After a decades-long fight to bring to light the torture of black men by Chicago police, the city on Monday began to disburse $5.5 million in reparations.

About $100,000 will go to each of 57 victims whose claims have been vetted by a local law professor, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, a group that has been fighting for recognition of 111 known victims, and also the city's legal department. The families of two other men who have since died will also receive non-financial reparations.

Victims said the torture was overseen by Jon Burge, a former military police investigator who served in Vietnam before joining the Chicago Police Department as a detective in 1972. He was assigned to the city's South Side, and over the following three decades, black men said they were beaten, suffocated, electrically shocked, or had loaded guns pressed to their heads until they confessed to crimes.

"Jon Burge's actions are a disgrace to Chicago and to the hard-working men and women of the police department, but most importantly to those he was sworn to protect," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement on Monday. "We stand together as a city to try and right those wrongs, and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago's history to a close."

The payments come two months after video of a Chicago police officer shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald sparked new questions of corruption within the city. Officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the death of the teen a year after the shooting, and not until the video was made public via a judge's order.