N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) will tell you plainly: next to being a mother, her favorite thing to be is Black. That joy is the through line of her life’s work, and it started early. She was raised in a multigenerational family home in Evanston’s 5th Ward, surrounded by grandparents, uncles, cousins, and a church community that taught her how to speak, how to listen, and how to lead. It was only when she left the neighborhood for school that she began asking the question that would shape her career: why were the streets narrower, the trees shorter, and the resources thinner where her family lived? 

  

She spent the next 25 years answering it. First as a residential real estate broker helping Black families build wealth through homeownership. Then as an entrepreneur, opening a bookstore in the 5th Ward that doubled as a free after-school program, and launching a construction company that employed Black tradespeople and developed dozens of affordable homes. Elected to represent her ward on Evanston’s City Council in 2017, she moved fast, securing facade grants for the Black business corridor at Church and Dodge without the matching requirement that had shut owners out for two decades, and commissioning a racial demographic map that exposed disparities in housing, household income, life expectancy, and environmental conditions across the city. 

  

In 2019, that groundwork evolved into history. N’nanba led, in collaboration with others, the passage of the nation’s first tax-funded municipal reparations legislation for Black residents. Evanston has committed $20 million to the effort and dispersed more than $7 million to date, proof that reparations can move from resolution to redress. In 2021 she founded FirstRepair, which inspires and informs local reparations nationally, equipping leaders, sustaining the movement’s morale, and holding the standard that repair means acknowledgement, apology, remedies, and tangible redress. Under her leadership, local reparations has moved from idea to implementation, with other communities across the country now looking to Evanston for a flexible model. 

  

Her work is also personal. As an act of self-repair and internal reparations, through DNA research, N’nanba traced her lineage to the Balanta people of Guinea-Bissau, whose name translates to “those who resist.” She was welcomed home by the Balanta community, and received her name, which means “We welcome you back. We are your family and we love you,” and was granted citizenship in 2025. She continues to support the village of Tchokmon with water access and health infrastructure, living the lineage restoration she advocates for others. 

  

N’nanba chairs Evanston’s Reparations Committee, serves as a commissioner of the National African-American Reparations Commission, holds a lifetime membership with N’COBRA, co-convenes the Global Circle for Reparations and Healing, and is a 2023 Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Her story has been told by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, the PBS documentary The Big Payback. She is a proud mother of two, grandmother of seven; she measures her legacy in their terms: a generation that inherits more ease, more access, joy on purpose.