discriminatory policies toward Black residents, including the disproportionate number of marijuana arrests.
Recreational cannabis was legalized in the state in June 2019. Called the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act, it was seen as having the strongest social equity measures in the nation.
In February, Illinois became the first state in the nation to enact a law abolishing cash bail—the ability to hold people in jail until they pay a set amount of money—which makes a mockery of the presumption of innocence and the Constitutional right to due process.
In Illinois, more than 250,000 people a year, many arrested for misdemeanors, languish in county jails. A large percentage stay for months, even more than a year, because they cannot afford to pay bail, which can run into the thousands of dollars. They are incarcerated not for public safety but because they are poor, and often Black or Latinx.
Starting January 1, 2023, Illinois will be the first U.S. state to take access to money out of the decision over whether or not someone is incarcerated while they await trial.
“This is huge,” Patrice James, director of community justice for the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, tells The Progressive. “There is nothing more unjust and racist than our pretrial system.”
Pretrial detention can be a matter of life or death. Early in the pandemic, Cook County Jail became a COVID-19 hotspot. At least ten detainees have died from COVID-19, and it’s because they could not pay bond.
Reparations and ending money bonds are just two developments that encapsulate how state and local lawmakers are grappling with white supremacy and racial inequity. There are more bills and laws being considered in Illinois to undo harm and meet people’s needs, signaling a significant change in state politics.
Progressive reform measures, such as raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 and legalizing recreational cannabis, had already passed in 2019 after the 2018 election. That’s when state voters elected Democrats J.B. Pritzker as governor and Juliana Stratton as lieutenant governor—the first Black woman elected to the post. Pritzker, a liberal billionaire who ran on a progressive agenda, defeated a near-billionaire, incumbent Republican Bruce Rauner.
Angelica Guerrero-Cuellar is sworn into office as a state representative on February 5, 2021. She replaced longtime Speaker of the House Michael Madigan, who held the seat for fifty years.
Illinois has been reliably blue in recent presidential elections, voting for Democrats since 1992. But in statewide offices, Illinois has had its share of Republican governors and GOP-led legislative bodies.
Even with Democrats in charge, Springfield, the state capital, has never been a bastion of progressivism, something that frustrated young state Senator Barack Obama, who served there from 1997 to 2005. Writing in his book A Promised Land, Obama bemoans Illinois politics as “a series of transactions mostly hidden from view.” He says one lobbyist told him, “The key to surviving this place is understanding that it’s a business. Like selling cars.”
However, the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency set in motion events leading to a progressive shift in state politics: The Illinois Legislative Black Caucus has emerged as a united political powerhouse, and, relatedly, the fall of House Speaker Michael Madigan in January. Madigan, an old-school Chicago Machine Democrat, led the Illinois House for thirty-six out of the last thirty-eight years, making him the longest serving leader of any state or federal legislative body.
Madigan built an army of lobbyists and loyalists that secured his hold on power. But his reliance on patronage networks and machine politics caught up to him in 2019, with a federal corruption investigation. Electric utility giant Commonwealth Edison admitted that for many years it had arranged jobs “for various associates of a high-level elected official,” identified in other court documents as the Speaker of the Illinois House.
Although Madigan has denied wrongdoing and has not yet been charged, it was a bombshell scandal from which he never recovered. Nineteen House Democrats, including many recently elected, said they would not vote for Madigan as Speaker in the new 2021 session. They instead demanded—and won—new leadership. On January 13, Representative Emanuel “Chris” Welch was elected Speaker, making him the first African American to hold that position.
The Black Caucus’s Antiracism Agenda, unveiled in September 2020, also helped fresh winds begin to blow over the Prairie State. Legislation began to reflect the goals of social and economic justice reform advocates, activists, and organizers, some newly elected to office.
Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Rich Miller, who runs the Illinois political blog CapitolFax.com, put it this way: “The days of Madigan’s ‘everyone at the table’ incrementalism were ended by straight-up progressive bills that were far from watered down.”
During the Illinois Legislature’s lame-duck session in early January, the Black Caucus successfully shepherded much of its Antiracism Agenda through both chambers and on its way to being signed into law by Governor Pritzker. The agenda is based on four pillars: criminal justice reform, education and workforce development, economic equity and access, and health care.
The health care bill failed to pass during the lame-duck session, but it passed both houses in March and was signed into law by the governor on April 27.
The omnibus criminal justice reform law that included a ban on money bond attracted the most attention and opposition, with law enforcement groups calling it “anti-police.” The multipart law, HB 3653, also called the Safety, Accountability, Fairness, and Equity - Today Act, or SAFE-T Act, is a sweeping reform of policing, the pretrial process, sentencing, and incarceration.
As Chicago Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova said in her “deep dive” into the Black Caucus’s reform law, “It amounts to the most significant course correction on criminal justice policies and practices that exacerbate racial and economic inequality in the state.”
A former public defender, James of the Shriver Center has seen the cascade of consequences when someone is arrested: “People lose their jobs. People can lose their housing. Incarceration does nothing but make things unstable. If a parent is arrested, who’s picking the child up at school? Who’s making sure that bills are being paid? People’s lives are completely derailed,” she explains.
James says the protests around the murder of George Floyd “galvanized” and “energized” people, but the Pretrial Fairness Act ending money bond was a result of “preparation meeting opportunity.”
Since 2016, the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, which encompasses thousands of people and more than 100 grassroots activist and legal advocacy organizations, have been working on these issues. Coalition members were called upon to help draft the legislation. (A detailed explanation of the Pretrial Fairness Act is on the website endmoneybond.org.)
“The legislation was drafted very carefully to end money bond and reduce the number of people who are housed in jails pretrial,” James says, adding that the Black Caucus “showed tremendous leadership and grace and commitment to their constituents.” She credits the “terrific trio” of state Senators Elgie Sims and Robert Peters and state Representative Justin Slaughter for carrying the bill forward.
Although some politicians and law enforcement officials claim that releasing pretrial detainees leads to an uptick in crime, researchers at Loyola University Chicago found evidence to the contrary. Their 2020 report, “Dollars and Sense in Cook County,” reported no significant change in crime rates because of increased numbers of eligible people being released pretrial.
Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans declared that the Loyola report “confirms what our office has previously determined in our own review—that bail reform furthers the cause of justice and equality by releasing defendants not deemed a danger to any person or the public.”
Heather McGhee, author of the recently published book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, has coined the term “Solidarity Dividends” to explain how an antiracism agenda is a progressive agenda.
Writing in The New York Times, McGhee said Solidarity Dividends are “gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air, and better-funded schools.”
The Coalition to End Money Bond protests at the capitol on its statewide day of action on February 25, 2020.
While McGhee does not mention criminal justice reform or voting rights or other areas of basic liberty, these democratic rights are “gains available to everyone” as well.
But often white people, with assists from rightwing media, police unions, and conservative politicians, refuse to see how they could also benefit from justice reform bills. Law enforcement groups opposed Illinois’s omnibus criminal justice reform bill as “anti-police.”
State Representative Lindsey LaPointe represents a majority-white district on Chicago’s far northwest side, where many police officers live. LaPointe, appointed to the seat in 2019 and then elected in 2020, is a social worker and former manager for Adult Redeploy Illinois, an evidence-based, cost-saving alternative to incarceration for people facing nonviolent charges.
She says in an interview that she received a “mixed” response from her constituents on the criminal justice reform law. But she has found a way to have a conversation with critics.
“When I encounter people who have strong feelings and don’t want to end cash bail,” LaPointe asks them, “Do we think that the amount of money somebody has should be a factor in whether we detain them pretrial or not?” Most people will then agree that it should not be. “But there’s a lot of noise and misunderstanding. Some people think everybody is going to be let out of jail, which is not the case.”
After the video of George Floyd’s murder became public, LaPointe heard from many people about the criminal justice system and policing, including some calling for an end to cash bail. The message she received was: “Black lives really do matter, and we have to do something about it.”
LaPointe, who was one of the nineteen Democrats who refused to vote for Madigan as house speaker, describes Illinois as being “literally in a state of change right now.” She believes Trump’s election and presidency helped galvanize state progressives. People started realizing “we can’t sit on the sidelines anymore. We have to start getting involved locally.”
But change is often contested and the state’s embrace of “progressivism” is uneven. On last fall’s ballot, a proposed constitutional amendment to mandate a fair (meaning graduated) flat income tax rate failed to pass. LaPointe cites “a lack of trust in elected officials” and the “uphill battle” to explain tax policy as two problems she ran into with voters. [Editor's note: The print and initial web versions of this article incorrectly described the referendum as seeking a "flat" tax rate, which is what is currently mandated. We have corrected that mistake.]
Support for the amendment was also undermined by conservative messaging, much of it paid for by billionaire Ken Griffin. Signs appeared on lawns, alongside highways and soybean fields: “Don’t get fooled again: No tax hike amendment” or “Vote NO on the Progressive Tax,” weaponizing the word “progressive.”
But, for now, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory, Illinois’s newly elected progressive lawmakers are making strides. An astounding 51 percent of the state’s representatives have been in office five years or less. A new generation of elected officials is populating the capitol in Springfield.
Illinois state Representative Lakesia Collins, a Black working-class woman, is part of that new generation.
Elected in 2020, Collins represents a diverse district in Chicago with neighborhoods that are predominantly African American, Mexican American, working class, and poor and those that are mostly white and wealthy. Her district, she tells The Progressive, stretches from “abandoned buildings” and “food deserts” to “nice high rises, town homes” and “grocery stores on almost every corner.”
Collins, who spent her teen years in foster care after her mother and grandmother died, worked as a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home for ten years, becoming a union leader and organizer with SEIU Healthcare Illinois. She was also a spokesperson for the Fight for $15.
“My career has been about building power, building a sense of community, and showing people their inner strength,” she says. It’s about “lifting up the working-class people.”
Through her union, Collins has learned how to fight powerful interests and win gains for the workers and residents. In nursing homes, “most of the falls happen because we’re short-staffed,” she says. So the workers organized to win enforcement of staffing requirements, putting “the onus back on the owners to staff the facilities at safe levels.”
While Collins is still transitioning into her new role as a state representative, she says, “Once you come from grassroots organizing and you come from these lived experiences, you always look through that lens.” She is encouraged to see more Black and brown women “taking on powerful roles.” Her role, she explains, is to help others “see legislation in the way that would be the most impactful, most meaningful, to the people that we serve.”
What is happening in Illinois, she says, is about righting wrongs: “When you talk about far-reaching legislation, it’s reversing what has deteriorated lots of communities of color since forever.”